Welcome back to the second part of the Day One of the Agrippa Symposium.
And now we're going to have a roundtable with everyone that has worked on Agrippa since 1992.
So it's very exciting. And this roundtable is going to be moderated by Caroline Bassett.
She's the Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities and Chair of Digital Humanities at the Faculty of English, Cambridge.
Thank you Caroline, over to you.
Thank you. I am probably the only person that has not worked with Agrippa across who is here,
but I am very interested in talking to people who have and I think this panel is really about people who in various ways lived with Agrippa or inhabited it.
So I'm not going to give big introductions because we haven't got much time and I hope there will be time for discussion and conversation.
So I suggest that we just start off.
So our first panellist is Peter Schwenger, who is Emeritus Professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University
and is someone who's written a lot on asemic writing, which might be where he starts from or not.
So welcome Peter, I'm timing this ruthlessly.
Thank you.
I was the first person to work to do a critical essay on Agrippa and it was something of a cliff-hanger because it was done
at the same time that the Agrippa editions were being completed - or not completed, because there were a lot of snags in production.
And on my hand I had deadlines to meet.
I had been commissioned by Mark Dery to write an essay on Agrippa for his forthcoming issue on cyber
culture in SAQ [South Atlantic Quarterly]; and the deadlines kept being pushed forward until they couldn't be pushed anymore.
And at exactly that point, I received the copy of Agrippa.
I wrote some of the essay beforehand based on descriptions in the press and the fundamental idea of a disappearing book.
I had been reading a lot of Maurice Blanchot at that time, and so I was glad to see that Kevin Begos cited Blanchot and as well as Mallarmé.
I used both of these in my article and then added a dash of Derrida.
My approach then was theoretical, unpacking the implications of a book disappearing.
Now theory is all very well, but I did need to see the material book and to read Gibson's text.
When it finally arrived, it came with the master disk.
Now, I've got a slide show here.
This is an image of a disk that is not the master disk in fact.
They weren't ready with the disappearing disk.
And so they sent me this one on condition that I would send it back.
Now, this played right into my game.
I was very happy to get a master disk that did not disappear because then I could look at it again.
I could ponder it, I could check my quotations.
I could do what literary critics do. A brief tour
now of what I got for my $400.
Oh, well, I'd better just trust that the right images are going to come up.
What you should be seeing is a box that holds the book proper.
And following that, another slide that shows what you see when you open the box.
And here's the first thing you see when you open the book.
It is signed by Gibson. It's number 150 of the small edition.
I'm not quite sure why it's number 150
since I can't imagine that they had 149 copies ready to go when they couldn't get this one ready to go on time.
What you see on the side of the cover
are pages from a 1938 newspaper that have been pasted on to the interior of the box and those pages are inserted at interval.
The pages themselves were unbound.
I'm not sure if that was a question of--a matter of the haste with which this edition was put together and shipped to me.
I was glad to get the edition. I was glad to get the disk; and the disk that you saw is actually my disk.
I sent back the master disk as I had been requested to do, and I had been promised to get a proper disappearing book of disk which I
wasn't planning on reading, but I wanted the actual artefact.
It never arrived despite many prompts on my part.
So I finally found it kind of depressing to look at this empty well and just took an ordinary disk and
slapped a label and an engraved label, on it to make it look good. That's my experience
With the book. I think my 5 minutes is probably up.
Thank you, Peter. Our next speaker is Alan Liu,
who is Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the University of California in Santa Barbara and is a long time
Agrippa intimate and also someone who writes astonishingly brilliantly on digital humanities.
So thank you, Alan, you're next. Thank you very much.
In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, I think you see my screen now,
the central ritual is the weighing of the heart in which the heart of the dead person is weighed on the scales to see if it's light enough
(light as a feather) actually, to be allowed to pass on to the afterlife.
The Book of the Dead recounts, for example, that 'Thots the Judge of Truths, of the Great Company of the Gods who are in
the presence of Osiris, saith to the gods, "Hearken ye to this word: In very truth
the heart of Osiris hath been weighed, and his soul hath born
testimony concerning him; according to the Great Balance his case is truth..."'
Now, the application I want to make of this rite here in the Book of the Dead from Egypt today is as follows:
For some decades, those of us, people in this panel, who have been working in book history, media studies, media
archaeology have, as it were, weighed the heart of Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) as a book. Is Agrippa at heart a book?
Is it fit to be the canonical example of a post-print book? A new-media book? A network (as I've suggested) in some recent writing? Or of something else?
Does Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (like Osiris) deserve to have an afterlife?
That was Kevin's great concern. But in retrospect, I think now that a different kind of weighing that is a method of inquiry is also needed.
I'd like today to add to the established methods of studying this book: book history, print studies, new media studies,
network studies, cohort studies, etc. the necessary method of the sociology of the book, without which I think in retrospect,
after all these years of working with Kevin,
I don't think the story of this book could be complete either in its local context or in the long horizon of the history and the future of the book.
So one, let's start by putting on the scales of evidence the correspondence between Kevin
and myself about the 'small edition' of Agrippa that he gave me in 2010,
which was five years after the team of graduate students and I put together the Agrippa Files site.
On August 13th, 2010, I wrote again to Kevin there.
Dear Kevin, just to let you know that the small edition of Agrippa arrived safely.
It's quite beautiful. I hadn't realised that the small edition came in such an elaborate case of its own.
Next day he wrote to me: I'm glad you like it.
Your point about the elaborate case goes to the heart of the difficulty, the whole project.
Virtually everything was handmade, custom made, which took tons of time and money, and led to legitimate differences of opinion about what works and what doesn't.
If Kindles and iPads had been available back in 1992
we probably would have had a huge success selling just an electronic download for $10 or $15.
But we tried to make a book object and an electronic book.
Now that phrase about it being virtually everything, being handmade, custom made points to the unstable nature of the book as a media object,
and it invites the approaches of media archaeology which sees Agrippa as the incunabula of the digital book.
And of Network Archaeology, which sees Agrippa as the incubula of the network.
That was what excited the BBS as of the time, for example.
But to now let me weigh the evidence of the copyright statement that we put together on the Agrippa Files site,
which I excruciatingly negotiated with Kevin.
I don't think I've shared this information with anyone else yet.
And that includes this clause that Kevin insisted be there about the copyright status of Agrippa itself.
And I've outlined that on the page.
Design and special contents of Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) is copyright symbol by Kevin Begos Junior. Etchings and Box Design
copyright Dennis Ashbaugh. Poem copyright
William Gibson. If you think about it, that's quite extraordinary.
There's no apparently single copyright for this book.
There are three separate copyrights for the different artefacts that assemble into the book.
That points to what I've become increasingly interested in over the years,
which is the unstable nature of this book, not as a material artefact, but as a contractual object.
It's an unstable construction on the basis of a formal contract.
I'm not actually positive that a formal contract existed between Kevin, William Gibson and Dennis Ashbaugh.
He mentioned it once, but I've never actually seen it.
And even if it did exist, I think the primary fact is that it was not robust and capable enough to govern a new-media object of this kind.
That is the social contract on which a formal contract rested was not strong enough.
The social contract between the publisher, the author, the artist,
and then the whole assemblage of other people involved that Kevin probably exercised
some kind of regulatory control over in terms of agreements about what they could do,
or see, the journalists, collectors, libraries, museums, readers, etc.
So three. Let me weigh on the scales.
The reticence Kevin has shown throughout our dealings with him in regard to showing or not showing Agrippa and
to letting William Gibson or Dennis Ashbaugh know about the website as it was being prepared or after it was launched,
or that he wanted to show the book in public at all.
I don't think I've shared this with anyone before. Kevin was very hard to work with in terms of what he actually wanted.
There's a very paradoxical situation in which he wanted to show Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) but not show it at the same time.
He changed his mind.
He had regulations about what photographs could be shown on the Agrippa Files site or not.
He was always unwilling to let me contact William Gibson and Dennis Ashbaugh about the book and
about the website, in preparation to ask for consultation and advice.
This is partly because the artefact, as he said, was unfinished.
But over the years I've come to believe and I must assert this is my surmise only because at a certain point I stopped asking.
My surmise is that there was unsettled business between the publisher of this book, the author and the artist.
They never had a formal contract that was robust enough to span from control over the established Codex-book form,
as it was known, to this new-media object that they were creating.
It was never clear who controlled what intellectual property, what relations of the intellectual property was.
What its afterlife would be, what sustainability would look like.
And so Kevin was always highly reticent about showing the book in public and letting William Gibson and Dennis Ashbaugh know about it.
I think it's less important to put this in the local context of the mystery of the book than to put it in the
long horizon of the unstable social contract that new media objects have when they first come on the scene.
So I'll finish with two books of reference. One is M. T. Clanchy's highly influential book From memory to Written Record,
England 1066-1307, which is not about the introduction of writing to England as much as it is about
the two and a half centuries it took for writing to be naturalised and become familiar in England.
As you may know, when a new media form arrives, there's a tremendous bang moment when everything seems counterfeit,
untrustworthy, as in this fake privileged document that you see on the screen here,
simply because the institutions like the Known Republics, legal court institutions
and so on had not been invented yet in order to invest trust in such media objects.
The final work of reference I like to put on the screen is D. F. Mackenzie's Bibliography in the Sociology of Text.
And I just read this here to finish.
He writes: '[Bibliography] is the only discipline which has consistently studied the composition, formal design, and transmission of texts by writers,
printers and publishers; their distribution through different communities by wholesalers, retailers and teachers;
the collection and classification by librarians, their meaning for, and - I must add - their creative regeneration by, readers. However we define it,
no part of that series of human and institutional interactions is alien to bibliography...'
All of those people, he says, are involved in the sociology of the book.
Their relationships are what matters, and I think this is where we need to go
in the study of Agrippa
from this point on. I put on the screen a kind of hypothetical social graph in the making of the artefact itself as a kind of miniature society.
Agrippa in its not quite bound-in poem, small edition, etchings, press releases, press kits,
prototypes and so on, and the entire galaxy of other people involved in the making and reception of this book.
The publisher, artists, author, the printers, the poor typesetters who had to type the ACTG text,
the 'digerati', journalists, collectors, the BBS users, the NYU students who hacked the poem,
the readers, the scholars, the curators, librarians and others.
I would love to go back to the evidence of the early BBS post, for example,
and put together a social graph of the reception of this book and compare it to the sociology of other new media forms,
such as the sociology of the Homebrew Club in Menlo Park.
When the Altair 8800 chip was new, the computer was new, or the sociology of the Radio Amateur or hobbyists of an earlier era,
which possibly we see compares to the early computing era.
So I'll close there and let me see if I can find my screen: stop there.
And just so people can see
this is my small edition of Agrippa, which Kevin gave me in 2010.
The case opens. You can see the box in its honeycomb
cradle. This really is a work incunabula
if you go back to the meaning of the word 'cradle'. The cheesecloth has kind of degraded over time.
Now the book opens. There's an endpaper with an autograph of William Gibson.
This is signed number 85 of 350.
There are six unbound that is not etching but reproductions in laser printing of Dennis Ashbaugh's etchings.
These were designed as laser prints for the small edition, as opposed to the original etchings that came in the deluxe.
There's a title page which Kevin once told me with designed not to be a formal title page in imitation of early incunabula,
which did not have title pages. There are 63 sheets ran on both sides of the ATGC genome of the drosophila fruit fly.
But in this small edition, there is no carved out a cavity at the back and there is no diskette, so I close there.
Thank you, Alan. We can probably go on straight to Matthew Kirschenbaum who's professor of English and also
someone engaged in digital humanities and with a history of engagement with Agrippa.
So, Matthew, over to you. Yeah. Thank. Thanks, Caroline.
And thank you, Justine, for this invitation. Caroline, I loved your introduction to the panel.
If you've worked with and lived with Agrippa since 1992, there is help available.
So I don't possess a physical copy of the book to share.
And so my piece of this story really starts with my encounter with the the electronic incarnations of Agrippa.
I started graduate school at the University of Virginia in 1992, which, as we can see, was a fateful year.
It was the year of Agrippa's publication. That same year, I also, for myself, discovered the Internet, such as it was at the time.
I stumbled across the text of Agrippa a year or two later, probably on Usenet.
Or Goffer Or FTP.
Those were all early internet services. I was a William Gibson fan.
I was also an enthused graduate student, so I was instantly taken with the text.
I'm using the word text also to really underscore that unlike the exquisite
material physical incarnations of the work that we've been seeing this morning,
my encounter with Agrippa was with a plain text digital file, which is to say, I would have been seeing monochrome words on a dark screen.
There would have been no formatting other than mind breaks.
It was what is technically speaking, ASCII text.
This, of course, also was a major part of what allowed for its propagation and migration across early networks.
I was studying at the time with Jerome McGann, the great textual scholar, and under his influence,
I began to wonder a little bit about the material circumstances of this plain text digital file, namely, how did it get there?
How did it come to be on the Internet?
By then I had learned a little bit more about the Agrippa project itself and the lore and mythology that surrounded it,
especially in 1994/1995, only a couple of years after its publication.
So I really wanted to try to understand and document how this text, which was designed to disappear, proved so remarkably durable and persistent.
I began collecting as many digital copies of it as I could find.
I came across as part of the lore and the mythology, the idea that the text was continually, quote unquote: 'mutating' and quote unquote: 'cyberspace'.
This was not true. All of the copies that I had, dozens and dozens of them saved on the one gigabyte hard drive of my 1995 desktop PC.
Every copy I found on the Internet was identical.
There was no, you know, sort of mutation in any meaningful sense of the text, or at least in any literal sense.
I documented this process as part of my first book Mechanisms.
In the course of doing that, I eventually made contact with an individual whose name has not come up yet
this morning, Patrick Krupa, who ran a New York City based bulletin board called MindVox.
This was the digital venue to which the text of the poem was uploaded on December 10,
1992, the morning after the transmission, which we'll hear more about tomorrow.
Krupa, who also went by the alias of 'Lord Digital', made the MindVox bulletin board files available to me.
I remember a harrowing email I received one June afternoon as I was working on the book telling me that he was going to put the files online,
but only for a few hours and he hoped I didn't miss it.
Luckily, I was online and reading my email and
from there I got into the MindVox archives, wrote up as much of the story as I could for the book. As I was reviewing proofs for Mechanisms
Alan and I were both contacted by some of the individuals we'll hear from tomorrow,
a.k.a 'RoseHammer', 'Templar' and 'PseudoPhred' who filled in some of the gaps in my story. I will save for tomorrow
I think the the actual mechanism by which the poem was uploaded to the the bulletin board and then the internet.
What I would close with today is really a kind of irony.
So the first line in Mechanisms is about Googling for the string:
'William Gibson Agrippa' and the phenomenon of dozens and dozens and dozens of copies
of this supposedly disappearing text instantly populating my browser screen.
And that was sort of the kind of conceptual paradox that really the whole book that my
whole scholarly project rested on, understanding that unique aspect of digital materiality.
However, nowadays, if you repeat that same exercise, it actually turns out to be much harder to find a digital full text of the poem online.
You can still do it there. They are still out there, but they tend to be buried much further down in one's search results.
A lot of the scholarship that the people on this panel and others have done about the book is what comes up first.
But moreover, a lot of these early FTP servers and early websites that hosted copies of the poem have themselves gone away.
So there is a sense in which at long last,
the ontology of the poem's supposed disappearance is in fact now playing out as actual
online copies of that become a little bit trickier to find than they once were.
And that ongoing transformation of the text is what has kept my interest in it alive after all these years.
So thank you. And I think: is Quinn up next?
Great. Thank you. Thank you. Quinn, Business School at York University, Information Scientist,
Welcome. Yeah. Hi. Thanks, everyone. It should help
of you see my screen. I'm just going to start with, I'm going to show my intervention here,
It's so lovely to have this opportunity to have decades and decades, you know, sort of be linearized in front of us.
And I came to Agrippa actually through Alan. I believe I was actually a master's student in information science maybe at the time.
And I was really interested Digital humanities and I took this course at Victoria BC called Digital Humanities Summer Institute.
And at the time Alan was talking about his Agrippa Files project and that's where I learned about Agrippa in the first place.
And then a little bit while later, of course,
we just heard Matt's great intervention there and what that I came to was a fairly well investigated artefact in this point.
You know, all of the sort of bibliographic information had been made available and Matthew and his team had done,
you know, all this sort of digital work of getting these copies all available.
And so I was presented with something that wasn't you know, this wasn't greenfield research here.
This was fairly well investigated.
But what struck me immediately is and I guess this is my own predilection here is so much of the artefact had been investigated.
But what was sort of missing and bothered me was there's cryptographic routine in particular was left unexplored.
And so originally using the Agrippa Files materials, I said, well, maybe I'll see if I can crack the code itself.
And so, you know, I took a couple of weeks effort at this.
And as it turns out, you know, my sort of 1992 error programming skills just weren't what they needed to be.
And there's just a lot of domain knowledge I didn't have. And so I realised this isn't going to be something I'm going to do myself.
So I created this contest, a cracking contest, and this is actually something that is not uncommon online.
These notions of cracking contests. And what I want to do is motivate people's interest.
And so here's the web page. You can go to 'crackingagrippa.net'.
And you can see the original challenge. And here is my original sort of write up, and I realised I needed to compile these materials for people.
So here is all of the material you'd see from a group of files.
And then I think what I'll do is and so very quickly actually, so I posted this online,
people found it very interesting and I had a number of submissions sort of right away.
And then I worked with those individuals to come up with a sort of technical description to kind of understand what's really going on.
And so my last couple minutes here, I'm just going to really quickly walk through my interpretation of what's occurring from inside of the disk.
So I start with the digital document and I work from there.
And so what's interesting is when you run this disk,
there are sort of four stages that occur and a lot of what we thought we knew about it turned out to be not entirely true.
So the first thing to kind of recognise is that there is this compiled binary on the disk itself so that
the poem itself comes pre-encrypted. So,
the first thing is this there's this virus-like mechanism.
It was actually never developed and as it turns out the cryptographic algorithm itself
it's
an RSA encryption, so it's very simple 12-bit encryption that doesn't actually encrypt the document, but rather provides an encryption effect.
And this encryption effect is to display the poem and then run it through the repurposed decryption algorithm,
which basically just sort of scrambles it. And then in the end, what you end up with is not a file that cannot be run again,
but only because the self-destruction mechanism was a mechanism to overwrite the binary itself.
So the file does self-destruct, but it doesn't actually re encrypt itself.
It really just shows an effect and then dumps out the encryption file and just leaves it out in the end.
And there's lots of kind of interesting things that we discovered, including for instance,
the self-destruct routine is called 'Make some [INAUDIBLE]', which is a sort of an interesting name for it.
And there's interesting things that we realised. For instance,
the self-destruct mechanism itself originally was thought to just sort of write over zeros,
just sort of overwrite that part of the file itself so that it won't be able to run again.
But at some point somebody realised you know you might want to be a little bit cooler than just overwriting the files with,
you know, with ones or zeros or just sort of zeroing it out.
Maybe what we can do is we can write a bunch of interesting characters that look like the DNA code.
And the final thing I want to sort of to show is some of the submissions offer very helpful descriptions.
Technical. It's not the right one. Sorry. The second one here is better where you can actually see the encryption sort of visualised.
And here's a good example. Time's up.
So I'll finish up right here. Here's an example
whereas if you look up here, you can see the permutation where you start with this number zero.
And the sort of bit scrambling in the encryption process here, this 12-bit encryption.
And then you end up with the output. And if you want to see it on the real data.
So here's the beginning of the of the poem, which is a double quote, and then it's 'I' space 'H E S'.
And then as you know, 'I hesitated'. Right?
And so what we see is actually you can walk that back and here is the encoded encrypted text itself.
So there's a kind of a nice fine visualisation.
And the final thing I'll show is if you want to kind of play around with it, I actually use this in teaching all the time.
I find it really helpful. One of the people who entered the contest developed this little tool and you can see you can actually just go
ahead and decrypt the ciphertext right in front of you and you can actually go ahead and just kind of change it.
One thing to bear in mind is you can break it pretty easily because of the way it's encoded.
So if you do something other than three characters, you'll probably break it.
So let's just put QQQ and then we can actually roundtrip it back.
And then if we just go ahead and delete all that, here we go.
We just roundtrip to it. And then of course, if you go over here, we change something.
This is probably we're going to see the encryption itself break.
Oh, actually, it kind of worked, but so I'll leave it at that.
That's my contribution to this sort of several decades of this interesting storied history.
And thanks for the opportunity to chat about it. Thank you, Quinn.
On to Rollin Milroy from Heavenly Monkey, which is a letterpress studio.
Let's go. Hi, everybody.
Nice to meet you all. Thanks, Justine, for including me in this. As Caroline said, I came to Agrippa as a letterpress printer,
bookbinder. So I really came to it specifically from the aspect of the book.
Just the book and
the box, I guess. So I first heard about Agrippa in 92 in the Science Fiction Eye magazine advertisement that ran.
I thought it sounded intriguing. I was involved in book collecting at the time, and over 20 years, I never saw a copy offered by a bookseller.
I never saw a copy listed in a catalogue. And for a book published in 92 in the quantities that the ad claimed
that's very unusual. So I wondered what happened. After that
I got into printing and binding, by 2000
I was doing it full time and since then I published about one or two books a year,
basically using the same methods that were used for the Agrippa book.
I don't have a particular publishing plan or focus, but over the years I have done a number of projects about books that were not
completed, not published, not issued in the way that the publisher had originally intended.
And I find those stories fascinating. And it usually comes down in one way or another to money.
About 12 years ago, I had to put my studio in storage because we were moving and it was going to be in storage for about six months.
So I needed something to do. And
around that time I was at a dinner party at a friend's house and everyone around the table was involved with books in one way or another.
And so we're all telling bookstories.
And I mentioned Agrippa because generally in the past when I've mentioned it, nobody knows what I'm talking about.
And the person hosting the party who was a very good friend of mine said: 'Oh, I have that book.'
And I said: 'No, you don't.' And she said: 'Oh, yeah, I do.'
And she went downstairs and rummaged around in her basement for a while and came up with:
her copy. So I said: Huh?
Can I borrow that for a while?' So she gave it to me.
And then I decided what I'm going to spend these six months while my studio's on ice doing
is trying to find out the story of what really happened with the publication of Agrippa.
I wasn't particularly interested in the the virtual cyber side,
partly because I'm not really technically capable of understanding a lot of it, but I am capable of understanding how to make a book.
So I wanted to know what that was, what the story was. So Alan's Agrippa Files site obviously is the place you start.
It's fantastic. But it didn't include a lot of the production details, physical production details that I was interested in.
So I started working backwards and trying to get to primary sources.
I contacted Begos, said I was working on something,
I didn't know what it was going to be and would he answer some questions.
And I didn't get a reply. University of British Columbia here in Vancouver has a connection with Gibson because they have his early
archival material and I got a request for an interview or something to give him some questions through UBC.
He wasn't interested. I contacted Ashbaugh through his website and didn't get a reply,
but I did manage to contact and have discussions with the person who printed the text, the person who printed the etchings and
I wasn't able to find anything about the binder, which is weird. And anyway, I ended up doing what I called a monograph.
And just sort of recounting what I found out about the book, what I was able to determine.
And that's why I'm here today. I would just like to add before I hand back the floor, I thought Alan's comment about the
lack of a strong social contract, I think was the phrase you used between the people involved in the project.
I think that's a very interesting comment.
And maybe we can talk more about that.
The other thing I'd say, though, is, Alan, you highlighted the copyright statement on the encrypted files site that Begos wanted included.
And in the strange little corner of publishing that I inhabit that is not an unusual statement.
I as Heavenly Monkey, have copyright for the book that I issue.
The author will have copyright of the text. And if there's an artist, the artist will have copyright over the art included.
Right. Thank you. Maybe we can come back to some of those questions. I think our last speaker is Justine, who is real.
Oh, yes. Justine is from the University of Cambridge.
And this is her conference. Thank you, Caroline.
As you said, I will be very brief because I think it is way more interesting to hear all of the speakers speak together.
And so, yes, I'm doing my PhD currently, jointly supervised here at the Bodleian and at Cambridge. I work on the nature
of books and how there can be many forms of books actually that we could consider and how thee forms of books are
preserved and accessed in library collections. So I should say that I myself come to Agrippa from actually a book conservator
perspective. I used to work here at the Bodleian before getting on with the Ph.D.
And so my approach to the book is from cultural heritage and conservation view.
And when I think of a book that self-destructs, you could think that it's quite counter-grain to
what I do as a book conservator. Or maybe very appealing to me.
But anyway, I think of Agrippa beyond the sensationalism of the label 'self-destructive'.
And I use rather this label 'self-destructive' that is very sensational to actually consider what it show
us at face value of our interaction with this medium of communication 'book' that we actually use every day in the written world,
as users, viewers and readers.
And coming back to Agrippa, I go in two directions that I connect at some point, which are: A, it is a book?
And B, if it is a book, where does it fit in relation to history of the book and library collections?
So, my answer to: A, is it a book? Actually, yes. To me, Agrippa is a book, and actually it's not one book to me, but it's at least three books.
And yes, you've seen many copies and you're going to be thinking, well, there is only one book in each of these copies, the one made of paper
that is folded together, sawn between boards and bound together.
And that is the codex-form book. I would consider,
not that all from a computer scientist perspective,
but more with a creative, critical reading of the computer programme and from the wonderful actually 'cracking the code'
contest by Quinn and the representation of what it is that you can see with the zeros and the ones and how they are intertwined together,
that for me, from a bookish perspective, when I see them - zeros and ones intertwined together - I think, oh,
folds of a gathering of a bookblock that actually support a text that appears then on the page 'computer screen' and it is William Gibson's poem.
Finally, there is a third book for me that appears actually here, right in the middle of all of that, in Agrippa.
It is the DNA sequence of the fruit fly or an excerpt of it because I don't think of it as asemic writing.
I see it more how often we hear about DNA and how DNA is considered to be a kind of way of having a history,
a kind of book of our own humanity, ancestry and of all of us living organisms.
So that's how I would consider this kind of third book, metaphorically,
nested inside the two other books. And from a book perspective,
and I would very much like to hear what my colleague thinks about that,
but for example, I think about the two DNA helix strands maybe as two folds again that unfolds inside twoo cover of the book.
And for instance, you could picture an accordion book when you think of the DNA strands.
So B, where does that fit if it is a book? If these are books? Well to me it fits in a library,
because people are: 'oh, if Agrippa is self-destructive, maybe the way people interact with it as readers and they read it for destruction,
maybe its location is more in a gallery, an art gallery?' But actually when you put it right in the centre of the library,
it brings you within the context of the library basically asking questions like: What do we do with books?
How do we preserve them? For do we preserve them?
And all of these questions that we are actually faced with when we are in the reading room where our own
bodily matter is actually constraint in our interaction with a book. We shall not speak, we shall not write on it, you know, leave as little traces of your own body on the book.
And then finally, well, once.
in the library, you branch out and you open it to library collections.
And all of a sudden, to me, Agrippa, and we could see it from this amazing panel, is related to many,
many fields in the history of the book, in the ongoing history of the book,
and how we have been experimenting with the materiality of this object book
that is an interface of communication from the codex-form books to the e-book, between print culture and digital collection, time-based media,
photosensitive surface. Thank you very much and thank you to everyone
who's been on the panel. Thank you, everybody.
I have a question to the panel or a comment, which is, I realised that, I too, I've lived with William Gibson.
And the reason I have is because I'm a science fiction reader and a techno feminist and someone who was thinking about technology,
gender, cultural imaginaries and cyberspace throughout that period and was also an accidental technological journalist.
And my question which actually be about the strange disappearance of William Gibson and everything we have said so far,
which might also be a question to Alan about how a sociology can be a biography in our sociology, but still come back to the question of the text
and the content, there might be a question for the rest of you about the role of Gibson and Gibson's fictional universe,
if you like, and Gibson's writing in Agrippa and in the project,
because that's how I came across it and that's how I was enchanted with the object as well,
which was less real, as a matter of fact, than all the cyber stuff you could steal at the time.
So any comments on Gibson? Any of you.
[Alan] I've had a few, a few brief correspondences with Gibson about this and other matters in the past,
but basically he has been a lurker in the entire conversation.
I think this is true since the very beginning. This was a project I believe was concocted between Begos and Ashbaugh.
Gibson always had a distant relationship to the project.
He was a kind of a fourth wheel, as it were.
They commissioned a poem from him and that was what he was concerned about and that was what he contributed.
After about this, I think Kevin said six months of delay when it finally arrived,
but as I understand it from Kevin, Gibson, never had a close relationship with this project.
And as you may know, over the years, at various times, Gibson has played the public role of a sceptic about the existence of the book itself.
He's on record as saying that he's never seen a copy, that he doesn't know that it exists, even though I think that's counterfactual.
So it's a very strange kind of situation and it's another piece of evidence, I think,
of the weakness of the social contract that underlies this construction called Agrippa (A Book of the Dead).
There is never the firm social basis to bind this thing together institutionally,
contractually and otherwise, as what we would recognise as a book.
[Caroline] Thank you. Justine, I think, you wanted to come back in. Yes but maybe Matthew first.
No, Justine, please go ahead. [Justine] Yes, I wanted to reflect on that because, funnily,
actually William Gibson has been kind of in touch with us. He has retweeted yesterday about the symposium, Matthew told us that.
And earlier too. And actually, I had reached out to him to invite him, we had discussed that
also with Quinn. So, he couldn't come but he wishes us the best of luck so he is kind of still, you know, looking over the project.
And yes, I have exchanged with him a little bit for my research and for him
it's really a project that is mainly tied to actually finding the book about his family and his father.
And also in my exchange with him, he said that you had never seen a copy of the book.
[Caroline] Which we don't necessarily believe. Matthew?
[Matthew] Yeah, I mean, I've also had a little bit of correspondence with Gibson over the years.
My sense is that it's not just a certain kind of estrangement from the project.
I think he also enjoys being mischievous, puckish about it,
and I think he sort of sees this as something he kind of did way back in the day and is
sort of tickled by the notion that this group of academics and curators and book people,
you know, still won't let go of it. I think he finds it a little bit sort of odd and inexplicable.
You know, there there is footage of him examining the NYPL copy.
He was there to do a big reading some years back, and they brought out the copy for him.
And there is I think there's even a short clip on YouTube of him paging through it.
He also, of course, signed the leaves. And I've wondered about that a little bit.
I mean, the signatures are obviously authentic.
The notion, particularly given the kind of elemental circumstances under which the project came together,
the notion that the leaves were somehow, you know, gathered and shipped off to him for autograph in Vancouver.
And that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
I mean, it could have happened,
but it would seem more likely that at some point he was actually in a room somewhere and in a position to sign multiple leaves for multiple copies.
And that would be one interesting sort of tangent of this to rundown, if anyone could.
[Alan] Just on that point, I wanted to ask Rollin about this, because over the years, I gathered this strong impression, which may be wrong,
that the book that we're calling a book basically consisted of a bunch of parts that were assembled more or less just in time,
depending on whether in order came in. So on that basis, it's not, you know, unbelievable that Gibson only saw a bunch of leaves of the book.
Rollin, what do you think of that? [Rollin] It's I would say it's more common when you're doing a book like this with people spread out.
What you do is you send the sheet to the person who is going to sign,
so you send a hundred sheets or whatever to Gibson, and he just signs those and sends them back to you.
And then they get collated
and when you're binding copies, you wouldn't necessarily wait for all the copies to be bound and then fly him into town.
Not to say that it didn't happen that way, but it's a lot more expensive.
It's easier to get a bunch of signatures on sheets and then deal with it. Sorry,
was there another question? I don't think so. [Caroline] No, I think that was it. I suppose my question following that would be.
The role then of Gibson, even assuming he had a peripheral role in the construction of the work?
Somehow, how then, really are you thinking about the pervasive influence of Gibson as a writer of cyberspace,
as somebody interested in the end of the book and the beginning of writing?
How does his culture imaginary play into Agrippa?
Because I think it does. I think it always has.
So I don't know whether we can really abandon Gibson and turn him into a bit player in his own destructing
book. Quinn? [Quinn] I'll just comment maybe in addition to sort of the fascination around the print object itself,
there was also at the time, of course, 1992 sort of transport ourselves back.
This is early Internet and before there was a lot of fascination from a sort of a
political cultural side as well with regard to the encryption and encryption effect.
There is materials that on the Agrippa Files showing the role of others who are broadly speaking interested in,
you know, challenging the cryptographic universe, I suppose.
And so that includes, of course, famously the Electronic Frontier Foundation and those folks were involved in.
But what I think actually was interesting from my perspective is, despite all of the interest in this, in the cryptography or the potential virus,
it's actually it was never really, you know, in reality, it would have never been a concern.
It was a very weak cryptographic tool and not one that would have concerned regulators or any of that.
So there is a kind of a cultural moment attached to it, but it was like any good art project,
maybe one that was just sort of drummed up from from interest.
And in reality, I don't think it actually posed any huge source of challenges
like William Gibson would be really fascinated with and interested to sort of see the pushing of a kind of a cultural frontier,
especially in the cyber space. [Matthew] Yeah. And just to, you know, just sort of continue Caroline's line of thinking.
I mean, Alan and I have both and Peter, too, written about the mechanism as kind of the central trope of the poem.
And a mechanism is very much a mechanistic technological image, although it resonates far more, I think, deeply than that in the context of the poem.
But I absolutely see this. It's at once different from any other public text that Gibson has authored.
But I also I personally see it as very much of a piece with his larger body of writing and also autobiographically and otherwise.
I see it very much as his voice in the text. [Alan] Well,
just to support both Quinn and Matt's statements here, on Quinn's part the
reception history of the work at this very beginning with the BBS excitement about it and so on
it has everything to do with Neuromancer and the Sprawl trilogy, which had come out at that point.
The book was received as, as I put it, the incunabula of the Internet, a kind of early version of the Internet.
And secondly, to support what Matt was saying, you know, I really when I teach this work,
the 305 line poem by Gibson provides that theory for a new medium.
It's memory of his father's photograph album, that Agrippa album from Kodak,
which I tried to get a copy of from the Kodak firm, but they had gone bankrupt by that time and disbanded their archives.
That poem is the theorisation of the book, which itself has become, on that basis,
one of the canonical examples of new media forms and the transition between media ages.
So it's very difficult to put Gibson to the side because strangely enough,
the interpretation of this book came before the book was finished in the form of the poem that is the theorisation of this work.
[Caroline] I think I really see it as a materialisation of his writing, which I think many people at the time, they see it in that way.
So I'm not sure that if anyone wants to come back, we're running out of time, are we?
Yes. I think we have to stop. I think we're going to have to.
[Justine] Yeah, I wanted just to know if Peter has had an interaction with William Gibson at the time,
because you were just there writing the article as the book was being made.
[Caroline] Peter, did you hear that? Justine is asking about your sense of the relationship between cyberculture at the time
I think and as the book was being diffused,
[Justine] If you actually have been in touch with William Gibson at the time because you know you were writing the article and the book
was still in the process of being mad, you received a copy that was not, you know, encrypted.
[Peter] So I think that I might take some issue with Matthew's statement that the mechanism is, in fact, mechanistic.
[Matthew] Just to be clear, I said it was not solely mechanistic.
[Peter] Well, yeah. That word took on a different meaning for me 30 years later, reading my own essay.
Of course you can't get everything in. We know that about books, but we also know that about reader responses.
And my response this time focussed much more on Ashbaugh, who has had very little attention paid to him,
actually, relative to the frenzy about decoding the disappearing digital aspect.
I was glad for that reason that Justine talked about Ashbaugh.
What I noticed or I think I noticed, was that the code,
the DNA that we have on those pages by Ashbaugh is also a code and can be connected to the Agrippa code.
It reminds us, I think, that we too are mechanisms, we run once, we disappear and all that we all that is left is a
futile attempt through things like memory or photography to reverse that disappearance.
It raises the question, then larger question about the relationship between the book and the body, which could be explored further.
I think Peter Greenaway does some some of some of that exploration in his movies, but we might think about moving in that direction as well.
[Caroline] Thank you. I suspect we're out of time.
But the final line of Gibson's time is something like 'laughing in the mechanism', which I think is interesting,
because one of the questions I would have is that we think about the degree of seriousness with which we might needto
take this project and also the degree to which I think it's partly a joke and a really interesting and intriguing,
imaginative, beautiful joke probably on us, or with us that might be a place to finish for the moment.
So thanks everybody and I think everyone is staying with us. [inaudible]