1 00:00:05,020 --> 00:00:09,780 Thank you very much to everyone online in person and so well. 2 00:00:09,940 --> 00:00:19,870 The last session of our group at Palooza 2023 and we're going to have Professor Jason Scott-Warren from the faculty of Cambridge, 3 00:00:20,110 --> 00:00:27,340 who is going to lead our Q&A and provide some mind-boggling closing remarks. 4 00:00:29,350 --> 00:00:37,360 And so, yes, over to you. And it's for all of the speakers from both days. 5 00:00:39,240 --> 00:00:45,900 Yeah, if we think maybe the concluding remarks, then we'll open up to more Q&A, because I think we really want to hear from 6 00:00:46,350 --> 00:00:51,180 everyone in the room and out there about what questions remain for them. 7 00:00:51,220 --> 00:00:56,129 So I'm going to just try to keep this relatively brief. I'm going to kind of scribble down a few thoughts. 8 00:00:56,130 --> 00:01:04,080 But um yeah, such an amazingly rich couple of days, that it's really hard to summarise and to conclude. 9 00:01:05,700 --> 00:01:10,130 I think one thing that was really lovely about this symposium was the way that we kind of went back in time, in the 10 00:01:10,470 --> 00:01:15,879 structure of some of these panels, that we kind of began with surviving copies and that tour of the surviving copies, 11 00:01:15,880 --> 00:01:23,520 and then we went back through the kind of responses to Agrippa since 1992 and then this afternoon, 12 00:01:23,880 --> 00:01:31,560 we wound back in the Kitchen and we wound back in all that very immediate early excitement 13 00:01:31,560 --> 00:01:37,080 around the hacking and the publication and the hacking of Agrippa. 14 00:01:38,040 --> 00:01:41,040 So that kind of backwards motion worked really well, I think. 15 00:01:41,590 --> 00:01:48,510 And I think the other really nice thing about it was the kind of element of transmission that we've had in the conference. 16 00:01:48,510 --> 00:01:56,970 So this kind of Anglo-American kind of this kind of extraordinary kind of connection that we had, over Zoom, 17 00:01:58,260 --> 00:02:01,200 which has been handled so brilliantly by the a/v team here. 18 00:02:01,200 --> 00:02:08,100 I'm concerned that we're in a kind of moment where that sort of yearning to be post post-COVID 19 00:02:08,520 --> 00:02:15,680 is kind of leading us to a slightly strange kind of recoil from digital forms of engagement from kind of, 20 00:02:15,690 --> 00:02:18,760 you know, getting together with people over Zoom, we're all a bit fixated on 21 00:02:18,780 --> 00:02:21,120 "We need to be in the room, we need to be present, we need to be in person". 22 00:02:21,120 --> 00:02:29,579 And actually it's really nice, I think, to have some kind of vindication of the process of kind of meeting digitally in this way, 23 00:02:29,580 --> 00:02:34,500 even though it has forced us to be confined to the afternoons, which was kind of an unusual thing. 24/var/folders/13/38nlpvfx13z26th1dk3nx1nc0000gp/T/com.microsoft.Outlook/21AFE58A-4CCE-465F-B2E2-B4EE5F056852/Re- OEDs.eml 00:02:35,610 --> 00:02:41,489 So I'm really unqualified to sum up and Justine's bowled me a real googly here because I'm really an early modernist, 25 00:02:41,490 --> 00:02:47,820 I spend my whole time in the 16th and 17th centuries and so having to think about anything from 1992 is really terrifying. 26 00:02:49,050 --> 00:02:56,630 And I've had an early modern poem in my mind, through this conference, which I want to I going to actually read, and I'm like 'no don't read an early modern poem!', but I'm actually 27 00:02:56,640 --> 00:03:00,780 I'm going to read it because then it will be a self-destructive poem. 28 00:03:00,780 --> 00:03:05,170 You won't be able to see it on screen, it's just going to fade on the air, it's an immediately self-destructive poem. 29 00:03:05,730 --> 00:03:14,370 And it's a poem from Robert Herrick's Hesperides, which is a collection of 1200 short, mostly short poems that he published in 1648. 30 00:03:15,060 --> 00:03:24,629 And in this poem he imagines the death of his book. And you have to know a little bit of classical background, inevitably, because it's from the 17th century. 31 00:03:24,630 --> 00:03:30,990 So you have to know that Absirtus was the brother of Medea and that Medea killed her brother and tore him 32 00:03:30,990 --> 00:03:37,110 into pieces when she was being pursued by her father, to stop him from catching her. 33 00:03:37,300 --> 00:03:40,770 This is a story which is retailed by Ovid in the Tristia. 34 00:03:41,430 --> 00:03:47,670 And Herrick picks this up to imagine encountering his dismembered book; so: To His Book. 35 00:03:47,870 --> 00:03:52,560 If hap it must that I must see the lie, Absirtus-like 36 00:03:52,770 --> 00:04:02,060 all torn confusedly, With solemn tears and with much grief of heart, I'll recollect thee weeping part by part, 37 00:04:02,640 --> 00:04:10,290 and having washed thee, close thee in a chest, With spice; that done, I'll leave thee to thy rest. 38 00:04:12,080 --> 00:04:19,850 Herrick's fantasy in this poem puts him in the position of a grieving father forced to gather his son's lifeless limbs on a journey of sorrow. 39 00:04:20,120 --> 00:04:24,650 That's from the Ovid. Having spent all these years collecting the poems in his book together, 40 00:04:24,800 --> 00:04:32,210 Herrick then imagines re-collecting the scattered fragments and recapitulating all that earlier labour in a kind of tragic mode. 41 00:04:32,900 --> 00:04:38,780 So the book becomes a body. It becomes a body which can be gathered up and embalmed and entombed like a human body. 42 00:04:39,230 --> 00:04:44,990 In a way, it's a kind of reliquary; there's a kind of excess of presence at this point; the book, 43 00:04:44,990 --> 00:04:49,030 when it's torn up, when it's destroyed, turns into a person, it turns into a child. 44 00:04:49,040 --> 00:04:52,640 It kind of, it's never more alive than when it's dead in a way, perhaps. 45 00:04:53,690 --> 00:04:57,919 And Herrick's act of curation keeps on reminding me in a slightly ghastly way, perhaps, 46 00:04:57,920 --> 00:05:04,940 of what we're doing here in kind of bringing this text together, putting Agrippa back together again, 47 00:05:04,940 --> 00:05:11,209 in it's strange hybrid form and then taking it apart and bringing it back to life, 48 00:05:11,210 --> 00:05:19,130 even as we acknowledge that it's a scattered body dispersed around the world, which can then be pulled together through a video link. 49 00:05:21,060 --> 00:05:27,879 So I'm looking back on Agrippa, I'm looking at it with the eyes of an early modernist and I'm starting to get hooked on Agrippa, I'm starting to get the Agrippa bug, 50 00:05:27,880 --> 00:05:33,330 which is really good because, you know, it's kind of late in the day, but I mean, we all have to get the bug, I think. 51 00:05:33,750 --> 00:05:40,110 And I'm getting it, and I think I might be getting it because I'm wondering whether Agrippa ultimately takes sides in some way. 52 00:05:40,800 --> 00:05:48,410 So because it coincides with the the arrival in the early nineties of the Internet as a kind of public phenomenon, 53 00:05:48,450 --> 00:05:52,319 something that people are aware of, we think of it as forward-looking. 54 00:05:52,320 --> 00:05:58,200 We think of it as this crossroads of the old and the new, we kind of fixate on the diskette, 55 00:05:58,200 --> 00:06:06,299 we fixate on the hopes for simultaneous broadcast, all those exciting technological things we were talking about earlier on today. 56 00:06:06,300 --> 00:06:09,480 In a way, there's a kind of teleological narrative, all this kind of leads to us. 57 00:06:09,870 --> 00:06:14,580 So so that's kind of, I think, in a way that becomes the excitement of Agrippa, 58 00:06:14,790 --> 00:06:19,560 But a part of me is wondering whether, I don't know, it's kind of biased the other way. 59 00:06:19,680 --> 00:06:27,280 So there's a kind of plea in Agrippa on behalf of the distressed, the textured and the archaeological. 60 00:06:27,420 --> 00:06:28,469 Agrippa the poem, rather I think, 61 00:06:28,470 --> 00:06:34,380 really surprised me, I went back to Agrippa the poem and it gives you this moment when Gibson is complaining about his grandfather, 62 00:06:34,830 --> 00:06:42,030 who was quote prone to modern materials, covering with a charmless concrete slab the sweet, 63 00:06:42,210 --> 00:06:46,810 uneven brick that knew the iron shoes of Yankee horses, so kind of you know 64 00:06:48,000 --> 00:06:53,640 the horrific concrete over the brick as a kind of betrayal of the past. 65 00:06:54,840 --> 00:07:02,880 It gives us the fledgling writer on the railway station platform above Indian-head pennies undisturbed since the dawn of man, 66 00:07:04,170 --> 00:07:11,640 the writer slipping in imagination from Main Street into the depths of, quote, fossil time, limestone centuries. 67 00:07:12,960 --> 00:07:16,770 So there's this kind of yearning, this kind of pull back into the past. 68 00:07:16,770 --> 00:07:25,110 And and I wonder whether there's also there somehow a kind of rebellion against digital technology, a kind of nostalgic rearguard action. 69 00:07:27,450 --> 00:07:29,489 The poem, after all, is not just about the failures of memory, 70 00:07:29,490 --> 00:07:33,840 it clearly is about the failures of memory, but it seems like it might also be about the process of retrieval. 71 00:07:33,840 --> 00:07:38,520 How do you go about kind of pulling out the details from a photograph and 72 00:07:38,520 --> 00:07:42,479 including the incredibly successful retrieval of the origins of Gibson's writing career, 73 00:07:42,480 --> 00:07:49,629 from his engagement with copies of certain magazines in the all night bus stations, so we actually do get back to the past. 74 00:07:49,630 --> 00:07:53,490 We do hit a moment of real kind of contact there. 75 00:07:53,490 --> 00:07:59,340 There is the fact that the content of the disk, this kind of diskette, that the content of 76 00:07:59,340 --> 00:08:03,430 the disk should be an autobiographical poem; that's kind of feels like a scandal. 77 00:08:03,720 --> 00:08:09,240 You know, you get to the digital component, and what's hiding on that component? not just a poem, but an autobiographical poem. 78 00:08:09,240 --> 00:08:17,010 And how shocking is that? How retro could you get? There's the fact that it uses this slow motion unfolding of the scrolling 79 00:08:17,010 --> 00:08:22,170 poem up the screen to create the kind of shared reading experience in a darkened room. 80 00:08:23,490 --> 00:08:27,630 So, in those kind of darkened rooms, maybe across the networked world, 81 00:08:28,200 --> 00:08:35,639 Lauren was talking earlier, quoting the press release on the Global Fireside Chat, on the new form of tribal storytelling. 82 00:08:35,640 --> 00:08:42,380 So we're trying to revive a kind of old mode of storytelling here. And then there's the fact that the text, 83 00:08:42,420 --> 00:08:48,569 the diskette, plays with encryption techniques that are the preserve of the state and the military and the banking sector, 84 00:08:48,570 --> 00:08:51,810 supposedly, according to the way they were kind of pitched to their audience. 85 00:08:52,470 --> 00:08:55,170 But it uses them to sort of seal and to nullify a poem. 86 00:08:55,670 --> 00:09:03,840 So it's kind of like, take these kind of, you know, big, scary kind of features of modernity and use them to wipe out an autobiographical poem. 87 00:09:05,820 --> 00:09:10,010 So there's something kind of really interesting, I don't know, something funny going on there. 88 00:09:10,880 --> 00:09:19,500 And and yeah, I just wonder if there's a kind of slight, you know, all of these kind of layers in the book and then, kind of, you know, 89 00:09:19,520 --> 00:09:26,070 the kind of, there is the diskette, it's a kind of an anticlimax, but it's also the ghost in the machine, it's also the soul of the book. 90 00:09:27,660 --> 00:09:28,920 So there's a really interesting set of paradoxes there I think. 91 00:09:29,250 --> 00:09:38,100 When he launched Agrippa in December 1992, Kevin Begos anticipated that it would present a curatorial challenge, 92 00:09:38,490 --> 00:09:43,350 So how were libraries going to be able to deal with this book that would change irrevocably as it was read. 93 00:09:43,350 --> 00:09:48,450 So how do you catalogue this book? because as soon as you catalogue it, it's changed, he says. 94 00:09:48,600 --> 00:09:52,410 He also anticipated that the reading of the book would become a real problem. 95 00:09:52,890 --> 00:10:00,120 So he says 20 years into the future, getting hold of a computer that will be able to play the disk will be more expensive than 96 00:10:00,120 --> 00:10:07,560 buying a copy of Agrippa; it's really funny the way that Begos kind of forsees the whole history of Agrippa as he describes, 97 00:10:08,220 --> 00:10:13,090 as he talks about it. And it's this kind of challenge that Justine has been exploring in her PhD 98 00:10:13,090 --> 00:10:19,530 so this challenge for curators of working out which distressings are part of the artefact 99 00:10:19,700 --> 00:10:25,399 And which are not; the challenge of working out how to slow down the kinds of degradation 100 00:10:25,400 --> 00:10:31,260 that the book intends to suffer, and the kinds of degradation that the book doesn't foresee, 101 00:10:31,280 --> 00:10:35,809 so the kinds of, you know, warpings and twistings and breakages that it doesn't foresee, 102 00:10:35,810 --> 00:10:39,650 librarians have to manage the book's self-destructive tendencies. 103 00:10:40,820 --> 00:10:46,129 And Justine's been doing this by creating a new copy census which is a method that was pioneered, 104 00:10:46,130 --> 00:10:52,550 I think, in relation to old books, in relation to the Shakespeare First Folio and Copernicus's De Revolutionibus, 105 00:10:52,970 --> 00:10:58,370 so these kind of books where going around libraries, around the world, 106 00:10:58,370 --> 00:11:03,019 and pulling them together kind of made sense and allowed you to to learn new things about the book. 107 00:11:03,020 --> 00:11:10,520 and this is kind of, I mean, applying this to a book from 1992 is quite novel and interesting. 108 00:11:10,520 --> 00:11:18,319 and as you saw yesterday, when we were treated to this copy census in visual form, in a way what it's doing is bringing to light, 109 00:11:18,320 --> 00:11:20,670 that improvisatory and experimental, 110 00:11:20,670 --> 00:11:30,470 quality of Agrippa, and spontaneity in the copies as they were produced, making them, in the end, something far from mechanistic. 111 00:11:32,200 --> 00:11:37,549 And I think what's really interesting about the project as Justine is pursuing it is that it's not just about copies of the book, 112 00:11:37,550 --> 00:11:40,570 it's also about the different institutional framings of the book, 113 00:11:40,580 --> 00:11:49,490 so what happens to Agrippa when it passes into these new collections, into libraries, into art galleries, into different kinds of hands? 114 00:11:49,770 --> 00:11:57,799 And we saw yesterday the very many different ways in which the book is being kind of treated, in which the kind of gatekeeping around the book is happening. 115 00:11:57,800 --> 00:12:05,400 so you've got this kind of real sense of: who's allowed to see it, how are they allowed, what conditions are they allowed to see it under, 116 00:12:05,540 --> 00:12:09,440 and perhaps, what's happening to the book in response to its readers? 117 00:12:09,560 --> 00:12:13,190 How is the book kind of changing in the hands of its readers? 118 00:12:13,190 --> 00:12:14,330 Which was really interesting. 119 00:12:15,790 --> 00:12:22,370 It's not just about the physical form of the book, but also about how valuations of the object are changing as it enters new locales. 120 00:12:23,390 --> 00:12:29,930 And all of that is feeding into a broader exploration, which I think we've seen really beautifully in this symposium as well, 121 00:12:30,770 --> 00:12:37,310 this question in textual studies, in bibliographical studies about what exactly this thing we call a book is. 122 00:12:37,730 --> 00:12:43,459 So Matt's lecture last night or the panel we just had today, this kind of huge 123 00:12:43,460 --> 00:12:47,150 and slightly kind of strange or estranging question about what exactly is a book, 124 00:12:47,150 --> 00:12:54,380 what do we mean by this thing, this ongoing process of rediscovery of something we thought that we knew. 125 00:12:56,300 --> 00:13:01,000 So I think that once we've had some more kind of questions and discussion about 126 00:13:01,610 --> 00:13:06,259 about the things that we've been learning across the course of the symposium, 127 00:13:06,260 --> 00:13:11,659 then we'll really want to thank everyone who has made possible this latest variation, 128 00:13:11,660 --> 00:13:15,830 this latest mutation in the project of coming to grips with the book.