So welcome, everyone, to this second day of symposium on Agrippa.
And next,
we're going to have quite an extraordinary panel of key players in the celebrated transmission of Agrippa that occurred on the 9th of December 1992.
And a number of these individuals have never publicly stated who they are and will be doing so for the first time today.
So each will go in turn and talk about their experience of the transmission event.
But in advance of that, we are going to play a video of one of the launches at the Americas Society in New York,
and then we'll follow that by showing just a few documents from the archive of Agrippa at the Bodleian.
And then we'll let our panellists tell us some more about the event.
So I think without further ado, let's begin.
Thank you all for coming here. I'm Laura Blond, Director of the program development here, and I'm delighted to recognise some of the faces
From Part One of our Cyber mini series, which featured William Gibson and Jack Womack.
And Jack is back with us again tonight. Tonight is the second and final episode starring Agrippa, a book of the dead, Gibson's withering computer disk story of the withering of his father.
In the best Brechtian traditions, we have exposed the seams of our set.
A mass PowerBook 180 interfaced with a high 8 video, a Sony VPH 1041 Q and a BNC connector.
I have trouble with can openers,
but one of the boons of this whole project is that I know my way around words like Radius PowerView and LCD panel, as if I owned them.
When the Kansas City Agrippa site called last week to share panics.
I coolly said that I was contemplating using our Sony projector with a CJD monitor hooked up
... specifically a SY9M part 26-73-90-4, which, for those of you who don't know, is now the connector for BNC.
Now I'll turn the evening over to people who really know what they're talking about.
The flow of the evening is that Kevin Begos, publisher of Agrippa and other limited edition art books,
will first discuss the project with Karen Benfield, associate producer with the Wall Street Journal Television Report.
And then in the spirit of disembodied texts, you'll hear the disembodied voice of Penn Jillette,
From Penn and Teller, the magic performance duo, in a pre-recorded reading Agrippa as it scrolls on screen.
Kevin will be back for questions afterwards.
And finally, we'll drink to postmodernity amidst Agrippa designer Dennis Ashbaugh's DNA portrait paintings upstairs.
Please join me in welcoming Kevin Begos and Karen Benfield. 28 [[START OF THE EXCERPT OF GIBSON'S POEM AS PART OF THE VIDEO OF THE TRANSMISSION]]
I hesitated / before untying the bow / that bound this book together. / A black book: / ALBUMS /
CA. AGRIPPA / Order Extra Leaves / By Letter and Name / A Kodak album of time-burned / black construction paper /
The string he tied / Has been unravelled by years / and the dry weather of trunks / Like a lady's shoestring from the First World War /
Its metal ferrules eaten by oxygen / Until they resemble cigarette-ash / Inside the cover
he inscribed something in soft graphite / Now lost / Then his name /
William F. Gibson Jr. / and something, comma, / 1924 / Then he glued his Kodak prints down / And wrote under them / in chalk-like white pencil: /
"Papa's saw mill, Aug. 1919." / 35 [END OF THE EXCERPT OF THE VIDEO OF THE TRANSMISSION]
Yes, ok, so thank you. If you want to.
Read more….
Can we show again the link to the transmission event, to all the online audience?
So I think that’s it, so thank you very much Dan and Walid.
And so now following that,
I am just going to show couple materials that we have here in the archive at the Bodleian that was
donated by Kevin Begos Jr in 2011 and these archival materials they relate to two things.
So, one actually is related to another launch event that actually happened for Agrippa that was also in New York but at The Kitchen this time.
So I'll first show this material. And so, here, thank you, Lauren Amazeen
and John Maxwell Hobbs, who are among our speakers, as they will be able to tell us actually more about what is this document.
We’re just going to show a few materials that we have here at the Bodleian.
So this is a letter of agreement that was actually signed by one of our panellists here today, Lauren
Amazeen, Director of The Kitchen. And it is an argument about what exactly will be the launch event of Agrippa at The Kitchen.
And, you didn't have Penn Jillette, you had Robert Ashley as an artist to read the poem.
And I believe that John will also tell us more about all of that and how it worked out.
And why you went with actually somebody reading the poem live.
So there is that first document which I think everybody now can see and the second document which
I'm going to show is actually this little draft of what was supposed to be the transmission and,
Yes, today here with us, actually, as a panellist Marc Scarpa, was actually at the time the producer in charge of the netcast broadcasting
And that will explain us more
What is this document presenting and he just told us actually this document
is in the hand of Dennis Ashbaugh and he has another document that compares to that
And so I'll hand it over to you, Mark, to introduce yourself and tell us what it is this document and everything you know,
your engagement with Agrippa. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you very much. Well, just a little background.
I was. Thank you, everyone. I'm honoured to be here.
And it's good to see some old friends and new ones. A lot of us collaborated on this project and didn't meet and or know each other at the time.
And that was sort of the heart of the whole vision of Agrippa the transmission.
The idea that everyone could come together with this very interesting story that was part of Agrippa A Book of the Dead and that it would,
in essence, metastasise or become a virus,
if you will, where the story would be placed on one bulletin board service and one way,
and then it would be shared with another one, and so on and so on.
However, it might change and grow and evolve to the point where the story would actually change and grow and evolve.
In speaking with Bill at that time,
his hope and desire was that it would grow into thousands or hundreds of thousands of different versions of the story.
And ironically, now, 30 years later, and we're all getting together, it seems as though his vision was realised.
So we should really owe a debt of gratitude to both Bill and Kevin and Dennis for leading the way in this project,
which is just in essence a very quirky art project at the time,
and that was able to try a lot of new ideas and fortunately there were a lot of other quirky folks like myself and everyone
else in this session that thought it was a good idea and let's all gravitate towards it and try to make it happen.
The transmission side of this I had stumbled upon having met Bill through my work at CBS News.
We had done a story about him that was unrelated to Agrippa, and also as a result, I had gotten connected to Dennis Ashbaugh.
Dennis then put me in touch with Kevin Begos and,
You know, the book was already well under way.
And the idea of the transmission sort of manifested.
And you did see a version of the drawing there.
But if I can share my screen, this was my original drawing here.
And I think that drawing, as I mentioned, was done by Kevin.
Not Kevin sorry, it was done by Dennis after I had done this one.
So this was sort of, you know, at that time we I was a phone freaker and had been online since 1980, 1981.
So very familiar with bulletin boards and so on. But the idea of actually having an auto dial infrastructure,
the thought was that the book itself or the words from the story would go to one bulletin board,
be published one way, then go to the next one, the next one, the next one.
So in essence, instead of what we now understand as webcasting, where it's one source to many, from a server and receiver standpoint,
we had actually dial up each bulletin board and post each one of these versions of the story and we were trying to figure out.
Well, how do we do that? In an automated way? How can it be done potentially?
We were even thinking of audio and video back then as a as a way to actually
maybe shoot some video and have it sent published and available for download,
which was obviously way ahead of its time since that technology really didn't exist at that time.
And we also were looking at other ways to get it to individual destinations in a faster capacity.
And there was, you know, a networking situation or technology that was called Switch 56, which is in essence 56.6 modem technology or bandwidth.
At that time, it was like 8 bit and 14.4, 28 bit really wasn't even a reality on a daily level per say, was there.
But, you know, you started to look at these new technologies in terms of bandwidth architecture,
which was switch 56, and that was actually a thing at the time.
And we thought, wow, now with Switch 56, we actually can send audio and video.
So needless to say, a lot of this, these drawings here, this original drawing was just us whiteboarding.
Then that turned into looking at sort of a more in depth.
Okay, what is this really going to look like in terms of instead of doing it live on all these different destinations at the same time?
Because that was the idea was let's get a bunch of modems together that would then dial all of these
bulletin boards at exactly the same time using Switch 56 and then post it all simultaneously.
And in essence, we were thinking about it from a broadcast perspective and what it ended up doing,
what we ended up doing is more of a delayed transmission that also included a presentation with it.
And so you can see the technical flow chart here where we had the disk, the CPU, the monitor, the outgoing modem,
the telephone line at that time with 9600 baud, the incoming modem,
the terminal programmed to run the script and then at certain sites around the world,
the thought was that they would have all these sort of watch parties, if you will, where it would come in,
and that would be projected onto the screen, just like ironically we're doing now very easily with Zoom.
And then you'd have a CPU monitor there in the location.
So as you could see, this was all very academic
And in many ways unrealistic at the time.
But it was something that, you know, ended up being sort of a roadmap for where we are today with broadcasts in general.
What else is here is sort of just I think this is my outline of a weekly report that I sent to Kevin.
We were looking for sponsorships at the time.
We were looking at primary and secondary test locations as well as primary and secondary locations for these watch parties, if you will.
And ultimately, our goal here was to achieve electric mothership connection, as I would like to say.
And so we had a lot of fun with it.
And, you know, my my career, this really sort of sparked my interest in the idea of being able to send and transmit information.
You know, in a streaming capacity, which again, didn't exist at that time later on.
And that was what my career turned out to be, is, you know, doing the first large online webcast in history,
which was the Free Tibet Festival just some four years later in 1996,
using real video technology or real audio and video technology with a slight detour prior to that using zings DreamWorks about 1995.
So it really all started with this project and and just sort of grew from there.
And I'm not sure what else I could mention off the top of my head here is the drawing that you have, I believe and this is, again,
Dennis and I kind of playing from what I recall with the original drawing and looking at how this could all come together and of course,
tying into the event that eventually wound up happening at The Kitchen.
So we didn't end up doing watch parties all around the world.
We ended up doing one event at The Kitchen that was hosted by John and it went swimmingly well and was a great event.
We also had a party as well that everyone attended, which was kind of fun.
And we did get these transmissions out to a select group of locations, and a lot of the other colleagues here took the,
I guess, format or the model that we put together and went ahead and shared it with different bulletin boards.
So I think we started out with very grandiose ideas of being able to hit everyone all at once.
And one big shot with watch parties all around the world to we had one event in New York City with all of us
sort of taking the story individually and sending it to different bulletin boards and it slowly caught on.
So the traction, you know, we gained momentum over years and years and years, obviously.
But we did start out with that very, very large vision.
And, you know, it wound up practicality wise.
Being something that was done very organic and ultimately in a very Bill-esque way,
very underground and very cypherpunk, so very proud to be a part of this project.
We all really didn't know what the [INAUDIBLE] we were doing, but we just went ahead and did it.
And so there you go. That's sort of a beginning of the conversation, I guess.
Kick it off to my colleagues. Well done.
Well done then, and well done now. So I am Lauren Amazon and excuse me, I'm getting sentimental here.
I was Director of The Kitchen in those days.
Excuse me. All right.
We were the Downtown. And as it turns out, the only space and we were the perfect space for this event to happen.
And so I thought what I would do is give some sort of a.
It just gives you the environment of the time.
And basically The Kitchen was the kind of place where people who maybe didn't fit somewhere else or anywhere else they fit with us.
And it was just a natural connection.
And in those days, works were described as arts that weren't interested in being branded or in being classified necessarily.
And so the way that we framed everything was works would be described as works in progress, experimental interdisciplinary projects.
When we brought people in, we weren't looking necessarily for a finished or a polished event or work or work in progress.
It was more about the experience and the development of the ideas, the intellect, the creative process.
And there was always, as the Director,
I always made sure that there was room for the unexpected, room for the unanticipated,
and for people that might just happen to be in town and had a really good idea and they were welcome.
So and for a lot of the artists at that point, it was not about the market at all.
In fact, they didn't really want to be part of the market,
although a lot of the work that started at the content ended up being nowadays mainstream, shall we say, or it's developed into that.
And the way I would describe it was it was raw and rigorous and it was about creative expression and experience.
And what I thought I would do is just read to you the way that we wrote about that project for the little press that we were able to do. What we did,
You saw the contract, and what the contract was about was we offered them our space,
all our team and all our expertise, and that's what we contributed to it.
There wasn't a lot of mix. It wasn't necessarily transactional,
but we we all collaborated and we had great space and we had a great community and we had a great team of which John was the head of the team.
So I thought I would just read you so you get a little taste of the way that we described it.
Agrippa exists in various forms a computer disk, a battered old book, and a global fireside chat.
The story is told in words, pictures, sounds, smells and the passage of time and will be broadcast to dozens of sites around the world
at the same moment. The live presentation of Agrippa will be, by its nature,
a mutation of the original book project presented in a form radically different from traditional ways of experiencing literature and art.
Agrippa, The Transmission should not be confused with the published version of Agrippa.
The book is an art object with weight, smell and texture,
while the transmission tells another aspect of the story and hastens a new form of tribal storytelling.
And then we went on to describe a little bit about the usage of the disk, etc.
And I'll just read you this one sentence.
However, the disk is encrypted with a specially designed program which will destroy the text after the first reading.
The reader must make an irreversible decision, but the story cannot be stopped, copied or printed.
Once it is set in motion. Here you go.
I am John Maxwell Hobbs.
I also was at The Kitchen at that time, I was the Producing Director and also responsible for what we were doing in new technologies at that point.
The Kitchen was the first arts organisation in the world to be on the Internet.
And at that point that was prior to anything outside of academia being on the web.
So we communicated using finger and gopher, look those up as you would finger to The Kitchen to get the schedule.
And that was also back in the days when an institution, didn't matter how many
staff members you had, had one e-mail address and we were The Kitchen at Panics.com
Annexe was the first IST in New York, and it was very interesting.
What Mark was saying had jogged my memory at that point.
The Internet was just one of a number of different ways to communicate online and wasn't necessarily the primary one as well.
And Mark had mentioned the bulletin board system, and that actually was very robust and had been around for quite a long time.
A little system called Fido net.
So basically you could communicate with someone on a different bulletin board, but you had to log on, upload your material and then sign on.
And then at some point within the next 24 to 48 hours, one bulletin board would communicate with another and hand over a whole package of information.
So that was a very slow and very asynchronous way of moving things around.
So it made a lot of sense for this project to come to the kitchen because we'd been thinking in very similar ways.
And Mark's the Venn diagram of Marc's career and my career have overlapped multiple times over the years, along with a lot of other people.
But it was very interesting to see in that fashion, and I still remember.
The Agrippa team had come to the kitchen as they were still assembling everything, including the book itself.
So there were still things that were up in the air. And I just remember that the vision was someone and nobody was sure at that point who
it would be would be reading it in a barn somewhere in the middle of the United States,
transmitting to cities and other locations, delivering things mid Fido.net or via Audio.
And this was even I think when the early tests were being done with see, you see me at Cornell and things like that.
But it was long, long, long before multimedia was really being transmitted other than through military and academic institutions.
And I'll hand over to the next person because the rest of the things in my head probably sit there in the discussion of how it was done.
[inaudible]
Oh, hello. My name's Daniel Salinger. I'm a film producer based in Los Angeles, and at the time, I was a student at New York University in the film department.
And I had read Neuromancer and was into a lot of the things I was on the bulletin boards.
I was into this sort of thing at the time, and I was taking classes at a graduate level department at NYU at 721 Broadway.
It was the interactive telecommunications department.
They were on the fourth floor and the film department was unlike the eighth, ninth and 10th floor.
And I would go down there and hang out with the students there and get involved in their projects, which include a lot of like a lot of interesting.
We had a public access channel and we would do things like set up a camera shooting out the window at the phone
booth on the corner and call the phone booth and talk to whoever picked up the phone and things like that.
And I was aware of The Kitchen event and I didn't make it, but I was aware of it.
But then somebody, an administrator at the Interactive Telecommunications program,
had mentioned that they were looking for a video crew to help with the event at the Americas Society.
And I volunteered immediately.
I called my friend Scott, who was much more into these things than I was, and he was very excited about it.
And we grabbed I think we had three cameras, Scott had one, and I think I brought two from the department.
And we went up there that night and Scott had the great idea to put videotapes in the cameras and
we videotaped the event. And I'll let Scott pick up.
What happened after we left the event. But the bottom line was that
I had a copy of the material and I created an experimental video.
I had an old editing system that was broken and the control track was broken.
And so I, I created an experimental video with the material from the transmission and a bunch of added material.
And my idea was that the videotape, as you watched it,
would degrade over time. That every time you watched it because the control track was broken, it would fall apart more and more.
And I thought that was sort of in line with the spirit of the project.
And I, I handed out, I don't know, less than 30 of them just to friends and people interested parties.
And somehow years later, I was on the Internet and I just typed in Agrippa and I saw Matthew's website that he was doing.
And it was the very exhaustive research into the the project.
And he had a copy of my video on there.
He had an early draft of it, which I have no, I'm very curious how he got it because like I said, there were not many copies floating around.
It was on analogue videotape, but it was that was part of my vision was that it would be a digital file that would not degrade.
Like somehow at the time video was not on the Internet, you know,
So ultimately it was realised that there's now this video copy of my experimental video that won't degrade over time.
And yeah, I'll let the I'll let Scott take it from there.
His participation and I just wanted to jump in real quick to say that the website was actually Alan Liu's Agrippa Files website,
which I also contributed content to, but the site was done by Alan and the team at UCSB.
And how did you know how that video was, how it got to you guys?
Yes. You. You sent it to me, Daniel? No. The original experimental video we have know that.
I do not now. Hi, I'm Scott Gardner, also known as 'Templar'.
This is Roseanne Genji Gardner, also known as 'PseudoPhred' from back in the day.
Like Mark, I was involved in hacking from the early attacks.
My first big hack was in 1981, hacked the White Sands Missile base into the classified section over the ARPANET,
went on to become a phone freak part of the phone line Phantoms. So I was always involved in that kind of culture.
And, you know, we were also fans of William Gibson.
And the news about Agrippa was huge.
It was it almost felt like there was a challenge to where Kevin Begos was trying to challenge everybody to be the first one to hack it.
So it was on everybody's mind at the time. It was, it was big news.
And so when when I got the phone call from Daniel, it was like Willy Wonka getting the golden ticket.
It was like, I can't believe this has fallen into our laps like this.
So, yeah, we grabbed our cameras, we jumped in a taxi.
I remember giving the taxi driver an extra 20 to blow some red lights because we were running late.
We got up there and I even had a whole story in my head about if we got caught reporting it
that I would say that the cameras only worked if it was actually recording at the time.
And then we went back to the office.
I was working at a place called Images Zone at the time, and we had recorded at our height,
we had this brand new height that could play things back and do freeze frames without any rolling or tearing.
So it was a great little deck for transcribing and and then Rosanne here transcribed the entire
thing in a mad session over those next couple of hours and did an incredible job with it.
Now there are still you know, you talk about Agrippa and then the idea of it decaying and of course our memories are decaying there.
There are still a few little nitpicky things that, that, that perception I think is a little bit different from reality.
Like for instance, the first
Transmission of it from our office was actually to our friend Chris Invidiata in Buffalo, who then posted it to Usenet.
But it was only half of it had gone through. So he had posted half of it.
And then a couple of hours later he had a repost of the entire thing.
The following morning I had called up my friend Patrick Kroupa 'Lord Digital' and posted it to MindVox.
But of course now the way Usenet works, it would take sometimes days for things to reach from system to system.
So by from everybody's perception, it certainly looks like my MindVox got it first.
But in reality we had posted it to Usenet just a couple of hours earlier and the rest was history.
You know, we had some discussion about the ethics of it because we respected everybody as artists,
and we really didn't want to break that respect.
But it really felt like there was an open challenge to be the first ones to do it.
And then on top of the 1500 dollars price tag, which we were just not going to be able to do,
we couldn't really have a good crack at the encryption itself. So that's my story. Rosanne do you want to say anything about the... I mean,
I can say that the story is about the ephemerality of memory, and my memory is really rather slim
On the night I remember the darkness at the, you're sitting in the dark and watching the transmission itself.
I remember rushing and hastily typing and, you know, I think now thinking back on it, and I work now with dementia patients,
I'm a speech language pathologist, about how important it is to maintain memory.
And at the same time knowing that our memory does degrade in such a natural way over time.
It was so authentic and organic to our real experience.
So, you know, it stayed with me in that trace for many years and driving part of the project, it felt like a heist.
I was 21 and you know, that little bit of an anarchist in me thought, okay, great, we're going to do something.
We're going to buck the system in some way. But truthfully, it was a beautiful piece.
And in reflection, for middle age, now I can, you know, that tribute to his father,
the idea of these old photographs, the idea of even not knowing who's in the photo,
looking through stacks of family photos and realising that without photographer with you,
without good record, without good notes, it's like you have to attribute something to them that you give your own spin to.
You give your own, your own perspective.
So memory is never truly that perfect.
Despite how faithful to the text we tried to be to make sure that it was accurate.
I think that's, you know, fun to contribute. And in the end, you know, we we just follow the ethos.
A common phrase at the time, which was that information just wants to be free. And that's our story.
I'll hand it back to you. Oh, okay. Thank you very much.
That was wonderful. Thank you. Just could I just ask about the actual the videotape in the machine and the
commissioned to go to the Americas Society and how that actually worked?
Who was it, Kevin, who commissioned you to go there to film the events?
What was the surreptitious element?
And then the other thing I'm interested in is just if you could say a little bit more about this business of transcription,
where you transcribing from the video
What was the purpose of that?
I'll take the Begos piece, which is that he had contacted the interactive telecommunications department at New York University to have a team.
Their concern at the time was that they were going to play it on the laptop that you see in the video.
But the screen is too small for an audience. So they needed to be able to project it onto a projector, which is, I guess,
the technical challenge that the the woman at the head of the video that we watched was talking about the technical
challenge of transmitting the scream of the poem unravelling onto a large screen for an audience to watch.
And this administrator was a gentleman named George Goudeau who had been contacted by Kevin Begos to perform this.
It was the one who tapped me and another a student there at the ITP to do this.
I did visit Kevin Begos a few days after and he had had a fax of the MindVox
post. And
it was interesting because he was quite amused, I think, that it had been transcribed and put on the Internet because it existed.
Agrippa, you know, existed only as this poem that was on this disk that you would put into a computer.
And then once you watched it, once it would encrypt itself and you couldn't see it again.
So the actual text was very hard for anybody to know or without purchasing.
I think the cost of the book I thought it was 2000, maybe it was 1500 dollars, you know, and they only made, I think, 200 of them.
So it was a very, you know, it was a very hard to access piece of text.
And I think as Scott was saying, you know, I think at ethos at the time, we were young and,
you know, had a real desire to sort of democratise the text or to make it available to everyone for free,
rather than it being this thing that was, you know,
collectors would buy and it would just sit on their shelves or what have you.
So that was it was more than just, it was a bit of a mission, I think,
for me at least to to take it and make it available to the general public.
I'll let Scott talk about the transmission.
But I would say that I think the assumption when Kevin Begos or the assumption from the ITP's point of view was that
we were there solely for the purpose of projecting this laptop screen onto a large screen that everybody can see.
The other student who was with us felt quite betrayed that we had that Scott had taken it and that they had transcribed it,
that was a real break of trust, that we had done that.
I'll talk about the transcription. Well, from a technical point of view, yes, we recorded it on hI8, which was a great format for that kind of thing.
And at the office I had a computer system and a high 8 tech side by side.
So we just played back to the tape and Rosanne furiously typed away on it.
I don't know if you if there's anything else you want to say about the actual transcription.
No, I think it's like I said, it was important to me to be as faithful as possible, to be original.
And we had the, you know, thankfully we had the technology to freeze frame.
Otherwise it would have been such a challenge in the replay of the audio again and again.
So it was less time than maybe a traditional audio transcription might have been.
Here's a funny little anecdote just to add, the irony is,
is that the discs in the books actually had different versions of the story to begin with.
And so, you know, the one that was chosen for what was the main showcasing of it at The Kitchen table was one version of the story.
It was always the intent of Bill to have the story against, sort of be a virus, if you will.
And for there to be different versions of the transmission posted on different bulletin boards.
And that started with the origination story and the book itself.
So he had a couple of different versions. There were slight variations just in wording.
And so, you know, if you go and you look at some of the archived versions,
you guys have your version and then you see some other folks did screenshots of what we eventually did,
which was posting it on different bulletin boards. And as it was mentioned earlier,
those was bulletin boards and shared it with other bulletin boards and it sort of was changed and it grew and it became,
in essence, the first piece of viral text, if you will.
He was very much into nostalgia and antiques and books and very much about the idea of the temporary as society in many ways.
So, you know, it all started with the physical books, and then that ethos evolved into the transmission.
And again, as it was, as I pointed out earlier, we weren't able to do the grandiose idea where we were,
in essence, broadcasting to all these different venues simultaneously in one shot with,
you know, watch parties at each ones so that these folks were recording what was going on
at The Kitchen and then thankfully preserved it and then shared it from there.
But we were also sending it out onto bulletin boards.
You know, up until and, you know, leading into that night and then, of course, from that night on.
So, yeah, there's I'm not sure how many versions of the story there are.
I don't think Bill know either. I think his intent was that other people would even change the words themselves and
have it grow as an organism in some way and that it would take on a life of its own,
which again, clearly it has because we're all here gathered together 30 years later in one
of the most prestigious universities in the world discussing this project.
So there you go. He was right.
I wonder whether there are any questions either on the chat or in the room that people might like to ask about this.
Let's start with Justine, who obviously is getting her PhD on this.
And I think this symposium must have been pretty good for you, Justine.
Thank you, Chris. Yes, actually, my question might relate to exactly what Scott and Rosanne and Marc were saying.
And actually, it's kind of for you John and Lauren. Compared to that, because right now we saw the launch event of the Americas Society.
Marc spoke about the bulletin boards. But I remember when we had the discussion together, you said that it was different at The Kitchen.
You know, that basically you commissioned somebody,
an artist to read the poem there because you were not able actually to transmit the pom to other locations.
So I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about that, the choice of the artist.
And also earlier you mentioned the Society of the Americas, The Kitchen, the different vibe uptown, downtown and choice of people.
Well, so what happened and I was referring to the press release that Lauren read, which is the
16th of October of that year. And so at that point.
We were still presenting it, but there would be a transmission and then we would be connected to different sites.
And if you look at the contract that you showed, that's actually the date of the day of the presentation at The Kitchen on December Nineth.
So it was up until the last minute we were, you know, as Marc notes, we were hoping that.
New York. Well, Bell telephone would come through with the lines that we needed, which never happened.
Etc., etc., etc. In the the famous switch
56 lines. Yeah, exactly. So we were in a building that had four regular telephone lines and that wasn't going to be able to happen.
So. As a producer, you know, the show must go on.
And we had sold tickets and a certain amount of press and all of that.
So. I mean, that we have we actually had the perfect person to be involved in this.
And this is the composer Robert Ashley, Rob
Ashley was not only on the board of directors of the kitchen,
but he was a contemporary of John Cage and had created an entire type of it was what he called opera for television,
which back then kind of meant a lot more than now because everybody can have their own television channel today.
But back then, it was a very special thing, and his specific style was focussed on the spoken word.
So. Reading the texts that William Gibson talked about or had written and thinking about style, which was very deliberate and
kinda slow and having watched the speed of the app presenting the text, it was absolutely perfect.
So we set up in our second floor space, which was a more flexible studio space, and it was a very interesting experience.
Hearing the story from the Americas Society jogged my memory as well.
These days it's like HDMI cable into a projector.
You know, back then you could not connect your computer to a projector and the projector.
That three gun, Sony, it took about an hour to set up because you
actually had to register it the way they registered three colour printing and things like that,
a grid that had to match and then you had to point a camera at the screen.
And so that's what we did.
We had a camera pointed at the screen with a large projection and Bob at a table in a chair, basically reading it as it scrolled by on the screen.
Centred in a room that was completely black around him with the audience sitting around.
And it was a very, very sort of special event that way.
And we did record it as well, the recording
should probably be part of The Kitchen archive that's now held at the Getty.
On the subject of recordings and tapes, I think Matt wanted to come in.
Yes. Thank you. I do have something to
share. And I hope I can get a good camera view.
… Okay, [trying to get a good view of the object].
We saw Rosehammer written on it.
…. if you unblur your zoom screen, oh there you go.
It will work. Let me take a quick moment to do that.
So what I am holding is a three quarter inch and CSC videotape.
This is a copy, as I understand it, of the original HI8 tape.
And this is the source.
There we are. This is the source for the footage that is publicly available on YouTube.
The casing, you'll notice says Re-Agrippa, which is the title Daniel you gave to your remix.
There's 'Rosehammer' with what appears ironically enough to be a copyright symbol. On the spine
is your what I take to be your sigil crossed rose and hammer and
the tape itself, the label reads 'Agrippa Scott's view'
And so this is the tape you had sent me, Daniel, in 2007 or 2008.
We digitised the video here at the University of Maryland.
And again, that became the source of the recording that's currently on YouTube.
What I would like to do with this, with everybody's blessing, is contribute it to the collection at the battalion.
And I can correspond with Chris about the procedure for that afterwards.
I'll be in touch immediately, Matt, thanks very much. Thank you.
The copyright was ironically placed. I assume so.
You know, that is funny sort of everyone took a bit of ownership of the project in a way.
It was supposed to be a project where no one had ownership of it. The open source story, if you will.
And during the exhibition, at The Kitchen, we were still actually posting it to other bulletin boards at the time.
And, you know, it's important to remember that the I didn't have the opportunity to go to the Americas society that but The Kitchen
experience what really made that exhibition of this premiere exhibition I should say of all things Agrippa, was the book.
It was the transmission. It was the curiosity of this, the idea of virality, of story.
It was just an amazing group of people that got together to really just try to understand and make sense of.
where the future was going and what we could do to empower artists and
storytellers alike to have a new form of self-expression and to play with that medium.
And I think that was probably the most exciting thing for me.
There was just the excitement of uncertainty and having our the opportunity to have that forum
at The Kitchen where a lot of artists had come through throughout the years just to try again,
you know, just wacky things as well as very academic things as well as just incredible art.
So it was a special moment.
We had. John, I don't know if you recall, you came to the party that we did as well prior to that.
I just was I was just digging this up. I'll share it real quick.
Is you remember this?
So we did a party prior to the exhibition at
The Kitchen at a place on the Lower East Side called Stella's.
I think it turned into like a Chinese restaurant later on.
But you can see here the invite was burnt. So the theme of this sort of old ancient work carried through even into
the party invites and into the virality of the net cast itself.
So just a little side note, I hope I didn't take too much time sharing that I thought it was a nice anecdote.
That's great because yesterday we saw a copy that belonged to the collector Allan Chasanoff and he had an invitation inside and we had been wondering since,
was it an invitation to the launch event or was it to this private party beforehand?
So we have the answer.
Thank you. So I'm conscious of time and at the same time I would like to continue the discussion for a long time.
But what I'm offering to do is that,
I had a question for Lauren, so if you could answer that question
that could be amazing. And then for everyone, I know plenty of people who are writing in the chat from the Q and A,
so we have a huge Q&A session that's going to be led by Jason Scott-Warren from 4:15pm to 5pm UK time,
so everyone can come back and ask all of their questions and I hope you, if still have time,
Marc, Rosanne, Scott and Daniel, and Matt who have been joining us from across the Atlantic, to come back and the Q&A session
that would great because I'm sure there will be more questions for you.
So yes, my next question is for you, Lauren.
And we talked about the difference between The Kitchen and the Americas society, and what you mentioned about the uptown, downtown. In those days,
there was a big distinction between uptown and downtown, especially in the streets.
And now downtown is basically mostly Brooklyn.
What kind of Brooklyn would be similar to that. Real estate
is much different now. So there is the downtown.
Let's talk a lot about real estate as well.
Artists and creative people could afford to live in the downtown and as a result of a whole culture evolve, it became very strong.
And so we were part of the downtown. And also our building, the building that The Kitchen had moved into was an old icehouse.
So it was also perfect for this sort of event because it was like a fortress
and there were very few windows inside and all the walls were painted black.
We had two black box event spaces, so that was it.
For whatever reason, it all came together esthetically as well.
And you mentioned the choice
between Robert Ashley and Penn Jillette.
Penn Jillette would have been a perfect choice for uptown. And actually for uptown,
he was considered wild while wit downtown
it would be Robert Ashley.
That's great. Wonderful. Well, we'll take a quick break for tea and I think till 3:15pm and but meanwhile, please join me in thanking all of us panellists here and abroad.
So, thank you.