Agrippa – I ❤️ E-Poetry

Reading the Agrippa Code (part 4 of 4)

July 23, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Twelve days after launching the Agrippa Challenge on July 10, 2012, Quinn Dupont made the official announcement that it had been “cracked.”

It was even easy, for those with the right kind of training in programming, mathematics, and cryptography— as becomes apparent from the published submissions. The link above leads to a great resource with fascinating analyses that help readers understand how the poem was encrypted and decrypted, as well as its self-destruct mechanism. So now that we know how it works, what do we do with that information?

A Close Reading of William Gibson’s “Agrippa” (part 3 of 4)

July 16, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

A Close Reading of William Gibson's "Agrippa" (part 3 of 3) — A Close Reading of William Gibson’s “Agrippa” (part 3 of 3)

The link above is not to Agrippa, but to an important part of the poem: the linguistic and graphical codes extracted from the disk image by Freek Wiedijk— that is, the sequence of words arranged visually into line breaks, indentation, and stanzas, often referred to as the “text” of the poem— which has been in circulation online since it was posted on December 10, 1992. Why the text of the poem is more than just the words is discussed in my earlier postings: “Reading Agrippa” and “Agrippa as a Digital Object.” That being said, this posting will pay close attention to this linguistic text, keeping in mind the other texts and contexts that inform and complete this work known as Agrippa, and point out some meaningful patterns for readers to approach the poem with.

Reading Agrippa by William Gibson (part 2 of 4)

July 15, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

What do we read when we read this famous poem? Put differently, where is the text of Agrippa? These are not simple questions to answer because this poem has been produced several ways, all of which capture certain intentions, whether authorial or of those who challenge the works’ design.

“Agrippa” by William Gibson (part 1 of 4)

July 14, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Screen capture from "Agrippa" (part 1 of 4) by William Gibson. White background with black font text. Text: "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 shoe strong from the first world war / its metal ferrules eaten by oxigen / Until the recently resemble cigarette-ash / inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite". — Open “Agrippa” (part 1 of 4) by William Gibson

Agrippa: A Book of the Dead (1992) is the first high-profile electronic poem, in part because it was written by William Gibson, a novelist famous for imagining cyberspace in the 1980s, in part because of its production as an electronic object and artist’s book. The link provided leads to a site titled “The Agrippa Files” created by The Transcription Project at UC Santa Barbara, which documents the material, cultural, and computational conditions that make this poem such a fascinating work. For those new to this work, I recommend the following posting, which introduces the poem and resources assembled in the site.