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 this entry, which introduces the poem and resources assembled in the “The Agrippa Files.”
This four part series examines Agrippa as an electronic object, as a textual object, and performs a media-specific close reading of its linguistic text and its code. The series raises questions about the nature of electronic textuality and offers solutions on how to approach these objects.
- Part 1: Introduction to Agrippa
- Part 2: Agrippa as Text
- Part 3: A Close Reading of Agrippa
- Part 4: Reading the Agrippa Code
Resource created by Leonardo Flores, Cynthia Román, and Ian Rolón.
