Reading Agrippa: A 4-Part Series

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.

Resource created by Leonardo Flores, Cynthia Román, and Ian Rolón.

elmcipthumb