Advent Calendar: Day 4

By Circe -
I have always been fascinated by lost things.

If you saw my YouTube history, you'd find countless videos on lost media, unreleased games, and uncracked codes. Things that once existed (maybe) (probably) (documentation is spotty) and had meaning that has slipped away into the cold void of time. Ideas and imagery once existed, and might still if we could just find that one forgotten copy, stuffed away in a dusty attic, stored in a trunk that no one has opened since WWII, neatly shelved among identical tapes that everyone technically knows are there, but nobody cares about enough to actually look at. 

"Agrippa, or: A Book of the Dead" is a piece that intentionally evokes the loss of this disappearing media. A project consisting of a poem written by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, written to a floppy disk that was then embedded in an artist's book assembled by Dennis Ashbaugh. Both the poem and the book centered on themes of nostalgia, contrasting the subjective, imperfect, impermanent nature of human memory and the perfectly objective, yet limited, recordings of technology. The ink used to print the book was light-sensitive, and faded with every reading; the poem was encoded onto a floppy disk, whose function was to scroll the poem inexorably down the screen of a Macintosh computer, after which it would encrypt itself and remain unreadable forever thereafter. A run of "Agrippa", achieved by a bit-for-bit copy of one of the original disks and a Macintosh emulator, exists on YouTube, for those unfortunates who missed the original reading in 1992.

Although the intent was to use the self-destruction of the piece to transform the work from experience to memory, the tech community predictably launched an all-out effort to decrypt the program and retrieve the poem once it locked itself away. After twenty long years, success was had in 2012. You can read about it at The Agrippa Files.

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