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Postcards From a Dead Future: William Gibson’s Agrippa
Agrippa is a highly unusual work of art, which one will
probably only know about if one is either a die-hard William
Gibson fan or deeply interested in the history of old electronic
literature. Agrippa is a huge book volume printed with
untreated ink containing strings of DNA code alongside old
print ads. At the end of the book is an old 3½” floppy disk,
containing a poem written by William Gibson. Once the poem
is executed, since it is stored as a program rather than a text
file, it becomes encrypted and can no longer be accessed.
There are only three known physical copies accounted for, plus
two page proofs which for curatorial reasons remain
significant.
Agrippa is interesting precisely because of the tension
generated between the materiality of book and poem. Both
book and poem were meant to disappear over time, the first
intention of its three creators - Kevin Begos, Jr., Denis
Ashbaugh and William Gibson - being to print the book in
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disappearing ink, which unfortunately did not exist at the time
of printing. The compromise was to print the book with
untreated ink, resulting in a book which smears and wears off
on the reader and opposing pages, degrading over time if not
exactly disappearing as effectively as the poem held on the
floppy disk at the end of the volume. The poem is Gibson’s
contribution to the project and is the reason for Agrippa’s
fame, such as it is. The poem is titled “Agrippa: a book of the
dead,” a born-digital text which Gibson sent to Kevin Begos on
a diskette. “Agrippa” was then coded into a small program,
consisting only of the 300-line poem scrolling up the screen as
the program is executed, after which the letters fall apart and
scramble together in an unreadable jumble. This is the point
where the poem-program becomes encrypted beyond recovery
and the poem is essentially lost.
Thematically, the poem is about loss, death and memory.
The poem is structured around the discovery of an album of
photos taken by William Gibson’s father when the father was a
child. As Gibson’s father died when William was six years old,
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William never knew his father and have very few memories of
him. Much of the poem consists of reading the photographer
through the photographs in an attempt to understand and
remember his father better, thus establishing death and the
memory of one’s loved one as a central concern of the poem.
As the poem progresses, it turns more autobiographical,
tracking various events of Gibson’s adult life, discovering his
father’s handgun (an object of death) and dodging the draft of
the Vietnam War (a death event) by escaping to Canada.
These events are described metaphorically through the
use of mechanisms, be it a handgun or a photographic shutter.
We should keep William Gibson’s literary pedigree as a
science fiction writer in mind here, because it enables us to
recognize the naturalness with which he juxtaposes the human
mind, identity and memory with mechanisms and technologies;
his willingness to understand the human in technological terms
and the technological in human terms. Understanding material
objects in terms of the human, even as human, is certainly
nothing new. As Jan-Dirk Müller has shown, books in
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manuscript culture (the medieval period) were seen as
continuous with the bodies of the original author (not the
scribe) (Müller 147) and it took some time before early print
culture was willing to let go of the this association, and we
might argue that the view of a book as an author’s enunciation
is still prominent in our post-literacy age.
It is via this path that we come to the question of
materiality and its significance for literature, even though it
may seem as a roundabout way to get at the position of
literature in our contemporary mediascape via medieval
manuscripts. Yet the reason is the material construction of the
book of Agrippa. As already mentioned, it is a huge volume
measuring 11⅛” by 15 ⅞”, placed in a dented metal coffin and
wrapped in a shroud. The Deluxe Edition which I examined in
New York Public Library,
contains 63 viewable pages with ragged, sometimes
scorched edges, including copperplate aquatint etchings
by Dennis Ashbaugh alluding to DNA gel patterns and
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body text pages consisting of dual, 42-line columns
excerpting a DNA sequence from the bicoid maternal
morphogen gene of the fruitfly. Page 63 (and another
underlying 20 pages glued together) has a hollowed-out
cavity holding the diskette with William Gibson’s poem.
(“Deluxe Edition”)
These strings of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts are of course not readable
by a human as being the DNA sequence of a fruitfly, yet their
arrangement into 42 lines is hardly coincidental but instead
meant to echo the first book ever printed on Johannes
Gutenburg’s movable type printing press - the Bible (also
referred to as the Gutenberg Bible or the 42-line Bible).1 The
visual design of Agrippa is thus a concrete aesthetic strategy
meant to connect one huge shift in writing and textuality - the
shift from manuscript culture to print culture - with another
huge shift - the shift from print culture to digital culture.
1
It seems that the Bible may not have been the first book printed by
Gutenberg, but it remains the most iconic and well-known of his works, qv:
John Man. Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words (156).
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Here, we need to take a slight step back and consider the
materiality of the book as participating in the act of mediation,
most fundamentally the mediation identified by Hans Belting
as the replacement of the bodies of the dead by the image,
transmitted through a specific medium. (Belting 307) The book
of Agrippa constitutes an image only through the most abstract
sense of representation through the scientific discourse of
genetics. In that concrete sense, the book is a scientific image
of a dead fruitfly, but it seems more appropriate to me to read
the DNA sequences as an evocation of Gibson’s lost father,
making the floppy disk the metaphoric book of life for
Gibson’s father; not encoded as DNA sequences but encoded
as poetic sequences.
It is here that Belting’s argument takes on another turn,
for as he argues “[t]he image of the dead, in the place of the
missing body, the artificial body of the image (the medium),
and the looking body of the living interacted in creating iconic
presence as against bodily presence.” (Belting 307-308) In the
case of Agrippa, then, we have Gibson’s poem which generates
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verbal images of his father in the medium of language stored
on the medium of the floppy disk, readable only through a
computer. Yet here it is also relevant to keep in mind that the
photographs Gibson uses to reconstruct his father are not of his
father but by his father. Gibson thus tries to read his father
through the father’s mediation of scenes, events and people
through the medium of the photograph. A precession of media
and images, if ever there was one, so let us attempt to make
this slightly less confusing via a diagram:
Gibson’s father
|
Photographs
|
Gibson
|
( Agrippa )
|
“Agrippa”
|
Floppy disk
|
Computer
|
Reader
Gibson’s father is placed under erasure, because there is no
access to him, either as a person or as photographer. All
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Gibson has access to are the photographs, and all we have
access to as readers are the verbal images that Gibson has
constructed. The book Agrippa is put in parenthesis because
while I regard it as highly constitutive of the aesthetic process,
it is evident that most readers of the poem “Agrippa” will
never have seen even a reproduction of the book Agrippa. As
should be evident, the process of mediation is rather
complicated because we are constantly dealing with mediations
of a later order, even more so than is the case with typical
poetry. Now let me throw another wrench into the process of
mediation, because we should not forget that the poem on the
floppy disk can only be read once before it becomes
unreadable. As such, we are dealing with another transmission
and transformation into another medium - that of the reader’s
memory. Adding to the layers of transmission, we end up with
this diagram:
Gibson’s father
|
Photographs
|
Gibson
|
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( Agrippa )
|
“Agrippa”
|
Floppy disk
|
Computer
|
Reader
|
Reader’s memory
It is important to add the final layer of memory as a medium,
because with most literary texts we will re-read them, doublecheck specific wordings, etc, something which is impossible
for the original version of “Agrippa.” It is also significant
because of the poem’s theme of memory and the fact that
Gibson appears to fictionally generate memories of his father
without actually having such memories and because the
transmission from material images to mental images mirrors
Gibson’s aesthetics of decay in the poem and the physical
book. The poetic images are mediated via the magnetic tracks
of the floppy disk and the silicone-based circuitry in the
computer to mental images in our brain, where the images
must remain, subject as they are to decay and memory loss. In
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one sense, then, we become the material on which Gibson has
inscribed his memory images of his father and himself; we are
the medium which now contains Gibson’s poem and Gibson’s
father lives once again in the books of life that are our bodies.
Let us refocus then on the notion of mediation as part of
the aesthetic process. The book is smeared with coal as if
charred; torn, scraped and damaged in every imaginable way
yet it holds an irreducible materiality and texture which makes
the book quite memorable. The decay and sense of destruction
which one cannot help but associate with the book becomes
part of its attraction - in addition to its status as a rare book, the
fact that it appears as a survived relic makes the book a very
sensuous object precisely because it is damaged.
This perfect imperfection of the book - imperfect,
because the book is damaged; perfect, because the
imperfection is intentional and part of the work’s aesthetic places the work within a certain temporal frame and so opens
up the work to two temporal interpretations; one that the book
evokes a historical object, rediscovered. The other
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interpretation has been the more typical and invoked by
William Gibson, that the book was meant to resemble a
recovered relic from a future apocalypse. While this may at
first seem a counterintuitive reading, there are valid reasons for
just such a reading. Firstly, we know that Gibson remains
fascinated with dead futures - the futures that we once
imagined, but that never came to pass. Gibson has referred to
these instances as “semiotic ghosts” (Gibson, “The Gernsback
Continuum”) and “future fossils” (Gibson, “‘Hawk’ Ashtray”),
which seems telling when we are dealing with an artwork
which is both so insistently paperbound and at the same time
inevitably digital.
In this fashion, the artwork can be read as the death of
the book, with the book being damaged and dying and the
poem being located at the end of the book rather than at the
beginning. With Gibson often being hailed as the prophet of all
things futuristic, one might argue that he especially becomes
the node for the transition from paper literature to electronic
literature. Yet there are two reasons, at least, why such an
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argument seems insufficient. Firstly, the very materiality of the
book, its careful design, the signatures on the inside cover and
the extreme aura which the book carries with it, this is not the
death of the book even as reborn in electronic format. Instead,
Agrippa is much closer to a bibliophile’s wet dream, an
ultimate collectible which invokes the physical design of an
earlier volume whose materiality is also immense. Secondly,
the poem is designed to be just as fallible as the book - the
poem disappears, after all, once read, which is far less stable
than any book. Gibson’s poem, then, despite being born-digital
is not an immaterial object but rather adamantly material,
because part of its aesthetic effect depends on the fact that the
text decays. Decay and disappearance is thus part of what
Hayles would call a material metaphor (Hayles 22),
foregrounding the traffic between material (the floppy disk and
the poem-program) and the theme of photographs as material
memories established by the text.
Instead, it seems that the intention of the artwork is more
to question the notion of storage in itself and the memories that
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such storage draw upon. Death and obsolescence is built into
the artwork itself by choosing the floppy disk as the medium
for transmission in 1992, a technology which was already on
the way out. Had the authors (for lack of a clearer designation)
wanted to invoke futuristic technology, one would assume that
they had opted for a CD-ROM which was the emergent
computer storage medium at the time. In fact, their planned
obsolescence happened sooner than they expected, when Apple
discontinued the floppy disk drive only six months after
Agrippa’s release. Text, materiality and technology thus
combine to generate a very effective aesthetic effect
underlining the decay and loss of information which is part of
any transmission. What the artwork is trying to do, then, could
be said to bring the materiality of the past into the present, in
the way that Gibson’s father’s photographs are material objects
through which Gibson attempts to access his father; in this
way, it becomes obvious that the book and the poem must
disappear, just as the father disappeared.
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The whole artwork is therefore framed by a discussion
and anxiety over transmission and the hope that these
transmissions will reach their receiver. If we turn to the book,
we find that while we cannot read the DNA sequence there are
a number of old advertisement reproductions printed on a few
pages, generally referred to as the ‘overprints.’ Significantly,
these overprints are all focused on media as means of
transmission. Most evidently, we have a Bell Telephone
System ad with the potent tagline “Tell Daddy we miss him” as
well as a DuMont television ad, a magnesium pistol for
nighttime photography and Cooper’s Universal Enlarging
Lantern for projecting images. All of these ads are old, some
older than Gibson’s father even. Yet these images reproduce a
sense of media as aging and mortal very much in the way that
Bruce Sterling has discussed dead media. (Sterling 1999)
It is here that we come full circle and return to Belting’s
argument that images are replacement idols for the dead and
here we are not looking for the photographic image, but the
image behind the photographic image. Through this exercise,
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Gibson attempts to keep present his father’s memory and make
visible the marks of the person who transmitted the
photograph. However, what is significant here is the process of
mediality which takes place; the process where materiality,
technology and symbolic technique concretizes a specific text,
which is then filled with our personal meaning and experience.
This is Belting’s view of mediality and the transmission of
media, (306) a process which Agrippa partakes in but which it
also complicates by its regression and decay of materiality.
Agrippa and “Agrippa” attempts to suture time and space
in the way that the spatial organization of the poem-program is
only temporally accessible once, before the magnetic layout of
the floppy disk becomes inaccessible because of a temporal
process. The same is the case for the overprinted ads in the
book, where their spatial position on the page changes every
time the leaves of the book are turned. The argument made by
Agrippa is that time and space are always configured in
particular and specific ways in the process of mediation. The
same argument goes for the process of the poem, where what
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divides one moment from another is precisely a mechanism;
we need devices in order to structure time but in this process
time is also spatialized through its measurement by technology.
In this sense, we humans are no different from media in that
our memories serve equally as mechanisms to divide, structure
and measure time.
Agrippa insists that media die, that transmissions change
not just the addressee but also the sender and the device itself.
Mediation partakes in death, in both directions. Gibson
remediates and resurrects his dead father through the creative
generation of memories in the form of a poem, while at the
same time inscribing the death of his father into the very
materiality of the two media employed in Agrippa - the book
and the floppy disk. As readers of Agrippa we also partake in
this process of ghostly mediation, such as when we execute the
poem-program or when we allow our fingers to smear off the
overprints, carrying parts of the artwork with us when we
leave, much as I did after having visited New York Public
Library; I left not just with the impression of the book in my
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mind but literally left with the book’s presence still on my
fingers.