Christiansen 1
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 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, 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 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 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.
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 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
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Gibson
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( Agrippa )
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“Agrippa”
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Floppy disk
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Computer
|
Reader
Gibson’s father is placed under erasure, because there is no access to him, either as a person or as photographer. All 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
|
( 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, double-check 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 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 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 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 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.
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, 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 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 mind but literally left with the book’s presence still on my fingers.
[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).