Agrippa

by William Gibson, Dennis Ashbaugh (Artist )

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Art

93 pages, Diskette

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the father of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, having coined the term cyberspace in 1982 and popularized it in his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), which has sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide.

While his early writing took the form of short stories, Gibson has since written nine critically acclaimed novels (one in collaboration), contributed articles to several major publications, and has collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers and musicians. His thought has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors, academia, cyberculture, and technology.


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William Gibson. (2007, October 17). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:30, October 19, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?t...

Reviews

[Matthew Royal]

Shocked to discover partway through reading that this was autobiographical. Conflicting emotions about draft-dodging to Canada.

[Tommy Verhaegen]

Notes from a very young William Gibson that already contain the seeds of his later greatness as a writer and the reason he became a writer.
This is basically a photo-book without (the e-book edition) the photos.

[Grace Haase]

So, obviously I didn't have access to the original mode of reading Agrippa, but I watched the disappearing poem scroll and heard the gun go off.
With a poem so dense and complex, especially with its mode of communication, it's hard for me to wrap my head around this after even 3 readings of it. I hope to understand this more with time and effort, but for now I'm going to enjoy and sit with the themes of finality, permanence, and "the mechanism".

[Plum]

Not absolutely my cup of tea, but it has merit.

[sudothei]

Really experimental format.
More a poem about growing up and male struggles.
Very bittersweet.

[Leonardo Bordino]

Book-art. Read online as a copy of this could fetch 5-10k US$

[Romano]

La pieza que consistió en un poema de 300 líneas de texto, almacenado en un diskette de 3.5”, el cual estaba programado para encriptar y destruir el texto una vez que hubiera sido leído. Tal Diskette estaba contenido en un Libro de Artista, obra de Ashbaugh, cuyas páginas estaban tratadas con materiales fotosensibles, las cuales aspiraban a la degradación paulatina de su contenido.

Agrippa [a book of the dead], concebida en el año de 1992 por William Gibson y Dennis Ashbaugh. A las pocas horas de haberse presentado la pieza, por medio de hackeo y sabotaje, diversos personajes anónimos evitaron la desaparición digital de la pieza de arte, rompiendo con la intención efímera de la misma, cuestionando nuestra relación con la tecnología, la memoria, la reproducción y el arte.

laughing,
in the mechanism.

Junto con el Dr. Jorge Arturo Chamorro Escalante realizo una exploración más extensa de Agrippa [a book of the dead] en el capítulo correspondiente del libro: Aproximaciones interpretativas multidisciplinarias en torno al arte y la cultura.

Disponible en: https://www.uaa.mx/direcciones/dgdv/e...

o

https://www.academia.edu/38721998/Emu...

[Dave]

Great images, but ridiculously short and next-to-no buildup. I definitely read it for "the hype" surrounding a disappearing book and, removed from its unique mechanism, it is a pretty poem at best.