16 years ago, William Gibson, Dennis Ashbaugh, and Kevin Begos Jr. released “Agrippa (a book of the dead).” It was an interesting mixture of different media, but made for a very interesting work of art. For example, it was planned for some of the images to be printed with a special ink that would slowly fade when exposed to light or air. This meant that the simple act of reading or looking at the book would alter it, eventually destroying part of it.

One of the most interesting parts to me, was the poem that Gibson included on a 3.5 inch diskette (remember floppy disks?) Gibson is a well-known sci fi writer who essentially created the cyper-punk genre with his book Neuromancer. It’s not too surprising, then, that the poem on the floppy disk is more than it seems. The disk didn’t hold anything like a text file, but a program that ran on old Apple Macintosh computers. The really cool thing about this program was that as it scrolled the text of the poem on the screen, it was encrypting itself so that it couldn’t be read again. Essentially, the poem ate itself as you read it.

On Tuesday December 9th, the 16th anniversary of the release of Agrippa, a website devoted to archiving Agrippa published a video of the poem running on an emulated computer. The site managed to find someone who had the disk and hadn’t played it yet, leaving the poem’s program intact. They made a copy of the program, so as not to destroy the floppy disk. Then they used a program that Apple created when they switched to OS X that allows users to run programs written for older versions of the Mac operating system (an emulator) to run Gibson’s poem. They recorded all this and put a video (high resolution version) of it up on their website so everyone can enjoy the poem. For the more technically inclined, you can even find an image of the disk that will let you do the same trick they did or just generally mess around with it. It’s really cool to see a piece of art employ cryptography and technology like this. It’s even more cool to find an archive of this work of art that was intended to be so ephemeral. I haven’t heard any comment from Gibson yet, but I feel like he would approve of this use of technology to outsmart his self-destroying poem.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Science & Technology, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.