Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)

<p>William Gibson’s poem played from a 3½-inch diskette on a 1992-era Mac computer running the System 7 operating system. When the diskette ran, the text of the poem scrolled up the screen (accompanied by infrequent sound effects: a camera shutter click, a gun going off) while an encryption program on the diskette encoded each line and made the poem “disappear” after its first reading.</p> <p>On December 9, 2008—the sixteenth anniversary of the original “Transmission” event debuting <em>Agrippa</em>—<em>The Agrippa Files</em> was aided by the <a href="http://mith.umd.edu/">Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities</a> and the Digital Forensics Lab at University of Maryland, College Park, in unveiling an <a href="http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/post/documents-subcategories/the-transmission/a-run-of-william-gibsons-agrippa-poem-made-from-playing-a-copy-of-original-1992-agrippa-diskette">emulated run</a> of the poem based on a <a href="http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/post/documents-subcategories/the-disk-and-its-code/disk-image-bit-level-copy-created-from-original-1992-agrippa-diskette">bit-level copy</a> of an <a href="http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/post/documents-subcategories/the-disk-and-its-code/original-1992-agrippa-diskette-used-to-make-emulated-run-of-william-gibsons-poem">original diskette</a> loaned by collector Allan Chasanoff. The copy was played on a computer with software emulating the functions of a 1992-era Mac. For a discussion of the forensic process by which the code was accessed and emulated, see Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, with Doug Reside and Alan Liu, <a href="http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/kirschenbaum-matthew-g-with-doug-reside-and-alan-liu-no-round-trip-two-new-primary-sources-for-agrippa">“No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa.”</a></p> <p>This disk image was created by the Digital Forensics Lab and the<a href="http://mith.umd.edu/">Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)</a> at the University of Maryland, College Park.</p> <p>Run the disk-image copy on a computer using Mini vMac emulator with System 7 book disk (to emulate the functions of the original 1992 Mac platform for which the software on the diskette was created).</p>