ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

It occurred to me that what Gibson does with "Agrippa" is very much like the Earth or Process artists such as Robert Smithson who create art that literally dissolves back into a natural form, but lives on in film or photograph. The image, or to use Baudrillard, the simulacra becomes the only representation of the original, real, material object. The mechanism is not only the photograph, but the art itself. In this way, the high tech "Agrippa" is in a way as organic as someone's ice or dirt sculpture. I don't know if this means anything, but it is interesting.

I am interested in the whole 'meme' (http://www.google.com/search?q=define:meme) phenomena particularly where the intent/accident/revision/evolution/preservation of an idea/text/object intersect. Maybe I'm a cynic--but did Gibson and Ashbaugh really think they were creating an impermanent text-object? Did they really think they could create something that was truly ephemeral? Or did they want to point up the fact that even the most transient of things can and are material, traceable, and retrievable? There is definitely a play into the need for the culture to collect (and perhaps more importantly to *own*), to acquire what it has been told it cannot have, and to preserve. There is just something fishy, or as Matt put it "sketchy," about the failure to produce the artist book and the "release" of the AGRIPPA poem.

The questions raised by the AGRIPPA book-object are definitely fun and at times recursive. What would have happened if the thing worked as planned? What if it wasn't meant to work in the first place? What do we do with/make of all the memetic stories that sprung up around AGRIPPA? How do we locate ourselves in this metatext (the web of connections) as we perpetuate the meme?

Just thinking out loud (in text)...

ED

To coincide with what Beth has said, Gibson's self-conscious effort to turn Agrippa into a distributable piece of performance art makes the original intended effect impossible to recreate. As Shakespeare's drama will never be again experienced as originally intended without the lost stage directions, Agrippa can never again have the finality it once had of slipping away into memory.

This original intent raised questions such as "what about the death of a work is so fascinating?" Perhaps this approach may offer additional understanding into what motivates readers to "save the life" of Agrippa, preserving it in print (or hypertext).

I join Ed in being somewhat of a cynic here in thinking that perhaps they really didn't ever "want" it to work as described (i.e. be impermanent), but on the other hand, I find real resonance in Beth's very insightful connections to site/earth work art such as Smithson's Spiral Jetty and there is no question in my mind as an Art Historian, that Smithson was in deadly earnest. There are many ways to document this with Spiral Jetty -- and perhaps if I were to read up on Agrippa as extensively, I would find adequate material to convince me of same with Gibson and Ashbaugh. However, from the way in which the Agrippa was discussed in class, there seems to have been a cetain level of cynicsm in their work from the moment of conception. Not in the quality of the work, mind you. And it is in the quasi-emphemeral but incredibly detailed and exquisite beauty of the object that I find resonance with Smithson's work. An interesting side note is that Spiral Jetty is once again visible in the Great Salt Lake -- water levels falling, etc. It is drawing perhaps a much greater crowd and a much more appreciative audience this time around than it did the first time. Perhaps the same might be said with Agrippa?

Not that I'm going to get involved in a debate about authorial intent -- perish the thought! -- but I thought it deserved mentioning that Gibson didn't use the internet when "Agrippa" was disseminated. He didn't even have a modem. So that raises some questions about whether he would have had a real grasp of the speed at which net memes travel, or how interconnected the community really was. Of course, he may have, but he himself wouldn't have been involved at the time.

I was recently talking to some friends about the relationship between online literature and quantum mechanics -- I was arguing that once we achieve a real scientific understanding of quantum mechanics (rather than simply defining the holes in our knowledge, which is about the speed right now), people will be forced into a different attitude about digital media. Not immediately, of course, but at the speed of Kuhnian paradigm shift. I think that people's discomfort with the digital stems from its non-concrete nature, its indeterminacy -- when you close your Word document, it no longer exists in a form you can understand. The only question, I guess, is which one will force people to accept uncertainty first -- science, or digital media itself.

Uh... sorry, that was kind of a tangent. It's a pretty unformed idea anyway. The point is that this is what I like about "Agrippa" -- that it highlights the transience of information in the digital age. I'm wondering whether anyone has done a history of disappearing books like Ashbaugh's -- there MUST be others, right? Information that's designed to be destroyed?

Alan Liu, whose forthcoming _The Laws of Cool_ will be a major event for the field (Chicago UP; he's working on the proofs right now), devotes space to a theory of viral/destructive art. One of my favorite examples here (it's not a book) is Joseph Nechvatal, who generates art by introducing virues into digital image files. Have a look here:

http://www.nechvatal.net/

One thing that I think is important to reiterate here is that when viewing Agrippa in any digital form but a dusted off, untouched, unencrypted 3 1/2" disk is that we are viewing an object whose material functions or, at least, capacities were superceded by it's digital replicant. In other words, it's the digital object that has retained and cultivated a sort of material worth bypassing that of the physical, tangible object in itself which, in many ways, it never really was.