William Gibson's AGRIPPA Recovered and Revealed 98
Bud Cook writes "While the text of William Gibson's elusive electronic poem AGRIPPA is widely posted around the Web, it has not been seen in its original incarnation — custom-built software designed to scroll the poem through a single play before encrypting each line with an RSA algorithm — since 1992. Today is the 16th anniversary, to the day, of the poem's initial release. A team of scholars at the University of Maryland and UC Santa Barbara used forensic computing to restore the code from an original diskette loaned by a collector and have placed video of the complete 'run,' as well as never-before-seen footage from the night of AGRIPPA's public debut in 1992, up on a Web site called the Agrippa Files. There's also a detailed essay documenting the forensic process, plus a mess of stills, screenshots, and a copy of the disk image itself."
Re:In a world of art that's mostly disposable... (Score:5, Informative)
Except the dead sea scrolls is hide from animals, not paper from your printer. Normal printing paper has a very short life span (comparatively).
Re:Yawn (Score:3, Informative)
RSA encryption: c = m^e mod n.
It really is something a 5th grader could write. The security is in the selection of e and n (and d, for decryption).
Re:In a world of art that's mostly disposable... (Score:3, Informative)
As for AGRiPPA itself, I get the point, but it always struck me as Gibson's shark jumping moment. An extremely unegalitarian artwork that only a few people can see in its intended form is certainly the artist's right to create, but it really lessened my respect for him, and decreased my interest in his future output.