Remembering Networks

Agrippa, RoSE, and Network Archaeology

Thursday, September 16, 4:30 PM Gregg Hall (Porter Hall 100)

Alan Liu, Professor and Chair, Department of English, UC Santa Barbara

In 1992 publisher Kevin Begos, Jr., artist Dennis Ashbaugh, and novelist William Gibson issued their collaborative art book Agrippa (a book of the dead).  Agrippa's last pages contained a self-encrypting, "vanishing" poem on a diskette, which immediately went viral on the networks, clinching Agrippa's status as a prototypical networked book.  Basing his talk on Agrippa and on the work of his own Transliteracies Project (including the RoSE, or Research-oriented Social Environment ) Alan Liu speculates on how a "network archaeology" might be possible that extends the scholarly approaches of media archaeology and the history of the book to networked works.

Sponsored by the Center for the Arts in Society. Co-sponsored by Department of English, Carnegie Mellon and The Colloquium on Electronic and Interactive Text, University of Pittsburgh.