The deluxe version of “Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)” with its shroud.

History is told by that which is left behind. This comes in various forms: Records, ideologies, people, and particularly artifacts. This definition evokes images of ancient pottery, tattered scrolls, and stone tools embedded in tombs. However, every culture, no matter how old, leaves behind its artifacts, to be studied by the historians, anthropologists, and academics of today. As such, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) is an excellent example of not just a collection of artifactual techniques and ideas but is itself an artifact of its time: the post-modern high art scene in 1992.

Agrippa consists of multiple parts, each with artifactual significance if viewed through certain lenses. The first component which would be viewable to someone who had shelled out the $1500-2000 for the deluxe edition in 1992 would be the case containing the book. The case is made to be a bit of an oxymoron: artificially distressed to appear older than it is, and made out of Kevlar, a polymer-based weave used to make light bulletproof vests. The distress is meant to make a book appear to be some sort of “relic of the future,” as was put by the Agrippa Files website. This artificial aging process is not unique, as it has been used for both recreation purposes by museums and enthusiasts alike, as well as for the sake of forgery in more unscrupulous circles to make fakes appear older than they really are. The Kevlar material also dates the work, as it is a more recent advancement in the long history of arms and armor, having come into popular use in the last fifty years. The case also contains the label for which this collaborative art project is named: the Agrippa photo album from Kodak’s album series, each named for a prominent figure in Greek mythology. This label acts as an artifact as well, representing not only the era of print photography but also the era of peak commercialized nostalgia, with the average consumer able to not only capture important life moments but all moments.

The next part would be the book itself, defined as an “artist’s book” rather than a traditional novel or manuscript. Once its shroud is peeled aside, the book appears aged similarly to the case itself, albeit with more obvious burns. The book contains prints of an artist’s facsimile of DNA cells, as well as a sequence of letters meant to look like a DNA genome sequence. Both of these points act as artifacts of the new scientific age present in the late 80s leading into the turn of the millennium, with the Human Genome Project starting no more than three years before the publishing of the book.

The final part is the disk that grabs so much of the public’s attention. The 3.5″ diskette is imbedded in a hollow cutout in the back half of the pages of the book, containing a 305-line poem by William Gibson, which evokes feelings of nostalgia for what would presumably be Gibson’s own childhood. The model of diskette used was notable for being rendered out of date by the end of the next year, 1993, as the Apple computer changed its input device which rendered the 3.5″ diskette obsolete. While there’s also commentary to be made about the nature of this sort of postmodern high art being an artifact that could only be of the late 1980s and early 1990s, that would only serve to distract from the main use of Agrippa from the perspective of a historical writer: a collection of artifacts representing different eras in media.

Relevant Links:

The Agrippa Files – Bibliography

Kevlar, as described by DuPont

The Human Genome Project