Second Life

In John Muir's first published article, "Yosemite's Glacier," the eminent nature writer compares Yosemite Valley to a worn book, suggesting that to understand the physical geography of the valley a visitor must employ a reading practice similar to the study of literature. Over the century since, nature writers and ecocritics have continued to call for a more critical engagement with our natural world through literature and other media. However, as 21st century readers who are perhaps more likely to experience Yosemite Valley via Google Earth than in Muir's prose--much less as a physical space--we must begin to ask how or in what ways can we continue to "read" natural spaces as that are increasingly mediated through digital tools such as Google Earth and Second Life. To address this question I argue that we must learn to apply the same ecocritical reading practices that give subjectivity to the natural world to the digitally mediated geographies that increasingly define the spaces we inhabit.

To demonstrate these reading practices, I take as a model Muir's writings and contend that his meticulous description of distance, height, and geological features forms a prototypical "virtual space" for his reader to inhabit as he walks them through the natural spaces of Yosemite Valley. This process of virtualization has evolved over time and been adopted by other media such as photography and film. Yosemite Valley's most current form of virtualization is that of Google Earth where a viewer can not only view the valley rendered in three dimensions, but also "fly through" it as if in an airplane. Google Earth also hypermediates Yosemite by allowing visitors to view and upload images and videos of the valley. I will argue that the digital mediation of natural spaces such as Yosemite give 21st century readers a case study of sorts in how to continue reading natural spaces in a digital world.

While Muir helps us understand the need to read critically the physical world in all its mediations, the question remains if the same reading practices can be applied to "virtual geographies" that do not attempt to remediate the natural world. In using the term "virtual geographies" I am drawing on and extending McKenzie Wark's 1994 usage and applying the term to the earth, sea, sky, walls and objects that surround us in digital 3D environments. I contend and will demonstrate in my presentation that virtual geographies offer rich sites of reading in their own right through my reading of "Immersiva" and "Two Fish," both of which are sims in Second Life.

Implicit in the question "where is electronic literature?" is the importance of spaces of reading. Through first extending the critical reading practices of ecocritics to digitized natural spaces and then applying those reading practices of the virtual geographies of Second Life, I hope to foreground the ways in which spaces have been, and can continue to be, rich texts in and of themselves.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

A product, a novel, a meeting place, or rather, as it is perhaps more correct to say, a catalyst of creative energy, which exceed the web to the real world, from lands of Second Life to the pages of blogs and magazines, to the cities of the world, from architecture and design to writing, music, visual art. It's a multilinguistic and multimedia project, therefore, that left itself to be discovered and interrogated during its construction, on the blogs dedicated to and on the occasion of various presentations and exhibitions in Bologna, Florence, Rome, Milan, Potenza;

"The Asian Tower ", as a virtual construction, comes from the testing of the idea of virtual space as a story of its builder and owners in Second Life,, Asian Lednev aka Fabio Fornasari,  an architect and designer from Bologna in real life;

"The Asian Tower ", as a collective novel, comes from the narrative  experimentation, as a literary refund of contemporary experiential and linguistic babel, by the writer from Potenza, Lorenza Colicigno, in Second Life Azzurra Collas. Professional writers, like the writer Rai Giuseppe Iannicelli  aka MacEwan Writer aka William Nessuno, and not professional writers, at least in fiction writing, as Susy Decosta, AtmaXenia Giha, Sunrise Jefferson aka Albamarina Cervino, Margye Ryba aka Carmen Auletta, Piega Tuqiri aka Piero Gatti, Aldous Writer, have partecipated  to the project with the involvement of the musician / artist Paolo Ferrario and multimedia artist Elisa Laraia: a group of avatars / people who have accidentally met nearby the Tower, in the land of Post Utopia, and built around it a complex web of stories and interpretations of stories. Today, while the project has nearly come to an end  with the publication of “The Archive of the Asian Tower”on the web site www.paroladidonna.net of Lorenza Colicigno , a sort of memorial repository in which is concentrated all its history as a project and as a product, “The Asian Tower” becomes a sort of permanent garrison of the story, a metaphor for that special novel whose protagonist is everyone with his own life and in his own words in the deep space of internet universe. The Asian Tower is also an auteur book with a preface by Mario Gerosa, which contains the concept of the novel, part of the novel itself, a music CD with music by Paolo Ferrario and a video by Elisa Laraia. Some chapters of the novel are the central chapter of Mario Gerosa web-literature anthology, “Parla come navighi”, ed. Il Foglio letterario. At the moment, a mystery surrounds the publication of the complete work, which web-literature experts as Mario Gerosa, prefer to imagine as infinite. The Asian Tower, then, is not only the container of the words containing it, much more, is a symbol, a metaphor for our time as possible. If the contemporary world, in fact, costantly risks of being a fragmented and alienating place, indeed of being a non-place, without personal and social profile, painted with the dark tones of war and death, with no prospect of the future, just in this contemporaneity, even if it starts from the Babel of communication, The Asian Tower means to be the opposite of the tower of Babel, that is,  a combining place, a place where the encounter, the exchange, the multiplicity of languages, of roles, of characters, make you believe you can still understand each other. If Borges said that “ a book exists, as long as it is possible” Azzurra Collas adds, with all humility, that “ the future exists, as long as you make it possible”.