The Void Library: update from Worcester
Elizabeth Swift, from the University of Worcester, provides todays featured submission to snapshot #8.
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Void, a performance company based at University of Worcester, is exploring how Virtual Worlds are changing the nature of storytelling in a new Second Life library project called The Void Library, that has been built above the University of Worcester Island. Visitors are able to access books, listen to stories and experience narratives appearing out of thin air as their avatars explore the multi-levelled virtual library. The Void Library is based on ideas from a short story by the Argentinean writer, Jorge Luis Borges, called ‘The Library of Babel’. This story tells of an impossibly huge library which contains every book which ever has, or could be, written – the only problem is there is no means of anyone finding any particular book and lifetimes are spent fruitlessly searching for meaningful information among the baffling array of texts.
The Void Library in Second Life explores the difficulty of meaningful choice in an environment of abundant information. It provokes some serious and playful questions about just how stories can be experienced in digital environments where the acts of ‘authoring’ and ‘reception’ are similarly challenged. Visitors are allowed to glimpse real texts, lift books off shelves and sit down to read them on comfy chairs. But The Void Library is also a perilous space and it is quite easy for avatars to fall from the building to the distant ground below, or to get sidetracked into stories that seem to be continually changing in a space that mutates with every visit.
The Void Library project, which has been funded and supported by the University of Worcester, was initially presented at the International Conference on the Arts in Society in Venice last July. It will feature in an article about narrative development in Virtual Worlds to be published later this year in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and Performance.
The Void Library was made by Liz Swift and Peter Ireland . It can be found at http://slurl.com/secondlife/University%20of%20Worcester/192/215/23.
