Writers and their works in a virtual space: Trope — promoting new writing in Second Life :: Invitation to Melbourne Writers’ Festival roundtable :: August 28, 2008; 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: ACMI Cinema 1, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square, Flinders Street, Melbourne, Australia.

Trope promotes new writing within virtual space, and launched as an imagetext gallery within Second Life that coincided with the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May 2008. Trope creatively intervenes in the ways that readers engage with literary texts and aims to expand writing networks and to further develop virtual literary community. Trope features short fiction and poetry in curated exhibitions. Texts are repositioned in a spatialised visual format designed so that users experience texts in a three dimensional world. Avatars are able to move through the imagetext gallery, interacting with texts and sound, and are provided with a visitors’ book to respond to the experience.

The panel features Trope’s creators alongside the Melbourne-based writers selected for the first iteration, discussing the dynamics of this intersection between literature and new media and the poetic possibilities of virtual spaces. The panelists are: Chair: Bel Schenk :: Participants: Cristyn Davies, Elena Knox, Sarah Waterson, Matt Hetherington and Alicia Sometimes.

This panel is sponsored by the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.