Wu Ming, the New Italian Epic: A Paradoxical Virtual Public Space

Wu Ming, a collective of authors of best-selling novel sequences in Italy, has developed theories on the creation of myths, popular culture or copyleft (free access to culture), and has named its aesthetics New Italian Epic. This article questions the relevance of this project in which the negation of the “history of Victors”, the resort to the modalities of possibility, the recursiveness (the claiming of the allegory as a gateway to infinite interpretation) seem to define a materialistic kind of anthropology and poetics available within the framework of a many-sided interactivity with Internet users. Yet the study highlights a strange observation : the collective shapes, by its repetitive statements of poetics, the virtual space in which its fictional works materialise.