"Sometimes I think and imagine that ... there exists a single art and science, and that this is drawing or painting..." Michelangelo's words (as quoted by Italo Calvino) provide a viable epigraph to my paper. A fundamental ambivalence affects contemporary media culture and net-based learning environments, largely characterized by what Bolter-Grusin call "remediation" (in which "both new and old media are invoking the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy in their efforts to remake themselves and each other"): hyper-mediated, windowed styles and immersive virtual reality (the simulated re-embodiment of human presence) are culturally at odds with each other, yet often co-exist within the same symbolic and cognitive hyperspace (our culture "wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them," Bolter-Grusin write).

What becomes of the verbal arts, and the cognitive value of writing, when our digital power of animating text and imaging 3-D models becomes a source for new forms of cognitive "immediacy" and "transparency"? In this situation, I argue, writing plays a new and crucial role: a role of inter-mediacy. In the process of becoming more marginal, text acquires new dynamic functions, as a "suture" holding together proliferating media.

Like Calvino, in my work as a teacher of literature (and media) I am both attracted to and concerned with the disembodiment and dissemination of the written word in the age of visual culture and electronic technologies.

My paper will discuss some of the ideas outlined above, making reference to three projects: I value the power of dynamic visualization in creating a new learning environment where milestones of our textual traditions can be preserved for new generations of readers, at the same time revealing their inner, virtual hypertextuality (the Decameron Web).
I value the power of dynamic visualization in allowing us to re-view in a new light apparently obsolete premodern humanist philosophies such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's praise of human dignity: his celebration of the human as the only being without a fixed identity, thus capable of acquiring (or simulating) any identity, through knowledge (and technology) (the Pico Project ).
Finally, I take Calvino's musings on lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity (and consistency) as a point of departure toward a creative pedagogy for 21st century e-humanism (N2K. Narratives for the Next Millennium).

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