
It is an idea that Italo Calvino also explored the author to conceives of a philosophical interplay of perception and space that encapsulates the endlessness of possibilities created by approaching one place in ceaseless variation. With new ways of approaching these spaces, so too do new opportunities emerge for visitors wishing to immerse themselves entirely within the places they visit. Galleries across the world, such as The Met, MoMA, and Rijksmuseum, have moved their halls onto servers, wherein the visitor can interact with paintings in detail that is unavailable in the physical world. Yet the cycle can be reversed, too, as is demonstrated by the Google Art Project.


Kafka’s Museum, based in Prague, uses multifaceted installations and montage to transmute the writers works into artifacts of the virtual, insofar as they are manifestations of virtual worlds. Museums in contemporary settings are utilising technologies that experiment with the virtual-physical divide. The use of the space itself and emphasis on haptic experience are a demonstration of the way conceptual places are changing as they move into different approaches to space. The Czech writer identified the directions the world would take in its transformation-the burrow exemplifies the consolidation of the virtual and physical, how these worlds respond to one another in the realm of art, wherein the possibilities they offer have been embraced by contemporary art projects. Kafka’s burrow challenges fragmentation, giving rise to a unified structure of connections. ‘The Burrow,’ (1936) an unfinished piece published posthumously, identifies the ways in which the world is apt to transform. As thinkers who sought to portray the questions of subjectivity and the external world in their works, Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino have also offered means of exploring space in its multiplicities their conceptions of space resonate with emergent spaces in contemporary settings. Literature and art, with its capacity for introspection on the mental and emotional, has provided space that incorporates aspects of being that would otherwise be displaced in the physical world. It concludes that Kafka and Calvino have provided frameworks that have been made manifest with the passing of time, and affirms the future of conceptual spaces as instigating change and creating meaning. It observes the subsequent effects that each author has had upon artists and theorists who have embraced the virtual as a means of exploring social and global issues, and acknowledges the role of art in creating new ways of navigating spaces both virtual and physical. This article examines the approach to space within Franz Kafka’s short story ‘The Burrow’ and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and discusses how their depictions of space anticipated the significance of the virtual in the current age.
