Avatar simulation in 3Ts: techne, trance, transformation

Abstract

This article argues that James Cameron's Avatar (2009) represents contemporary preoccupations with the "reality" of virtual reality. Rather than reading Avatar as a wishful return to a state of nature, this article takes the computer-generated world of Pandora as a self-reflective anthropological, psychological, and ontological mirror of a network society haunted by the specter of what I call "hypermimetic" simulations. Neither fully human nor fully virtual, yet animated by both human and virtual links, the hybrid figure of the avatar emerges from the interface where the indigenous other and the posthuman self, nature and techne, reality and simulation, meet, clash, and, above all, reflect on each other.