03. November |  19:00   |  Bruce Clarke (Lubbock, Texas)

„Embodied Mediation: Semiosis and Cybernetics in AVATAR “

Considered as semiosis, the process of teleaction turns worldly phenomena at one location into transmissible signals received elsewhere, within a total circuit of telecommunication through which responses to those signifiers can be sent back to remote effectors and so alter the things that they signify.

In James Cameron’s AVATAR (2009), the avatar in question is precisely a remotely-controlled teleactive device, but at the same time, it is a living body interacting with a living world. This is an example of embodied mediation: the avatar in AVATAR represents the organic metamorphosis of a technological system. Whereas the computational avatar of contemporary cyberculture is a visual signifier that descends into a virtual world on behalf of an embodied user or player, the movie AVATAR sends the digital interactivity of a virtual-reality or cyberspace scenario through a biocybernetic system that everts it into a tale of teleactivity within a natural story-world.

In this talk I will draw out how the movie’s avatar regime – both as an observing system in its own right and as an element in the fabula under the viewer’s observation – has formal implications that generate significant existential contradictions. That is, the cultural unconscious of this fabulation is meaningfully paradoxical. The avatar of AVATAR becomes a complex, at times self-contradictory sign. In the end, the story told by the movie about the transmission of personhood from one body to another is actually the inverted sign of its own production process.