ALF SEEGERT Till We Have [Inter] faces: The Cybercultural Ecologies of Avatar [A]t the end of the last decade came The Matrix, and The Matrix sort of played on this sense that we all have that maybe reality isn't real, that maybe we're living in a vast simulacrum, and so much of the movies of the '90s, say, were about managing to break through into real life, break through from this illusory life into what is real and tactile. And now we come to the end of this decade, and there's this wonderful movie out called Avatar in which it's only by going into this make-believe world a man can truly fulfill his potential, can rewrite history. It's sort of a Native-American parable in which we actually go back and save the Native Americans from the imperialist, capitalist forces that would wipe them out. And I just thought it was really striking that we've come and now we sort of hunger for our virtual selves, our avatars to take on, you know, the final frontier, which is maybe in our own minds. -David Edelstein r. Imagine, if you can, a young girl frolicking in a color-drenched world. She spins wildly, face smeared in sunlight. She rolls gleefully down a green hillock. Peeking through the blades of grass, she spies a flower and eagerly plucks it. Hopping gingerly from stone to stone', she crosses a gurgling brook. She stalks after a doe bedded down inside a thicket. She blows on the delicate seeds of a dandelion, which scatter wildly. Climbing a stream- side tree trunk to chase after a butterfly, she slips, falls, plunges, finds herself blissfully submerged in pristine blue water. She has been baptized by nature. Or, maybe not. Does this girl see the surveillance cameras that have been tracking her every move? Does she notice that, moments after she leaves the thicket, the doe has been surreptitiously evacuated from the scene with a mechanical jerk? Does she realize that, moments after she picks her flower, another one sprouts in its place, identical? What she does grasp is the stark Twilight Zone-quality reversal that ultimately cuts off her pastoral bliss. The sunlight dims and the sky goes out. Nature, in effect, "shuts down." The little girl trudges dejectedly out of what is now revealed to have been a gorgeous sim- ulation conducted inside a vast warehouse of synthetic space. As the girl makes her dismal exit, she passes a line of other children eagerly awaiting their own opportunity to spend a few precious moments inside virtual nature, nature which presumably no longer exists anywhere else in the world. The 112 WESTERN HUMANITIES REVIEW ALF SEEGERT next child excitedly plunges forward into the warming blaze of artificial sun- light. What had seemed like nature turned out to be nothing more than a high-tech carnival ride. These scenes from the 2003 music video Respire, by the French rock group Mickey 3D, I take as a parable of our cybercultural condition (watch the video here: http://tinyurl.comlrespire23). We fear more than just the loss of nature. We fear the technologically induced loss of an authentic experi- ence of nature, and anxiety ensues. Even as the mildly eco-apocalyptic lyrics of the song (in French) suggest that humans have defiled the natural world, the video's imagery depicts just the opposite, namely, everything to which "nature-connectedness" might aspire. The most straightforward reading of Respire might thus go something like this: if we continue our headlong plunge into a hypermediated future, heedless of our ecological impacts on the planet, then the only nature left for our grandchildren will be the one we manufacture ourselves. In short, technology alienates us from nature, and if we are not careful, it will substitute for it. Or, maybe not. If the intent of Respire is to make viewers actually feel this "loss of nature," we should take a moment to scrutinize "nature" as it is actually rep- resented in the video. Did I mention that the video is done entirely with glossy computer-generated imagery? Or that, in addition to idyllic pastures, fluffy clouds, and flowers just waiting to be plucked, we see this little girl not only chasing the wildlife, but actually reclining on an exceedingly Bambified deer, which plays pillow with no thought of resistance and who gazes back in reciprocating adoration? Or that the surveillance cameras are used to trigger pre-scripted events and thereby "story" this pastoral enclosure in accord with the participant's actions? Like the pastoral form in general, Respire offers us virtualized nature as if it were nature itself: in this instance, a version of cyberpastoral. Baudrillard's precession of simulacra culminates in detaching the ultimate referent, nature, from actuality. It would seem that we have already lost sight of the Earth so completely that the only nature we are able to revive is a hyperreal fusion of Disney and The Truman Show. Just as The Matrix delights in the visual possibilities of bullet-time even as its characters decry the falsity of simulated reality, Respire revels in the very thing it laments. Its nostalgia for a "nature that never was" is rendered, seemingly irony-free, in full-color, high-definition computer-generated imagery. The medium is the message, and a peculiar one: Respire's CGI nature represents not the desert of the real, but the Eden of the virtual-a cybercultural ecology in extremis. In Respire, our yearning to return to nature is never realized but only hyperrealized, manifested through a desire manufactured by the very technologies that supplant nature in the first place. Or maybe not .... WESTERN HUMANITIES REVIEW 113