religion

Avatar presses a worthy message..

This week, I watched Avatar 3D.

I have definitely seen better 3D… what is amazing about the movie is its fantastic screenplay. Cameron’s creation of Pandora and the reincarnations of Earthly beings into real-life avatars, are truly fascinating. Pandora is the faraway planet where Man wants to mine Unobtanium. But, it is also the land of savage tribes and dangerous creatures. Doctor Max is behind the science of reincarnating humans into Avatars, and, in her words they are “remotely controlled bodies […] grown from human DNA mixed with DNA from the natives”.

We see the Avatars for the first time: cyan blue creatures with long lemur-like tails. They are sleeping in acrylic tanks, waiting for the time to be released into the wild.

The Avatars are the mining company’s attempt to mix with the locals without putting humans into the undue risks of roaming around Pandora. Every Avatar has a human driver who slides into a machine that allows his nervous systems to be in tune with those of the Avatar and thus control it remotely. In this way, the main character – Jake is transformed into the divine savior of Pandora.

Pandora is an amazing ecosystem in itself. Mother goddess Eywa, takes care of maintaining the balance which has not yet been broken by a resource-thirsty human race. The natives can plug themselves into other creatures and a common transport protocol allows for the transmission of neuronic signals between them.

Maybe, if religions had not awarded Man the power to reign over nature, we may indeed not have had to humiliate ourselves with global summits to discuss how much exploitation would not be “too” harmful! Yet, not seeing beyond the smoke screen Luca Pellegrini, on the Radio Vaticana says (in Italian):

Pandora è il pianeta che strizza abilmente l’occhio a tutte quelle pseudo-dottrine che fanno dell’ecologia la religione del millennio. La natura non è più la creazione da difendere, ma la divinità da adorare, mentre la trascendenza si svuota materializzandosi in una pianta e nelle sue bianche liane che nutre gli spiriti diramandosi nella forma di un vero e proprio panteismo.

No translation I can make would be fateful enough to the original text, but the Radio Vaticana, which claims to be “the voice of the Pope and the Church in dialogue with the world” finds issue with the movie, because it promotes a pagan approach to the respect for nature. In my view, the story does not intend to promote any particular approach. Considering the success it has had in cinemas worldwide, I am hoping that it manages to instill in people the appreciation for living in harmony with nature that the global leaders cannot seem to agree about in too many global summits! [Stockholm, ’72][Rio, ’92][Kyoto ’97][Johannesburg 2002][Copenhagen 2009][Earth Summit 2012]

Ave Avatar!

Avatar Prelude

I should have watched Avatar 3D yesterday night. But the cinema was fully booked and we will have to watch it some other day. Those who hear the word Avatar for the first time when they see the name on the film’s poster, may wonder what it means. Others will have come across the term when using an internet forum or online community, and still don’t know. I came across it some years ago when working on a virtual presence project at the dawn of P2P. But I only just found the inspiration to look up the meaning… and I am sharing it with you.

According to Wikipedia the term Avatar was first coined by Neil Stephenson for his novel Snow Crash (1992). However, the truth is that the name Avatar was probably created for Ultima IV (1985), an Apple II computer game where the succesful player will see the protagonist turn into an Avatar after having understood the eight vitues and descended into the Stygian Abyss. The name Avatar is coined from the Sanskrit word avatāra which means “descent” – the term is used to decsribe the Hindu equivalent to Christian “incarnation”, whereby a god descends from the heavens to earth. In fact, according to the Wikipedia article, “the Sanskrit noun avatāra is derived from the verbal root tṝ “to cross over”, combined with the prefix ava “off , away , down.”

Ultima IV is among the first of the role playing games. It was first released for the Apple II but then saw its incarnation on other popular platforms such as the Amiga, Atari, Commodore 64, Sega etc.. The name Avatar is, in this sense very adapt as it sees the player descend to adopt the personality of the virtual persona in the computer game. I must have been too young to remember this game and, so I cannot talk about it. But I have found it available for free download, and it is apparently compatible with the Windows platform.

I also haven’t read Stephenson’s book – Snow Crash – but, I am tempted by the Amazon reviews. The book was published at a time when the internet was becoming commercially available. In 1992, Delphi was the first to offer national access to the internet [a brief history of the Internet]. Stephenson’s foresight and the closeness which his “Metaverse” has to the internet, has also motivated academic texts. In Basel (2007), Snow Crash – discovering the Metaverse the author points out that:

the most important contrast between the Metaverse and a traditional gamespace is that the former bends to the whims and desires of the user within a given set of rules, whereas the latter is tailored and controlled by the designer to convey a specific experience to the player. 

I have come across other texts, but have not researched the topic. Jaynes et.al. (2003), The Metaverse: a networked collection of inexpensive, self-configuring, immersive environments, seems like an interesting paper. If you can refer others, please do.

Let me just leave you to Avatar… :)