The Birth of a Stereoscopic Nation: Hollywood,Digital Empire and the Cybernetic Attraction

Ethnographic and ecological stereoscopy

Any evaluation of stereoscopic cinema’s past must, by necessity, turn to a consideration of the spectacular attractions that predated it in the Victorian era. Preceding early cinema, it has been suggested that stereographs were proto-cinematic in a number of ways (Michelson, 1989; Zone, 2007). Firstly, their visual function was profoundly embedded within the logic of the attraction (see Figure 2). Indeed, in describing the overlap between the stereograph and what he refers to as cinema’s ‘novelty period’, Ray Zone suggests that the stereograph laid the foundations for what Tom Gunning (1990) describes as the ‘cinema of attractions’, even though Zone makes no direct reference to Gunning:

Many of the genres, particularly Automobiles, Aviation, Comics, Disasters, Erotica, Exhibitions, Novelties, Theatrical, Railroads, and Wars, were borrowed and would become standard subjects for the nascent motion picture industry during its ‘novelty period’ from 1895 to 1905. (Zone, 2007: 15)

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Figure 2.

Stereocards as proto-cinematic spectacular attractions: the infamous train approaching the viewer functioned as a commercial attraction long before the Lumière Brothers’ seminal film: (a) Sky Railroading (BW Kilburn, c. 1858–1895); (b) Train Leaving the Station (Lumière Brothers, 1895).

Like early cinematic attractions, stereographs worked within the context of what Charney and Schwartz (1995) have described as a broader set of modernist cultural and technological transformations. Such transformations embedded the viewer within the emergent and intersecting spaces facilitated by new technologies, be it the cockpit of the plane, the front of the train, the rollercoaster, the department store, or the far-flung reaches of empire opened up by new capacities to explore.

Equally, however, stereographs looked forward to later cinematic forms through narratives that sought explicitly to relate their spectacular attraction to broader structures of dramatic meaning. For example, stereocards were often sold in sets that developed narratives across a number of spectacular tableaux. Like an early form of intertitle, such sets included explanatory captions on their reverse side that anticipated the negotiation that took place in its media successor after the cinema of attractions developed to encompass narrative form.

Stereographs provided the viewer with a proto-cybernetic visual experience on two counts: firstly, by drawing attention to the process of spectatorship through the stereographic spectacle, it made the viewer aware of the informational nature of the image. The stereograph was, after all, not perceivable mono-scopically, which is to say that it was only through a doubling of the visual information contained within two slightly different images (and received simultaneously) that its effect was perceivable at all. Secondly, stereographs also provided a protocybernetic experience by delivering to viewers the peoples, places, resources and even virtual spaces of empire. Describing the monoscopic photographs of empire, Anne Maxwell (2000: 11) argues that

for many people these images constituted a precursory glimpse into the world’s least traversed regions, an experience hitherto confined to intrepid explorers and those who could afford a Grand Tour. For others they were a part of the Victorian passion for collecting, an activity that strengthened colonialism because it enabled participants to possess the whole world, if not literally then at least visually.

What Maxwell describes of photography here can be applied to stereography. That is, stereographs of exotic people and places on the imperial periphery operated as a functional continuation of imperial practice, allowing Victorian spectators to glimpse the places that they could not necessarily travel to (see Figure 3). They also fulfilled the Victorian desire to understand, categorize and own both information about the world and, by extension, the world itself (ideologically at least).

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Figure 3.

The stereoscope as virtual travel: an advertisement for one of the largest stereograph and stereocard sellers of the time acknowledges the possibilities of virtual travel and the imperial domain (note Africa and South America featuring prominently as destinations for the New York Stereo Spectator). Underwood Stereograph Travel System Advert, c. 1907.

Maxwell’s assertion that the Victorians came to own the world visually fits with Richards (1993) and Cook’s (2004) assertions that this empire was a cybernetic one, based on information as much or more than on physicality. The difference between the photograph and the stereograph, however, is an important one: while the stereograph is said to have failed commercially because it was said to have foregrounded the human body in the process of visuality, this feature will have been precisely its advantage in advertising the empire’s cybernetic tendencies. Stereographic spectators beholding the natural wealth of the imperial periphery will not only have been made aware of their physical anchor in the imperial heart, they will also have been made aware of the cybernetic, informational nature of their empire. In emphasizing the body and its specific role in subjective visual perception the stereograph also emphasized the fact that such perception was an informational process.

Analysing Avatar in light of 19th-century imperial stereography reveals some striking parallels. As a narrative, the film is remarkably self-reflexive about the body and its relationship to processes of imperial cybernetic, immersive spectatorship. Indeed the problematic juncture of cybernetic imperialism, scopic technologies and bodily immersion/dislocation with such regimes is the film’s subject. The narrative revolves around the premise that Sully’s body must be separated from his consciousness: he cannot pass into the imperial ecological space without the violent disconnection of his mind from one biology to another. This metaphor functions on a number of levels. Sully’s bodily transference is reminiscent (if somewhat more extreme) of viewers throughout the past century who peered into stereoscopic apparatuses to be scopically immersed in a new, imperial space. Equally, Sully’s moment of transfer is reminiscent (though again more extreme) of the experience that viewers of Avatar itself undergo, and is curiously sophisticated in responding to the possibility that film’s stereoscopic trick might disrupt viewers’ attention and immersion within the narrative. For the narrative is about a self-aware spectator crossing the boundary between his own and another cybernetic imperial space.

If it seems here like the relationship I am drawing between Sully within the film and the spectator of the film functions is a conveniently over-extended parallel it is because that is precisely what it is. The film encourages a slippage between the fantastic technologies of the narrative and the emergent new-media forms that made the film’s stereoscopic spectacle of this narrative possible (however likely or otherwise the fantastic technologies are to become a reality). In other words, the film’s rhetorical address/promise to the spectator is premised upon an elision between the content of its spectacular attraction, the technologies deployed to materialize it and the newly hyped stereoscopic apparatus deployed to exhibit it. As we shall see shortly, DW Griffith also deployed a similar sleight-of-hand almost 100 years earlier.

Returning to notions of cybernetic imperial space, Avatar uses moments of stereoscopic spectatorship as a means of representing the kind of informational and representational nexus characteristic of past colonial adventures. Our introduction to the eco-politics of an extractive robber baron military industrial adventure in Avatar is through a holographic visualisation. ¹ As Sully sits at the table watching the virtual reproduction of Pandora’s eco-wealth and the ‘home tree’ village of the Na’vi people, the content of this holographic attraction (Figure 4b) has striking echoes with the many thousands of past stereoscopic images made by Victorians and Americans of giant trees, captured as they expanded their zones of ecological exploration and extraction (Figure 4a).

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Figure 4.

Stereocopic regimes and empire: stereoscopic spectatorship as a representational/informational nexus of imperial eco-politics. In Avatar, this is a holographic visualization of Pandora’s eco-wealth and the ‘home tree’ village of the Na’vi people. In the 19th century, this was a stereographic attraction of precisely the same types of subjects: (a) Giant Redwood (JJ Reilly); (b) Avatar (James Cameron).

Similarly, the moment that Sully is cybernetically disembodied and connected to his ‘avatar’, the film resembles the fleshing out of a cinematic attraction, storyboarded via early stereographs. Like a contemporary update of past imperial stereocards now residing in the silicon of the CG cybernetic empire, Avatar returns to the same subjects as its predecessors: peoples, spaces, resources of empire. Despite the blue skin colour and cat-like eyes, the Na’vi are reminiscent in their weapons, jewelry and dress codes, of a First Nation American/Papua New Guinean tribal mix and the parallels in visual culture are clear to see (Figure 5). While Tsu’tey’s weaponry and pictorial representation (Figure 5b) resemble that of the tribes people in what was the Belgian Congo when stereographers where gathering new commercial material (Figure 5a), his Mohican/dreadlock hair style resembles a fusion of First Nation American and the Maasai people of North Africa, both of whom were stereographed in the mid to late 19th century to be sold on as attractions for the stereo-viewer collection (see especially Dinkins, 2009). Equally, the leader of the Horse People Akwey (Figure 5c) bears a septum piercing found amongst tribes people from Papua New Guinea to India and the Americas (Figure 5d).

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Figure 5.

Resembling the fleshing out of a cinematic attraction, storyboarded via early stereographs Avatar echoes past imperial stereocards returning to the subjects of its predecessors: peoples, spaces, resources of empire. In this case, the subjects of empire: (a) Native Tribesman in the Belgan Congo; (b) Avatar (James Cameron); (c) New Guinea Tribesmen; (d) Avatar.

With this, we see how Avatar’s showcase of the fictional Na’vi people reflects the conventions of the late Victorian live ethnographer’s anthropological displays that both predated stereoscopic technologies and later came to share a platform with them at world fairs. In both cases, these exhibits made a spectacle of the same subjects: the peoples and bounty of imperial dominion (Maxwell, 2000: 2). Avatar more closely resembles the stereographs, however, which, like their photographic counterparts, stood in marked contrast to the live display in their depth and breadth of content:

By contrast to anthropological displays, photographs of the colonised encompassed a wide range of forms and genres. Photographic representations of colonised peoples included cartes-de-visite (sometimes referred to as cabinets), daguerreotypes, collotypes, postcards and stereocards, and spanned a wider range of registers, including ethnology, travel and portraiture. (p. 9)

Avatar inherits the wider gamut of its stereoscopic predecessors, literally taking its spectators on a journey through the range of registers. To ethnology, travel and portraiture we can add ‘eco-tourism’ and ‘new age mysticism’, although even these categories were arguably present already in the turn-of-the-century stereocards. Certainly, spaces in Avatar are mapped out in uncanny resemblance to their Victorian counterparts. As imperial explorers were represented daringly crossing treacherous ravines or negotiating awe-inspiring caverns (Figure 6c), so, too, is Sully represented making his way through caverns on a climb up to his Na’vi initiation test (Figure 6d). Once reached, the scene from the top (Figure 6b) would have seemed startlingly familiar to many a 19th-century stereoviewing enthusiast (Figure 6a).

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Figure 6.

Imperial explorers: the spaces in Avatar mapped out in uncanny resemblance to their Victorian counterparts as the imperial explorers who daringly negotiated treacherous new geographies and ecologies are renovated in the form of Sully’s narrative journey. Scenes in Avatar would seem startlingly familiar to many a 19th-century stereoviewing enthusiast: (a) National Park; (b) Avatar; (c) Under the River; (d) Avatar.

We see, then, that late Victorian and early American stereoscope spectators were invited vicariously to participate in the dangers and wonders of the newly opened spaces of empire. Likewise, the awe of eco-wealth and resource exploitation went hand in hand with the display of the ‘natives’ who lived, and increasingly died, among such rapidly extracted wealth. Where early pioneers proudly photographed the fruits of their extraction labour (Figure 7a), in Avatar the same images are presented to us but this time as a source of shame and a symptom of the occupying powers’ lack of moral legitimacy (Figure 7b). Likewise, where the mechanization of imperial extraction was once a triumphal source of awe and wonder (Figure 7c), in Avatar it takes on the post World War II horror of a natural holocaust ² only made possible by industrialization (Figure 7d). Nevertheless, to return to the above suggestion that early stereocards functioned as protocinematic attractions, we can see in the commonalities of both spatial representation and aesthetic subject matter, an audiovisual impulse towards the spectacular representation of natural resources connecting Avatar to its predecessors.

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Figure 7.

Resource extraction and empire: where early pioneers proudly photographed the fruits of their extraction labour, in Avatar the same subjects are presented as a source of shame and a symptom of the occupying powers’ lack of moral legitimacy. In both cases, however, resource extraction and the destruction of eco-wealth is presented as a spectacular attraction: (a) Felled Redwood; (b) Avatar; (c) Extraction Railway; (d) Avatar.

Lest we are caught up in the specificities of the comparable spectacular images found in Figures 5, 6 and 7, it is worth reiterating that these echoes are not necessarily direct visual quotes but the recurrence of an underlying spectacular imperative that formed the foundation of early stereography and which returns in Avatar. More accurately, this spectacular imperative should be understood as never having really gone away. The stereographic representation of waterfalls (Figure 8a) that then resurfaced in early cinema as Edison’s Waterfall in the Catskills (1897) represents a tendency towards the spectacular that finds a renewed place in Avatar in the first chopper scene (Figure 8b). Likewise, the thousands of ocean coves photographed by early stereographers (Figure 8c) and recaptured by early cinematographers (Surf at Monterey, 1897) become the backdrop for a mountain banshee flight scene near the end of Avatar (Figure 8d). While these comparisons are striking, they are so not only because of a direct relation between each other but also because they mark a more general tendency towards what we have come to understand as a particularly cinematic form of spectacular imaging that was clearly a founding principle of early stills stereography.

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Figure 8.

The spectacle of imperial space as the recurrence of a longstanding, underlying spectacular imperative. The stereographic representation of waterfalls and ocean coves represents a tendency towards the spectacular that finds a renewed place in Avatar: (a) Ravine; (b) Avatar; (c) Shoshone Falls; (d) Avatar.

Thus, beyond the direct comparisons, the logic of Avatar’s 3D CGI allows the cinema viewer to glimpse the extent of a newly cybernetic empire where the relationship between information and visualization again returns to prominence, facilitated by the binary code of the CG algorithm/s. It is not without irony that psychiatrists reported a huge (and much commented on) rise in the phenomenon of viewers claiming depression brought on by the fact that Pandora does not exist, in a manner reminiscent of what Steven Bottomore (1999) has described as ‘train effect’ hysteria in early cinema.

As with the ‘train effect’ of a century before, it is entirely likely that reports of Avatar viewers so overwhelmed by the immersive nature of the film that they had to seek medical help were a falsely overblown but useful marketing tool. More telling, however, is the fact that, although viewers of Avatar were allegedly grief stricken, no mention was ever made in these reports of the many cultures and peoples echoed in the film that also no longer exist. If we were to take such reports of grief on face value (and given Bottomore’s work in this area that would take a considerable act of faith), they could be understood on a number of levels. While the Victorians could own the cybernetic empire’s peripheral space visually, they could also actually travel there if they chose to (see Figure 3). Avatar, on the other hand, reminds the viewer that the peripheral space of their empire is truly cybernetic: they can never actually visit it. Similarly, such strangely misplaced grief could also be the collective expression of mourning for the destruction of the cultures cleared for the white settlement of the Americas. Regardless of the veracity of reports of depressed viewers, what is pointedly notable is that, like the cybernetic spaces of Avatar, the Na’vi are an equally cybernetic echo of the 100 million indigenous peoples exterminated through European colonization, war and disease (Cosgrove, 1984; Stannard, 1992). Similarly, far more important than the veracity of reports of viewer despair is the fact that they took precedence over a consideration in news media of the way the film pointed to an all too real mass destruction of a people in our recent past.

Ironically, the world that viewers of Avatar can never access is a world that was destroyed during the rise of the very viewing practices that are still contained within Avatar. As James Ryan (1997: 140–181) points out, vast numbers of indigenous peoples and their homelands around the world were largely destroyed in the 200 years leading up to and during the invention of the photograph and its stereoscopic corollaries. Unsurprisingly, for the indigenous survivors not wiped out by accidental disease or deliberate biological warfare, the camera was an object to be treated with the same suspicion as the gun. Aside from the obvious analogies between the two devices (both are used to ‘shoot’, both were ‘loaded’ with cartridges and both pointed at the object or person they were to be focused upon), Ryan points out that the camera was likely as damaging as the gun in many instances. Two brief moments in Avatar underscore this. The first is during the caterpillar’s eco-destruction of the Na’vi forest when Sully’s immediate and knowing response is to climb upon the machine and to destroy the camera. The second is when Colonel Quaritch uses Sully’s video diary footage to justify military action upon the Na’vi village. In both cases, the camera and the ‘full spectrum dominance’ it offers to the invaders also betrays the indigenous people.

By extension, the camera’s betrayal (or that of the people who deployed it) of indigenous people was fully interwoven with the initiation of cinema history. From short actualities of indigenes representing their ‘primitive’ ways as grist for the cinema of attractions’ mill, to the development of feature-length films like Birth of a Nation, cinema’s history of indigenous representation has been ambiguous to say the least.

Cameron is clearly profoundly aware of his place in film culture and his relationship to cinematic history. As George Monbiot (an environmentalist rather than a film critic) stated at the time of the movie’s release:

Avatar, James Cameron’s blockbusting 3D film, is both profoundly silly and profound. It’s profound because, like most films about aliens, it is a metaphor for contact between different human cultures. But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas. It’s profoundly silly because engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film … But this is a story no one wants to hear, because of the challenge it presents to the way we choose to see ourselves. Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas; the American nations were founded on them. This is a history we cannot accept. (Monbiot, 2010)

Cameron’s metaphor is more conscious and precise than Monbiot realizes, however. For it constitutes both a general reflection on the nature of colonialism, genocide and the deployment of audiovisual technologies in such processes at the same time as it is very specific in its acknowledgement of, and apology for, DW Griffith’s role in ‘fathering’ film.

The birth of a stereoscopic nation

DW Griffith’s reputed role in making one of the first feature-length films and in innovating cinematography whilst negotiating the incorporation of the attraction into narrative cinema has been the subject of much scholarship (see, inter alia, Gunning, 1991; Mitry, 1982). This has led film encyclopaedias and textbooks to dub him the ‘single most important figure in the history of American film and one of the most influential in the development of world cinema as an art’ (Katz, 1998: 563). However, Griffith’s place as the ‘father of film’ has also led to an uncomfortable reckoning regarding the racism that underpinned both Griffith and his work (see Taylor, 1998).

For many filmmakers, this reckoning has taken the form of satirization of Griffith and the shadow that Birth of a Nation’s famous Wagner-inspired Ku Klux Klan horseback chase scene cast across modern movie history. Matthew Wilson Smith (2008) asserts that musical scores like Wagner’s alongside Birth of a Nation helped emphasize early narrative cinema’s homogeneity of form and content – as opposed to the cinema of attractions’ vaudeville form, with its heterogeneity of performance, audience agency and spectatorial attention. For Smith, Wagner, with Birth of a Nation’s use of Ride of the Valkyries as the major example, became a byword for the integration of a new cinema, founded upon the elevation of its content to the status of high art. Not simply the birth of a nation, then, but ‘the birth of a whole new aesthetic form’ (p. 231). Thus, for Griffith, the Wagnerian orchestral arrangement (the orchestra literally placed within the cinema space) functioned in the same way as the stereoscopic apparatus did for Cameron: both providing a means of eliding the boundary between the narrative content, spectacular attraction and the dual spectatorial space the viewer was therefore expected to inhabit. Likewise then, both provided a means with which the spectator could integrate seemingly heterogeneous form and content into an apparently homogeneous whole.

In many ways, Birth of a Nation acts as a textual bridge between the racist and colonialist logic that pervaded early live shows, stereographic stills and cinematic attractions, and that of later narrative cinema. Crucially, in his pre-narrative cinema period, Griffith made some 30 films that were based on representations of Native Americans. Gregory S Jay (2000) has convincingly argued that these apparently sympathetic representations of America’s first settlers actually betray the racist logic that eventually emerged in Birth of a Nation. With this in mind, it is intriguing that Avatar deliberately references both Birth of a Nation and Ride of the Valkyries (Figure 9a). When the marines move in for their final attack on the Na’vi, the representation of assembled military might resembles that of Birth of a Nation not only in terms of its shot construction (Figure 9b, 9c and 9d) but also in the fact that the central command attack vehicle is pointedly named and referred to by a Southern general as ‘Valkyrie’. Whether consciously or not, Cameron refashions Birth of a Nation to make the ‘Birth of a Na’vi Nation’: a kind of wishful thinking in which past crimes can be cybernetically atoned for by the power of silicon. Equivalents of the Ku Klux Klan scene are played out not once but three times in Avatar: once involving the military (Figure 9b) and twice involving the Na’vi people both riding (Figure 9c) and flying (Figure 9d) to the rescue of their land.

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Figure 9.

The Birth of a Na’vi Nation: Avatar deliberately references both Birth of a Nation and Ride of the Valkyries. When the marines move in for their final attack on the Na’vi, the shot construction of assembled military might resembles that of Birth of a Nation. Equivalents of the Ku Klux Klan scene are played out not once but three times in Avatar refashioning The Birth of a Nation as ‘The Birth of a Na’vi Nation’: (a) The Birth of a Nation; (b) – (d) Avatar.

Besides textual similarities between these films, however, there are broader parallels between the aims of both directors in making their respective films and the narratives they construct about themselves through their films. Like Griffith, Cameron attempts with Avatar to negotiate a new chapter in the relationship between the narrative and spectacle of contemporary cinematic vision. Like Griffith (see Gunning, 1991), it seems that Cameron deliberately sets out with Avatar to establish himself as the pre-eminent innovator of his industrial and aesthetic cinematic landscape. Where Griffith’s role was to incorporate spectacle within a newly emergent narrative form, Cameron presides over a considerable expansion in the nature of contemporary spectacle. With Avatar, Weta Digital’s fusion of live action and CG animation for the entirety of the movie marks a seminal (even if it is not the first) instance in which ‘live action’ is, to all intents and purposes, recognizably rationalized under the logic of the CG attraction for the full length of the movie. Here CG special effects are not set piece moments mapped briefly onto what is ostensibly a live action text, but instead they are the fabric of the movie into which the live action is stitched. In Manovich’s terms, cinema has in this film become the visible slave of the computer from start to finish. In his seminal article ‘The Cinema of Attractions’ (1990), Tom Gunning argued that the emergence of narrative cinema forced the attraction ‘underground’, surfacing in dance routines and spectacular landscapes. An interpretation of Avatar’s feature-length CG attraction might turn Gunning’s analysis on its head and ask if the movie marks the moment in which narrative goes underground, functioning in the lulls of a cinematic attraction that has expanded to fill every minute of the spectatorial experience. More reasonably, however, we might say that we can see in Avatar the balance/tension that Geoff King (1999) argues is the defining equilibrium of Hollywood cinema where spectacle and narrative have reached a symbiotic parity.

Stereoscopy in the age of cybernetic systems

While Avatar talks back to the proto-cybernetic origins of Victorian stereoscopy, it also attempts a redefinition and a redeployment of contemporary stereography as the function of a renovated cybernetic culture. Here an expansion of our understanding of the ‘cybernetic’ as it was outlined earlier bears fruit. To recap, just as the information networks laid down during the late Victorian empire came to function as a cornerstone of contemporary new media culture (see Cook, 2004; Richards, 1993), I have argued that the late Victorian stereograph was symptomatic of the informational reorganization of culture, space and time that took place during that period. The contemporary stereoscopy deployed in Avatar marks an echo of this imperial and visual past, at the same time as it constitutes something new: both the informational made concrete in visual form as per the Victorian period and, as we shall see, the post-mechanically reproduced, chip-based form of cybernetics described by Nichols.

Avatar’s success as a stereoscopic film is based upon the redefinition of a tension inherent in early stereoscopy: the capacity to circumvent the pure mechanical reproduction of David Brewster’s photographic stereoscopy and to reformulate a new stereoscopy based upon the kind of non-indexical rendering of 3D objects that Charles Wheatstone originally produced. All of this is made possible by the recombinatory and simulative capacities of the computer chip, and in this sense Avatar demonstrates the growing impact of cybernetics upon cinema, based as it was for a century upon mechanical reproduction. Avatar’s contemporary stereoscopy is premised upon the non-indexical capacities that CG imaging has facilitated – specifically the capacity to fabricate a perspectival image that nevertheless appears photorealistic. This introduces a circularity to stereoscopy’s long and continued development, akin to that which Manovich (2001: 195) describes with the emergence of CG manipulation returning our image culture to hand-crafted forms after the anomalous interlude of mechanical reproduction.

Historians and visual theorists of stereoscopy’s past have often focused upon its eventual birth as a photographic form as simultaneously the reason for its triumph and the reason for its equally rapid failure to survive as a mass medium (see Crary, 1998; Maxwell, 2000; Schiavo, 2003). Photographic technology, they argue, might have allowed the mass proliferation of stereography, but its monoscopic alternative also challenged stereoscopy by offering the fiction of objective vision. Elsewhere I have argued that this historical account is problematic for a number of reasons (Gurevitch 2012), that aside however, with the emergence of contemporary cybernetic culture, the fiction of objective vision begins to dissolve (if it ever really functioned as powerfully as theorists of stereoscopy’s first demise have suggested). This is fact that Avatar addresses. Whereas past forms of cinematic consumption involved a degree of psychic immersion into the narrative, many spectators of Avatar are increasingly cognisant of the more active role that they play in the perception, manipulation, interaction and even creation of screen content. From game consoles and facial recognition systems in cameras, televisions and computer technologies, through to touch screens and voice interfaces, the boundaries between user, image, and even what constitutes the screen itself, have shifted.

In this sense, Sully, with his metaphorical transformation from cinematic spectator (immobile in his wheelchair in cinematic space) to participative gamer (highly mobile in his ‘avatar’ in CG animated space), finds analogues in the experiences of many in the audience. From this perspective Avatar is, via Walter Benjamin and Bill Nichols, a ‘work of culture in the age of cybernetic systems’: a metaphor for the current emergence of cybernetic technologies of vision and communication and the capacity to cross corporeal boundaries (Jones, 2007). In short, Avatar concerns itself with the ways in which computer technology is reshaping our visual culture and our understanding of ourselves.

The significance of Avatar’s cybernetic stereoscopy lies in its deployment as a visceral and spectacular grantor of the promise contained within the storyline: that the transference of consciousness from one body to another might one day be more than a metaphor. Regardless of its likelihood, Avatar’s cybernetic conjuring trick, materializing a seemingly photorealistic stereoscopic world that has little basis in indexicality, implies the promise of more to come. Nichols’s (1988: 33) description of our changing relationship to culture in a cybernetic age is therefore fitting:

The chip replaces the copy. Just as mechanical reproduction of copies revealed the power of industrial capitalism to reorganise and reassemble the world around us, rendering it as commodity art, the automated intelligence of chips reveals the power of post-industrial capitalism to simulate and replace the world around us, rendering not only its exterior realm but also its interior ones of consciousness, intelligence, thought and intersubjectivity as commodity experience.

Herein lies the crucial difference between Avatar’s stereoscopy and that of the Victorian predecessors it echoes. Avatar’s stereoscopy is premised upon the ‘automated intelligence’ of the chip and its capacity to ‘simulate and replace the world around us’. Thus, while Avatar is a cybernetic text insofar as the narrative contemplates the age of cybernetic systems, it simultaneously deploys the logic of cybernetics in full through its stereoscopic CG form.

Stereoscopy and cybernetic systems as software patch

By way of conclusion, we will turn to a consideration of Avatar’s production process. For we risk misunderstanding the cybernetic implications of Avatar if we simply analyse the film as a final product to the exclusion of its production process. Avatar was not a one-off production laid down on a celluloid roll or even a digital hard drive for subsequent exhibition like Cameron’s earlier films. Instead, Avatar, like many of its contemporaries, and even some of its predecessors, is beginning to be rationalized under the logic of the updateable computer code (Manovich, 2008). With franchises such as Star Wars now just one of many coming to be treated in such a manner, contemporary CG spectaculars are increasingly subject to the ‘backward compatibility’ update of the stereoscopic ‘patch’. As with the predecessors so with the successors, films now heading into production increasingly function as the digital DNA of sibling sequels. Here the source code underpinning the special effect is forever potentially subject to the software update and Avatar, as a special effect stretched to feature length, functions within this logic more than most. In this sense, Avatar should be seen as a cybernetic project akin to the grand information gathering endeavours of the Victorian empire blended with the cut and paste capacities of contemporary software culture. When Cameron chose to base his project at Weta Digital, he was not simply buying animation skill; he was buying into the construction and conservation of a simulated biological archive. The hard drives of Weta Digital’s appropriately named server ‘farms’ could be described as a vast, digital arc of simulated content. Appropriately, then, the stereophotograph was not the only cybernetic cultural form showcased to Queen Victoria at the 1851 exhibition. Asserting that the zoo and the botanical garden were one of the emblematic precursors of the cyborg in their function as animate, self-regulating systems, Nichols (1988: 34) argues that:

Queen Victoria spoke of ‘the greatest day in our history [when] the whole world of nature and art was collected at the call of the queen of cities’. Those permanent exhibitions – the zoo and the botanical garden – introduced a new form of vicarious experience quite distinct from the aesthetic experience of original art or mechanically reproduced copies. The zoo brings back alive evidence of a world we could not otherwise know, now under apparent control. It offers experience at a remove that is fundamentally different as a result of having been uprooted from its original context. The indifferent, unthreatened, and unthreatening gaze of captive animals provides eloquent testimony to the difference between the zoo and the natural habitat to which it refers.

By what seems like more than a twist of fate, Weta Digital has specialized in the global neo-colonial preoccupation with the simulated self-regulating system in numerous recent films. This is not simply the case for the objects and environments constructed, but also for the programmes that underpin the behaviour of these objects: Weta’s most commercially successful software spin-off to date now spans multiple industries. The Massive programme, as it is called, is accompanied on its website by a tagline that could scarcely better encapsulate Nichols’s articulation of the cybernetic as the self-regulating system: ‘simulating life’. Starting out as an algorithm created to describe the behaviour of biblical numbers of battling warriors in The Lord of the Rings films (Peter Jackson, 2001–2003), Massive has since been adapted to describe the behaviours of any number of biological crowd forms from humans and animals to androids. The Massive simulation acts as the very definition of a self-regulating cybernetic system. Crucially what is notable about this software is not just that it governs the behaviours of simulated life across multiple movies and is therefore decoupled from the specificity of individual films, it is that it is decoupled from the film industry as a whole, being deployed equally in game engines and architectural simulations and television effects to name just a few.

Unsurprisingly, Avatar is not the end of the road for this cybernetic system; with sequels rumored to be slated for production, the botanical content of the first movie will be brought out and digitally dusted off. This is Avatar as part of a greater cybernetic system: rather than being bound by the primacy of the celluloid production process as it would have been in the past, the digital pre and post production processes have swelled so that Avatar exists as much within a broader cybernetic ecosystem fittingly archived within the servers of a special effects company based in New Zealand. A sequel requires a return to the archives that demonstrates New Zealand’s success in capitalizing on its place in the history of the imperial network (both physical and informational).

Contemporary New Zealand’s current global position is in part based upon a renovated version of this logic. As an economy making a transition from ‘Wool to Weta’ (Callaghan, 2009), the imperial centre to which New Zealand sends its information back has shifted to Hollywood (a shift already underway in the material realm shortly after the first European settlers began shipping vast quantities of New Zealand timber to Los Angeles to fuel the construction boom). ³

Where the 19th-century expositions in London and Paris, Nuremburg and Amsterdam featured colonized peoples and the bounty extracted from their homelands as a spectacular testament to imperial success, today the CG output of effects-houses on the imperial periphery like New Zealand and Australia performs a similar function. Like the European powers of the past that would go to great lengths to gather and represent the raw materials of empire – the bodies of the ‘subjects’ who constituted the labour force and the products they mined and crafted – the raw materials of today’s de-territorialized global empire are similarly constituted. This time, however, the digital images exported back to the imperial centre and, often treated as if they were ‘weightless’, are representative of the labour that continues to constitute the raw material of global capital. This is an empire in which, as Beller (2006: 14) has argued, spectacle follows the flows of global capital, and the image constitutes the sum of its labour (the labour performed both in creating the image and again afterwards in spectating it).

With a digitized, stereoscopic, semi-simulated colonial environment built and animated by Weta Digital, the extent to which the making and distributing of Avatar had become an echo of Richards’ cybernetic empire becomes apparent when we consider the process from the perspective of its relative informational structures. Despite one of the world’s smallest populations of only four million people and a relatively miniscule economy of US$117 billion in 2010, New Zealand had the ninth largest share of supercomputing capacity in the world (figures from the CIA World Factbook and IMF World Economic Outlook). Avatar and its simulated systems constitute the development of a cybernetic empire writ large, and long after the original imperial centre has collapsed and been replaced. From Wheatstone’s first hand-drawn stereoscopic images and Brewster’s showcase of the imperial periphery’s ecological bounty to Queen Victoria, we have almost come full circle in Avatar. Reminiscent of Wheatstone’s first rendered images, Avatar is the product of human labour but this time combined with the processing capacities of the render farm: a cybernetic project if ever there was one. More importantly Avatar not only demonstrated the commercial possibilities of future stereoscopic spectacle, but it precipitated a wave of stereoscopic updates on a film culture previously lodged firmly in its history of mechanically reproduced celluloid. This is truly the birth of a stereoscopic nation and the emergence of the cybernetic regime of modernity.