On Avatar's (2009) Semiotechnologies: from Cinematic Utopias to Chinese Heritage Tourism
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[1] University of Leeds
University of Leeds
Reino Unido
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- Localización: Tourism analysis, ISSN 1083-5423, Vol. 20, Nº. 3, 2015, págs. 269-282
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
The article explores the conditions that fostered an unlikely convergence between James Cameron's Avatar (2009) media industry, his and his colleagues' travel and activist pursuits in Brazil, and Chinese tourist planning. Focusing on one of the film's simulated landscape markers, Cameron's collaborative composition of an audiovisual “Pandorapedia” and his documentary on his Amazonian travels, it debates how cinematic tourism assists in reconfigurations of utopian visions as tourist markers. The particular utopian icon that connected such disparate projects as those of movie making and its digital popular extensions to the generation of tourism in Chinese world heritage sites was that of the fictional “Hallelujah” or “Floating” Pandora Mountains. Highlighting meeting points between semiotechnological assemblages (world “languages,” music, and visual technologies) and human artwork (acting, audiovisual creativity, and activism) it outlines how (a) postmodernist combinations of art travel and tourist commodification relocate into postnational environments but (b) do not lose their regional relevance and applicability.
