An event that I have organized in collaboration with the Department of Communication and the School of the Humanities.

The Power of Simulation: From The Matrix to Avatar

What do contemporary Science Fiction movies tell us about ourselves? Is there a sense in which these fictions of the future reflect something essential about the reality of the present? In this lecture, Dr. Nidesh Lawtoo (Johns Hopkins University) suggests that The Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix (1999) and, more recently, James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), hold up a magical mirror that reflects the contemporary fascination for the power of virtual simulations. Informed by a variety of new media—from film to the Internet, computer games to Facebook—these movies make us see how real bodies can be virtually reloaded into digital bodies, human figures into virtual avatars. Rather than looking ahead to a purely futuristic world, or looking back to a primitive, natural world, The Matrix and Avatar reveal how human nature in the “real” world is currently being transformed by digital practices in an increasingly “simulated” world. Neither fully human, nor fully virtual, yet animated by both human and virtual links, the power of simulation transgresses boundaries between human and the non-human as it emerges from the interface where the posthuman self and the digital avatar, nature and technology, meet, clash and, above all, reflect on each other.