On Avatar’s (2009) touring semiotechnologies: From cinematic utopias to Chinese heritage tourism

The paper explores the conditions that fostered an unlikely convergence between James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) media industry, his and his colleague’s travel and activist pursuits in the Brazilian Amazon and Chinese regional tourist planning based on the film. Focusing on one of the film’s simulated landscape markers, Cameron’s collaborative composition of an audio-visual ‘Pandorapaedia’ and his documentary on his Amazon travels it debates the role of cinematic tourism in reconfigurations of utopian visions as tourist markers. The particular utopian icon that connected as disparate projects as those of movie-making and its digital popular extensions to Brazilian developmental projects and 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, audio-visual creativity and activism) it outlines how post-modernist discourses of art-travel and tourist commodification dilute into post-national environments without losing their regional relevance and applicability