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In paradoxical and altogether predictable terms, James Cameron’s ravishing Avatar sets a blue man group of mystically attuned forest dwellers against the aggressive and heartless exploitation that characterizes the military-industrial-media complex, with its virtual interfaces, biotech chimeras, and cyborg war machines. The paradox, of course, is that a version of this latter complex is responsible for delivering Camaron’s visions to us in the first place. To wit: before a recent screening of the film at the Metreon IMAX theater in San Francisco, we hapless begoggled ones were barraged with military ads, not to mention a triumphant techno-fetishist breakdown on the Imax technology that would soon transport us to the planet Pandora almost as thoroughly (and resonantly) as the handicapped jarhead Jake jacks into his computer-generated avatar body.

But those are behind the scenes ironies. With its floating Roger Deanscapes and hallucinogenic flora, the manifest world of Avatar instead spoke another truth: that the jungle pantheism that now pervades the psychoactive counterculture has gone thoroughly mainstream. Of course, noble savage narratives of ecological balance and shamanic wisdom have been haunting the Rousseau-mapped outback of the western mind for centuries. That said, Avatar represents some important twists in that basic tale. The most important of these is that the Na’vi’s nearly telepathic understanding of their environment is grounded not only in ritual, plant-lore, and that earnest seriousness that now afflicts PC Hollywood Indians, but in an organic communications network: the fibrous, animated, and vaguely repulsive pony-tail tentacles that not only allow the Na’vi to form direct control links with animals but also, through the optical filaments of the “Tree of Souls,” to commune with both ancestors and the Eywa, the biological spirit of the planet whose name resonates with Erda, our own Earth.

Call it ayahuasca lite. For while Avatar features nothing like the South American shaman lore and stupendous aya visuals that litter the otherwise very bad 2004 Western released here as Renegade, the film does suggest that the bitter jungle brew, and ideas of ecological wisdom now attached to it, is having a trickle-down effect. The banisteriopsis caapi vine that gives ayahuasca its name (though not its most hallucinogenic alkaloids) is also known as the “Vine of Souls,” which echoes the Na’vi’s Tree of Souls. And when Sigourney Weaver attempts to establish the efficacy of the Trees through a neurological discourse of electrical connection, the corporate tool Parker asks what she’s been smoking—a backhanded way of acknowledging how much Avatar’s visionary take on ecological consciousness is grounded in psychoactive consciousness.

After all, beyond a thriving and in many ways damaging ayahuasca tourist market in Brazil and Peru, clandestine aya circles manned by South American shamans and all manner of Euro-American facilitators are are now well established throughout the west. Among the professional creative classes who make up a sizable portion of West Coast seekers—for spirit and/or thrills—ayahuasca could almost be said to be mainstream. So it no longer matters whether Cameron or his animators have themselves drunk the tea; its active compounds are already swimming in the cultural water supply. Eco-futuristic dreams are now indistinguishable from the visionary potential of media technology itself. Indeed, whether you are talking form (ground-breaking 3D animation) or content (cyber-hippie wetdream decor), Cameron’s visual and technological rhetoric is impossible to disentangle from hallucinogenic experience.

OK, maybe I am the one smoking something. But if there is an aya-Avatar connection, it would explain one crucial way in which the film differs from conventional “noble savage” mysticism. Rather than ground the Na’vi’s grooviness in their folklore or spiritual purity, the film instead presents the vision of a direct and material communications link with the plant mind. Which means that Eywa (aka Aya) does not have to be believed—she can be experienced. After the temporary fusion with the Tree of Souls that fails to prevent her death, Weaver’s chain-smoking left-brain doctor happily confirms Ewya’s existence. Like the Vine of Souls now wending its way through the developed world, the Tree of Souls becomes a kind of bio-mystical media, a visionary communications matrix that uplinks the souls of the dead and the network mind of the ecosphere itself.

Italian digital artists are still slowly creating their own niche with special exhibitions and competitions in order to reach the public and gain recognition.  Through this activity they are diminishing the distrust and skepticism many people have toward the media and educating them to the creative potential of digital technology.

To open a space in this world still under exploration, I want talk about an interesting and evocative artist: Japi Honoo. She’s in the fact an Italian artist, but linked to Japanese culture by an inexplicable affinity. Self-taught, she was fond of drawing since her childhood, and began her artistic journey through a progressive empirical  knowledge of digital art and the application of photo manipulation. Japi uses such programs as Photoshop and Illustrator  to reinterpret and express obsessions and fantasies that had also been the focus of  such great surrealist artists  as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. The central theme of her work is the female body; manipulated, distorted and extended until reaching the Whole. The delicate and almost impalpable colours in her pictures  evoke  the gentle and dreamy atmosphere of Japanese aesthetics and artistic  tradition.

Japi Honoo describes her imagery as stories of  her  “state of mind”.  Her stories  express  “feeling out of time and belong to every age.”  For Japi, digital techniques can assume  the same function as the paint brush, enabling her  to create new worlds and possibilities for the interpretation of femininity. Subject to reinterpretation are the central and eternal themes of the feminine dimension: sexuality, vanity, body degeneration, pregnancy and maternity. To do this, she utilizes the bodies of models who reflect the current concept of beauty, and then distorts them, creating and alienation in the viewer that raises questions and concerns regarding all the aforementioned feminine themes. Japi says that this artistic choice is due to her indifference to  “perfection” and instead prefers the “single being “.  She wants to  “give an authentic  life to those bodies, so they can tell personal and universal stories”. Visionary artists  may indulge in various technical and creative strategies.  They can follow the knowledge and path of the  Old Masters’ techniques, like the mixed technique of egg tempera and oils as employed by Ernst Fuchs, or they can explore new media, as  is  happening with artists like Peter Gric or Japi Honoo. Whatever route they choose the destination is always the same: to create worlds full of artistic sensitivity and ecstasy in which the viewer is invited to become  immersed.