any modern human intervention – not least that of the filmmakers themselves.6
It is on this level that the documentaries’ heterotopic function becomes fully evident. As noted earlier, for Foucault heterotopias involve the juxtaposition of worlds, but this in a manner that simultaneously represents, contests, or inverts what is juxtaposed. Series such as Life on Earth not only appeared to bring together all the “real sites” of nature, but did so in a manner that involved an ideological inversion: more often than not, the filmmakers went to extraordinarily lengths to eliminate any evidence of modern human intervention in habitats which had in fact been modified, however subtly, by such intervention.
This inversion has nevertheless gone largely unnoticed. Even today, criticism of the genre tends to be centered on the numerous “fake” zoo scenes introduced by the filmmakers to scenes ostensibly shot in the wild (see, e.g., Singh 2011). In the late 1980s, when Parsons’s idea for Wildwalk started to come to fruition, even these relatively crude interventions were generally not acknowledged or debated. In the United Kingdom, the BBC’s blue-chip wildlife documentaries commanded not just a remarkable cultural authority but huge audiences. Overseas, the success of the NHU’s output translated into a significant profit for the BBC via series that were often coproduced with US organizations. In 1996 a new joint venture with Discovery Communications (Animal Planet) generated wall-to-wall wildlife TV (Cottle 2004).
In this context, it is hardly surprising that Parsons’s proposals were well received by Bristol City Council. If Parsons could bank on the global success of series such Life on Earth, he could also bank on the success of his ventures within Bristol itself, including the Wildscreen Festival, which he cofounded with World Wildlife Fund founder Peter Scott in 1982. This festival doubled up as an international trade show, complete with its own version of wildlife film Oscars, the “Pandas.” It also gave Wildwalk its first, and somewhat misleading, name (Wildscreen@Bristol).
While the NHU’s cultural authority in Bristol generated goodwill for Parsons’s project, its blue-chip documentaries’ characteristic naturalism may have led to a fundamental misunderstanding of the challenges of transmediating the blue-chip documentary mode of representation to a museum. As I explained earlier, the documentaries suggested an effortless representation of “nature itself.” To anyone not familiar with the extent of the transformations produced by the programs, or indeed the unique mobilities afforded by the medium, the idea of a “museum counterpart” of series such as Life on Earth might well have seemed not just desirable, but eminently plausible, with its success virtually guaranteed. If so, the very naturalism that was such an integral part of the success of the blue-chip genre may well have been the beginning of the undoing of Wildwalk.
Wildwalk and the “new zoos”
In 1983 health problems forced Parsons to step down as head of the NHU, but he continued at the BBC until 1988 as head of Natural History Development, a position that involved searching for new commercial possibilities for the NHU and BBC Enterprises. In an interview that Parsons gave Attenborough a couple of years before he died, he suggested that it was during this period that he had the idea of a new kind of visitor attraction:
while I was head of development, I’d, one of the ideas which I tried to get [BBC] [E]nterprises involved with was a rather different type of visitor attraction, which I called the Electronic Zoo. The reason for this was that, that I’d become very disenchanted with existing zoos. I’d become rung up, during the years that I was Head of Development, I was constantly being rung up by Natural History Museums and Zoos, and, who were really sort of begging for bits of film, and for advice on how to run bits of audio-visual exhibits. And I just felt, well this, we shouldn’t be gluing on audio-visual exhibits onto existing zoos and museums, it’s not going to be very successful. But there is a good case for actually using the resources of our industry, and creating a different type of attraction, which is going to be much more holistic. (Parsons 2001)
In the same interview, Parsons also noted that he’d attended a meeting in the United States with several leading zoologists, which clearly marked a key point in the development of his ideas. At this meeting there was a sense of growing environmental crisis that needed to be urgently addressed. The meeting was attended by Paul Erhlich, Peter Raven, and Tom Lovejoy, and so it may be deduced that one of its central concerns was the promotion of the then new concept of biodiversity as a cornerstone of a new ethic of conservationism. Henceforth, biodiversity would become a key theme in Parson’s plans for Wildwalk.7
After 1988, Parsons set up a company devoted to making natural history documentaries for IMAX-affiliated theaters around the world. This company brought him into contact with museums associated with such theaters. Equally, the new business generated profits that Parsons devoted entirely to the promotion of the Wildwalk idea (Parsons 2001), which he conceived as an “electronic zoo.” Today, such a zoo might be described as a “virtual zoo”; Parsons’s choice of words reflected the vocabulary of his time: at a time when the Internet had not yet materialized, he anticipated that the “electronic revolution,” which had been “made possible by the development of micro-chips,” “would undoubtedly have a profound effect on wildlife television as well as the rest of the industry” (Parsons 1982, 361).
In fact, zoos had already been transformed, at least partly by the success of older forms of TV production. During the 1980s zoos had begun their own far-reaching dynamic of transmediation, a dynamic which would in some respects influence the design of Wildwalk itself. An account of the changes in zoos is thus required in order to explain this influence, and also to explain how Wildwalk in turn translated the transformations.
When Parsons began his career in television, zoos played a key role in natural history television. During the 1950s television producers regularly transmediated the zoos’ modes of representation and their characteristic techniques of display to the context of early broadcast television. They borrowed zoo animals and their curators to make programs that were little more than televised keeper talks. As Attenborough put it in his memoirs, “The most successful animal programme on television in the early 1950s was a series in which George Cansdale, then Curator of Mammals in the London Zoo, exhibited his charges on a large table covered by a door mat” (2002, 31).
The programs were, if anything, a poor version of a zoo naturalism which, until the early 1960s if not much later, was usually based on three main criteria: guaranteeing the visibility of animals to visitors; keeping animals in (and visitors out of) enclosures; and maintaining asepsis. In practice this meant that animals were often displayed in relatively small displays with hard surfaces. These displays prevailed because the popular appeal of zoos for most visitors continued to rest on two contradictory pleasures: first, experiencing in close proximity the sheer living presence of what were thought to be wild animals; and, second, experiencing the character of zoos as the “original” heterotopias of nature, understood in quasi-encyclopedic terms, as a kind of tour of all the major animal classes, or later as something akin to an ABC book of nature for children.
The underlying semeiotics of this naturalism can be clarified by returning to Peirce. Insofar as each specimen in a zoo is an actual occurrence of a species, it is not just an index, but what Peirce terms a sinsign. As he puts it, “A Sinsign (where the syllable sin is taken as meaning ‘being only once,’ as in single, simple, Latin semel, etc.) is an actual existent thing or event which is a sign. It can only be so through its qualities”: a sinsign forms a sign “through being actually embodied” (Peirce 1998, 291). A banal but good example is a buzzer that makes itself known by the actual event of buzzing.
Despite being almost literally framed by zoo displays (in enclosures with bars, or indeed other less obvious barriers), zoo animals have traditionally been displayed as if they were no more (and no less) than iconic sinsigns, that is, as if they were simply themselves, which is to say “wild animals,” albeit “in captivity.” As such, their presence in zoos has more often than not been interpreted
