explain below, in Wildwalk these aspects were nevertheless recontextualized in a manner that sought to link them to the symbolism of a science museum specializing in teaching about evolution and the rise of biodiversity. If Parsons was critical of zoos’ conservationist claims, he was equally critical of most zoos’ focus on the megafauna. In his words, the zoos
concentrated mainly on big vertebrates, they do very little on invertebrates. And if you actually look at biodiversity, you suddenly realise that it’s actually a very small segment of the world’s biodiversity. And their education was very much tied to this, and at a time when I just felt people should just be much more aware of the true extent of biodiversity and how the planet was being worked by animals; run by wildlife, by nature, it was actually not very constructive. (Parsons 2001)
As this quote makes clear, Parsons objected not to zoos per se, but to the limitations of most zoos’ heterotopic “menu.” This objection seems contradictory when it is considered that the heterotopic practice of natural history documentaries had itself privileged megafauna, apex predators, and a highly restricted selection of “charismatic” animals. The limited nature of Parsons’s zoo critique, and his awareness of the pedagogic potential of zoo animals as dynamical objects, doubtless explains why he was happy for Wildwalk to include live animals – albeit a collection of “minifauna” as opposed to the more traditional zoos’ “megafauna.”
Wildwalk as a hybrid museum
By now it will be clear that Wildwalk made its own classification complex by transmediating several very different traditions of representation and display. It is no coincidence that, during its lifetime, the attraction was characterized by its designers, architects, and promoters in a variety of ways: as a “multimedia wildlife center,” a “natural history exhibition,” a “natural history center,” an “ecology science center,” and as I noted above, an “electronic zoo” by Parsons himself.
The At-Bristol charity itself classified the overall At-Bristol complex as a science center, thereby defining Wildwalk as a science center as well. This is ironic given the disastrous implication from the point of view of state funding. It is also peculiar given the fact that, in the early 1990s, John Durant, At-Bristol’s first chief executive after the complex opened and a leading figure in Britain’s Public Understanding of Science (PUS) movement, offered a characterization of science museums and centers which located Wildwalk firmly in the former type. He characterized science centers as generally consisting of one or more relatively open spaces with freestanding interactive exhibits which visitors play with in order to arrive at an understanding of a scientific or technological principle. By contrast, he characterized science museums as having smaller, relatively closed spaces with a mixture of permanent and temporary exhibitions which are scripted around a “story” about a particular area of science and technology. Such a story, he suggested, is told by way of a variety of objects, captions, interactives, and audiovisual/electronic media (Durant 1992).
This account notwithstanding, a case can also be made that Wildwalk was a “participatory” museum, an instance of the genre that San Francisco’s Exploratorium has often been credited with having started in 1969, and which has an explicitly pedagogical and even emancipatory function (Hein 1990). The Exploratorium made use of the theories of Richard Gregory (Henning 2006, 85), a Bristol-based psychologist of perception who, in 1978, opened up his own science center in Bristol known as Exploratory. Exploratory was the first British science center, and At-Bristol was designed to replace it. Central to both institutions’ approach was the idea of constructing exhibits that not only gave visitors center stage, but enabled them to “have fun exploring their own sensory and cognitive responses” (Henning 2006, 85).
In Wildwalk, such explorations were not an end in themselves, but part of an effort to render intelligible scientific knowledge, a key function of the new kind of science museum/center (Hein 1990). Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this was the hands-on character of the displays and the attraction’s many audiovisual consoles, which used games to teach about individual species (or ecological phenomena) even as they attempted to make tangible a broader theory of evolution. More than evolution per se, Wildwalk sought to illustrate the principle of a growing (evolutionary) biodiversity via a peripatetic narrative about the origin and growing complexity of life on earth.
Architecturally speaking, it did so via a “black box,” with a botanical house at the front and an IMAX theater at the back. Its entrance prefigured the aforementioned narrative by way of a curving corridor that began with four large photographs showing different biomes, and then moved on to smaller and smaller images of particular life forms: the photographic building blocks, as it were, of nature. These were followed by a time line that started with a straight line representing the present but ended up spiraling “back” (in walked direction, forward) to the emergence of life on the planet. Quoted along the top of this time line was a famous fragment of On the Origin of Species: “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” The quote was taken from the last sentence of On the Origin of Species, which stated in its modified version (which added “by the Creator”) that
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (Darwin [1872] 1994, 428–429)
And “cycling,” or circling, was what Wildwalk required its visitors to do: the attraction set out a route which spiraled across the building and over two floors. This route was divided up into several distinct spaces and galleries. The first space, on the ground floor, comprised two galleries, “A Simple Beginning” and “Building Bodies.” Offset to one side was a dark atrium spanning the entire height of the black box, whose main feature was an abstract light sculpture, superimposed on large screens with images. As the lights came on and off, they interacted with the screens, representing the progression in time from the simplest to the most complex life forms. In this, as in the rest of the interior spaces of the museum, an overall chiaroscuro but futuristic lighting effect was combined with the gaudy, almost cartoonesque colors associated with the work of John Czáky Associates, one of Britain’s leading interior design companies for museums and exhibitions.
As in the first episodes of Life on Earth, the first half of Wildwalk’s ground floor was devoted to the beginning of life in the oceans. “A Simple Beginning” described the start of life via single-celled organisms, primarily via screens with looping montages, and via simple touch screens. Building Bodies – the same title as that of the second episode of Life on Earth – then explained how single-celled organisms evolved to become complex multicellular organisms. This space combined casts of fossils, which visitors could see and touch, and aquariums with live invertebrates and fish.
After observing the aquariums, visitors crossed a threshold in the form of a doorway between the relative darkness of the first two galleries and the daylight of the first of two immersive exhibits (“Plants on Land”) situated in the botanical house. This threshold – and three later ones involving similar passages from dark to light/light to dark – was the closest that the peripatetic narrative came to having an “edit point” of the kind that allowed Life on Earth to engage in the forms of ubiquitization that it pioneered. In Wildwalk such a transition took visitors not so much from one era to another, but to different life forms.
In some respects this space contradicted the raison d’être of the kind of immersion found in the more spectacular zoo displays. On the one hand, the ETFE “tent” used to allow sunlight into the botanical house meant that visitors could look out of the attraction, and see the utilitarian buildings of the Canon’s Marsh regeneration. On the other hand, the plants in the exhibit were meant to re/present not an existing biome (as was often the case in zoos), but the evolution and growing complexity of plants on land: visitors made their way up a serpentine walkway that took them
