based on a theory about the likely origins of plant life on land and, second, that this part of the botanical house was closer to a botanic garden than to a zoo display. The only concession to a zoo-like rhematism was the inclusion of live butterflies, which flew above the eons represented by the different kinds of plants.
At the end of the serpentine walkway, visitors reached a second threshold that took them back to the first floor of the black box. Immediately to the left of the entry point, visitors encountered an ironically tiny gallery – really only a recess – about the “Forgotten Kingdom”: fungi. The rest of the first floor was divided into two galleries: “Land Legs,” and “Living Planet.” The former gallery was, like “Plants on Land,” meant to trace the evolutionary shift from sea to land – but this time with respect to the animal kingdom. It also offered a tour of the major classes of land-based fauna, with much of the space devoted to invertebrates, as per Parsons’s critique of zoos’ emphasis on megafauna. Consequently, all of the animals on display were relatively small, and they were re/presented in relatively modest enclosures with little or no landscaping. Indeed, far from being instances of the newer zoos’ tableaux vivants or indeed the almost alive nature morte of the dioramas of natural history museums, many of these displays were “jewel box” or terrarium-like displays of the kind that zoos often intersperse in indoor exhibits.
Where zoos might accompany such displays with a printed sign with the name of the species and limited information about its natural history, Wildwalk’s living animals were meant to be viewed in association with interactive consoles which used video segments to show aspects of the displayed creatures’ ecology. The audiovisual elements had a certain independence, and so could be viewed on their own or in tandem with the exhibits of live animals. But the consoles’ footage, an instance of transmediation in its own right, was devoid of the kind of narratives found in actual TV wildlife documentaries; it followed a logic of frame, shot, and montage, but was shorn of the kind of narrativization found in the TV programs.
The peripatetic nature of the viewing experience, and the need for brevity in order to maximize throughput presumably precluded the type of storytelling found in the documentaries. However, deprived of this narrative structuring, much of the footage provided by the consoles arguably lost a key element of the appeal of the documentaries. More importantly, the absence of this narrativization also limited the genre’s characteristic use of ellipses, the out-of-field and voice-over narration as a way of linking up the various parts to a broader pedagogic message of the kind featured in Life on Earth.
In this context, one risk from the point of view of Wildwalk’s pedagogic ambition was that the combination of live and audiovisual displays might fail to produce a more meaningful whole. At the same time, the conjunction of live and audiovisual displays might imply an equivalence, or perhaps even a hierarchy between the dynamical and the immediate objects, with the latter taking precedence in the design if not in the actual observation of the displays.
This issue was particularly evident in a display innovation with a small video camera installed in one of the terrarium-like tanks. The camera could be manipulated by visitors to take shots of a living insect. At a time when consumer video cameras were still not as ubiquitous as they are now, the possibility of just playing with a miniature video camera might well lead to unexpected discoveries of the kind promoted by participatory science museums. It nonetheless raised the question: why this exception to consoles otherwise driven by relatively mechanistic and closed software? Was this not simply a celebration of video technology for its own sake?
As is so often the case in participatory science museums, Wildwalk had numerous consoles and exhibits which were organized around a ludic logic. This logic was evident throughout the museum thanks to the playful, cartoonesque qualities of the colors and frames mentioned earlier. But, in many cases, playfulness was also evident in consoles and larger exhibits organized around actual games. The implicit, or as I call it the “nonformal” (Lindahl Elliot 2006a) pedagogic dimension of some of the games was not always sufficiently thought through; for example, a display called “The Hunting Gallery” used mock rifles, of the kind normally found in shooting arcades, to invite visitors to “shoot” species on the verge of extinction. A screen next to the arcade then explained what threats faced the species being targeted. It seems that Wildwalk’s designers were entirely unaware of the irony of this pedagogic choice.
Where “Land Legs” focused on the natural history of particular taxa, the second gallery, “Living Planet,” attempted to engage in more ecosystematic representations, framed as simulations of particular biomes. As described by the attraction’s promotional literature, these simulations were designed to be immersive in their own right; in the words of At-Bristol’s description of one such simulation, they should allow visitors to “experience what it is like to join an Antarctic penguin colony, without freezing to death.”
An exit at the end of this display, another edit point between dark and light allowed visitors to enter the second half of the botanical house, which had an exhibit called “Tropical Forests.” Here, too, there was a serpentine walkway, which this time led down to a simulation of a rainforest. This was, however, a heterotopic, and indeed hyperreal, rainforest in the sense of the term used by Jean Baudrillard (1994): the display was not an effort to represent a particular forest, but all tropical forests “in general.” As Wildwalk’s promotional literature put it, the display had plants “from all tropical continents,” and hence it echoed the placelessness that has arguably haunted many blue-chip documentary representations of tropical forests. While the documentaries usually identify the general geographical location of the forests, they often overlook the geographical and botanical particularities of forest structures in favor of representations of idealized “jungles,” densely vegetated and “teeming with wildlife.”
Alas, this exhibit was not as densely planted as those in many equivalent zoo displays, and here again the transparency of the ETFE panes that covered the botanical house limited the extent of the immersion: the “view” this time was north, to a busy thoroughfare (Anchor Road) and the buildings alongside it. Nor was it “teeming with wildlife”; while it included a living colony of leafcutter ants, an aquarium representing the “flooded forest,” and several species of birds, a visitor might wander through this display and not notice any “wildlife” until s/he reached the aquarium at the very end of the walkway. Despite this, the display did make use of zoo-like techniques to recreate ambient sounds, and to instrumentalize them by way of devices designed to produce the kind of pedagogy of the senses which I have described in the context of the newer zoos (see Lindahl Elliot 2006b), and which Henning (2006) notes is central to the hands-on science education movement. In the case of “Tropical Forests,” devices along the walkway invited visitors to press buttons in order to “call up your own sounds of the forest.”
The exit from this last quasi-exterior space took visitors into the final space. Early in the attraction’s life, this was known as “People and the Planet,” and there was an “environmental news room” with a series of workstations where visitors were invited to explore a variety of environmental issues. In some respects, this room was a prefiguration of ARKive, a web-based archive of wildlife footage which Parsons conceived as a separate project, and which came to fruition in 2003, a year after he died (see www.arkive.org). However, this section was eventually replaced by a walk-through “coral reef” with an acrylic tunnel of the kind that has become de rigueur in major aquariums, designed to give visitors an almost literal sense of immersion. This addition was to foreshadow the future of the building, which in 2009 was transformed – indeed, transmediated in its entirety – to make way for an aquarium run by the Blue Reef chain.
After walking through this part of the final space, visitors entered a gallery that represented various ways of recycling the by-products of consumer culture’s excesses. Ironically, thereafter visitors departed via a final “gallery,” the museum’s shop, itself a traditional citadel of consumption.
Science centers have generally contributed
