case, this movement was at once confirmed and contradicted by the transmediations I have just outlined. Wildwalk’s overall organization as a peripatetic narrative about the evolution and growing complexity of life on earth was clearly meant to be grounded in theory. In a science museum, objects – in Peirce’s sense of dynamical and immediate objects – are typically employed at once as an observational hook, and as an illustration of a phenomenon, be it a scientific principle, a natural law, or a technological procedure or practice. The illustration hinges on a multimodal form of communication, which itself typically involves text on walls, display surfaces close to the object or, more recently, in screens or consoles. While the object may be what initially engages the visitor, the hierarchy of the display and its characteristic naturalism generally privilege the communication of arguments via linguistic symbols, numbers, diagrams, or other similarly abstract signs. For Peirce, arguments are conventional signs which “tend to the truth” via symbols and “legisigns” (1998, 296). Legisigns are general types, or “laws,” which is to say conventions, established by people (291). Symbols, Peirce noted, “afford the means of thinking about thoughts in ways in which we could not otherwise think of them. They enable us, for example, to create Abstractions, without which we should lack a great engine of discovery” (1931–1958, vol. 4, para. 531). From this perspective, in Wildwalk the mixture of multimediated consoles, inanimate objects such as fossil casts, and living beings such as plants and animals were the narrative vehicles of an overarching “plot” that was itself abstract.
A case can nonetheless be made that the kind of transmediation that took place in the attraction actually undermined this semeiotic and its corresponding pedagogic function. As has long been true in zoos themselves, the rhematism, or what Peirce himself would also describe as the “firstness” of live animals, might actually work against the kind of abstraction required by Wildwalk’s pedagogic function. When confronted with living, breathing creatures, visitors might do no more (and no less) than focus on the creatures themselves, which is to say, the sheer presence of their shapes, their movements, and so forth.
Of course, this tendency might be controlled, or redirected by way of texts, graphics, and interactives. But such a strategy was vulnerable to a rather more grievous problem: that in the effort to promote the transition from iconic sinsign to argument (in Peirce’s sense of the term), the museum might end up using living creatures as little more than a prop, an instrumental means to an end of the kind that animal rights protestors have rightly critiqued in the context of zoos.
There was, finally, also the risk that the numerous audiovisual consoles in Wildwalk, unaccompanied by explanations of their workings or of the manner in which their footage was acquired, might well be reduced to black boxes in their own right: black boxes not in the architectural, but in the engineering or cybernetic, sense of the term, which is to say, devices that might be viewed only in terms of the output – in this case, machine-like representations whose provenance and characteristic semeiotic remained unknown and unquestioned. In this context, the absence of reflection on the making of wildlife representations (in TV and elsewhere) meant that Wildwalk lost an opportunity to become an emancipatory space of the kind associated with the most critical participatory science museums.
Conclusions
In True to Nature, Parsons explained that when he first proposed a “definitive natural history series” to the BBC’s senior management, his series was to be “the television equivalent of all the glossy Time-Life nature books and other noted coffee table volumes rolled up into 20 programmes” (1982, 310). If, in the early 1970s, Parsons proposed to engage in the transmediation of the then prominent genre of the nature coffee table books, in the late 1980s he proposed to engage in an analogous translation: to revolutionize zoos and museums by creating an “electronic” zoo – or what might equally be described as an electronic science museum.
That he could gather the resources to build it suggests an affirmative answer to the first question that I posed in the introduction to this chapter: a museum, or rather a museum designer, can so blur the boundaries between the museum genre and a medium of mass communication as to transform the museum into what I have described as a peripatetic version of whatever medium is transmediated. There is, however, always a gap between what is said and what is done, and indeed between what is said and what is done in saying. It is clear that Wildwalk was no more a peripatetic version of a wildlife documentary than Life on Earth was itself an audiovisual version of Time-Life coffee table books. Both were sui generis media which might be linked in various ways to earlier media, but which had a semeiotic logic completely different from that of their ostensive predecessors.
What was true for Wildwalk is bound to be true for any such attempt in any other context: the genres of wildlife documentaries, zoological gardens, and science museums have intricate and subtle cultural ecologies; while it might seem that success in one medium, one technology may provide a springboard for success in another, this chapter has made clear that decontexualizing aspects of any one mode or genre, let alone several, and then transposing them to another, is likely to lead to semeiotic transformation – at times, completely unforeseen transformation.
Such change is more likely if one takes for granted that any one genre’s techniques of observation are inherently superior to those of another. It seems clear, for example, that Parsons assumed that the mobility afforded by a cinematographic observer was necessarily a good thing; the same was true of his attempt to build on the apparent rhematism of living plants and animals in zoos. But in the context of participatory science museums, Exploratorium founder and physicist Frank Oppenheimer once explained why the opposite might be true:
Sightseeing through these media [classrooms and television films] resembles sightings from the windows of trains that are unstoppable, irreversible, and dominated more by the smells, sounds, and motions of the train than by the landscape. Sightseeing is invariably unsatisfactory where the main concern is a rush toward a destination or a need to catch the next train. The best kind of sightseeing involves some exploration and the freedom to decide what not to investigate and where to linger. The more one can become involved with the sights through touching, feeling, smelling, and activity, the more rewarding it can be. It is nice to be able to linger and backtrack. (Oppenheimer 1972, 980)
Unforeseen semeiotic dynamics are also more likely if it is assumed that modes of representation are automatically amenable to recombination. Wildwalk illustrated this problem insofar as it did what Parsons himself criticized in museums and zoos, namely, at times it simply “glued on” audiovisual images to object-based displays. Worse, the attraction’s black box, in both the architectural and cybernetic senses described earlier, at times seemed to “glue” real animals to the visitor attraction, with little more than a superficial regard for the pedagogic consequences of this remarkable inversion.
The reference to pedagogy leads me to a final point. In environmental education it is common to make a distinction between formal and informal modes of pedagogic communication. Less acknowledged is something akin to the “shadow” of both of those modes, a nonformal mode, for which something may be taught without being taught, and something may be learned without being learned (Lindahl Elliot 2006a, 4). Neither the science educator nor the museum attendee set out to teach or learn something deliberately, but something is nevertheless taught and learned unselfconsciously.
In Wildwalk’s case, Parsons wished not only to promote a better understanding of biodiversity, but to convey the beauty and sheer magnificence of the evolutionary process. However, anecdotic evidence gathered by staff at Wildwalk and during my own observations at the museum suggested that many visitors failed to perceive the overarching narrative about growing evolutionary complexity. On the contrary, many thronged around either the exhibits that were more zoo-like (e.g., the aquariums or the tropical house), or those that offered opportunities for instrumentalizing relations with nature (e.g., “The Hunting Gallery”), and did so oblivious of questions of evolution, biodiversity, let alone growing complexity.
The
