of communication, but also a horizon of expectation shared by the audience. The lived logic of this generic “inertia” may ultimately escape even the most carefully planned transmediations. This is a problem that was reflected in Wildwalk’s struggle not just to achieve higher attendance levels, but to find an appropriate name and description for itself. The attraction’s changing names may be taken as an index, in Peirce’s sense of the term, of the challenges of transmediation.
Notes
1 1 Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, Minutes of Evidence, Examination of Witnesses, June 15, 2000, Question 134, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmcumeds/578/0061521.htm (accessed July 22, 2014).
2 2 Statistic provided in 2006 to the author by Marie Orchard, the manager of Wildwalk at the time of its closure.
3 3 An article in the Architects’ Journal referred to Wildscreen director Anne Finnie’s sense that the building’s entrance had stressed the entrance to the IMAX to the disadvantage of Wildwalk’s displays (Melvin 2000). The Wildwalk foyer also had such bad acoustics that two school groups together created an unacceptable level of noise. Moreover, the main access to an education suite on the top floor was by a lift which was unsuitable for use by all but very small groups (Rogers 2004). Catherine Aldridge, the director of learning of At-Bristol, summed up the problems politely when she noted in 2004 that the design of Wildwalk was more “architecture-led than looking at day-to-day practicalities” (quoted in Rogers 2004, 24).
4 4 The extra e is added to “semiotics” to highlight the fact that my approach is based on the work of Peirce (1931–1958), as opposed to poststructuralist approaches based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure.
5 5 “January 1979 – Life on Earth – The Nation Is Hooked,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0166zhl (accessed July 22, 2014).
6 6 Filmmakers have on occasion been caught transporting specimens illegally across national borders for the purpose of “studio-based” filming. For example, in 2003 there was a scandal when an award-winning British filmmaker and conservationist, Michael Linley, pleaded guilty in a court in Western Australia to a series of charges involving animal smuggling. See “Briton Admits Animal Smuggling,” BBC News, October 30, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3227433.stm (accessed July 22, 2014). Parsons himself hinted at this kind of practice in True to Nature (1982).
7 7 An account of the history of the concept of biodiversity, and its impact on Wildwalk, is beyond the scope of this chapter. For an account of how biodiversity was launched as a key theme in modern conservationism, see Wilson 1988.
8 8 For example, in the United States zoos in locations as diverse as Minnesota, Houston, and Oregon reported record attendance levels in 2007–2008.
9 9 As Peirce himself put it, “we have to distinguish the Immediate Object, which is the Object as the Sign itself represents it, and whose Being is thus dependent upon the Representation of it in the Sign, from the Dynamical Object, which is the Reality which by some means contrives to determine the Sign to its Representation” (1931–1958, vol. 4, para. 536).
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