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Nils Lindahl Elliot

Can the design of a museum so blur the boundaries between its own genre and those of other media – for example, the media of mass communication, or indeed the newer digital media – so as to transform the museum into something akin to a peripatetic version of those media? Is such a transformation not only feasible but desirable? And if it is, what challenges do designers face in the quest for what can be termed the “mediazation” of museums?

I understand mediazation in much the same way as John B. Thompson (1990), that is, as the process by which a growing number of spheres of modern culture have come to be affected directly and indirectly by the media of mass communication and, more recently, by the technologies associated with the so-called digital culture. While the political sphere offers perhaps the most obvious example of the process in question, mediazation has affected countless other fields, ranging from everyday consumption and lifestyle choices to the structuring of the leisure industry itself.

Museums are no exception. Museum designers have long sought to find ways of incorporating changing techniques and technologies of mediated representation within existing genres of display. In one recent intervention, the director of the Clevedon Museum of Art put mediazation in dramatic focus when he suggested that “Every museum is searching for this holy grail, this blending of technology and art.” He did so in reference to his own institution’s much celebrated incorporation of tablet computers as a means by which visitors could locate artworks within the institution and engage in a variety of interactive practices (Bernstein 2013).

For every generation of museum designers, and for every generation of new technologies, different design challenges may be identified which appear to be prompted by the latest innovations. In fact, the innovations at once reflect and affect social semiotic ecologies whose delicate interrelations go far beyond technology in any narrowly instrumental sense of the term. In this chapter I illustrate this point by engaging in a case study of a museum that was conceived at the crossover of the so-called electronic and digital revolutions. Wildscreen opened in July 2000 in Bristol, England, as part of an all-new £94 million complex of technology, science, and nature-related visitor attractions. The complex, initially known as @Bristol, was built at Canon’s Marsh, in Bristol’s harborside: it included Explore, a hands-on science center; an IMAX cinema, the first of its kind in the west of England; and Wildscreen itself, a science museum with a focus on natural history and biodiversity.

FIGURE 3.1 Wildwalk, Bristol, UK.

Photo: Mark Boyce, February 3, 2007.

Wildscreen was very much a hybrid science museum, combining modes of representation and display typically found in natural history museums – for example, fossil casts and accounts of the nature of the evolutionary process – with consoles of the kind associated with science centers and participatory science museums (Figure 3.1). At the same time, Wildscreen had numerous living animals on display, and included a walk-through botanical house, one part of which evoked the kind of immersive simulacra of tropical forests often found in the newest generations of zoos.

The most radical aspect of the attraction was its least obvious one to the visiting public: it was conceived as a walk-through version of a wildlife documentary. The museum’s originator, the late Christopher Parsons, was an internationally acclaimed wildlife documentary producer, and he proposed to create what he called an “electronic zoo,” in a reference to the changes made possible in part by the incorporation of charge-coupled devices (CCDs) in video and television. Wildscreen’s architects later described the attraction as “the museum counterpart to the BBC’s Natural History Unit” (Hopkins Architects 2000), which Parsons himself led between 1979 and 1983. This unit, known by its acronym as the NHU, is the BBC department responsible for the production of BBC wildlife documentaries, including the blockbuster documentaries presented by Sir David Attenborough from 1979 onward.

In the year it opened, large numbers of visitors traveled to see @Bristol thanks to a massive publicity campaign and the project’s association with Britain’s millennium celebrations. However, after the first year, it became clear that @Bristol would fail to attract the required number of visitors – a number which Gillian Thomas, @Bristol’s chief executive during the building and opening phase, described as a “modest” 200,000 visitors per attraction per year.¹ A name change from Wildscreen to Wildwalk and a shift in emphasis from the then futuristic “@ Bristol” to the almost pleonastic “At-Bristol” failed to improve attendance levels. By 2006, Wildwalk was attracting fewer than 150,000 visitors, and a significant proportion of these visitors were school groups.² While this was by no means an insignificant figure, it was financially unsustainable for an institution whose running costs were comparatively high thanks to the display of living animals and a climate-controlled botanical house.

The IMAX theater also failed to produce the required attendance level. Once the start-up funds for the overall complex were used up, At-Bristol was forced to carry two underperforming attractions. Its classification as a science center meant that the complex could not benefit from the state subsidies given in the United Kingdom to museums, and so, in early 2007, the trustees of the charity that ran At-Bristol decided to sacrifice Wildwalk and the IMAX and to focus all available resources on the Explore science center.

It seems likely that, if there had been a different funding regime for science centers, Wildwalk would have managed to survive. In this chapter I will nonetheless argue that the attraction failed to fulfill the expected potential for reasons to do with the overall design of the complex and with Wildwalk’s own characteristic form of mediazation. At-Bristol effectively pitted two relatively expensive and science-based attractions against each other. This problem was compounded by the fact that Bristol City Council had contradictory aims for the regeneration of the Canon’s Marsh district. The overall site was forced to be at once a futuristic showcase for the city’s reputation for high-tech science and technology, and a historic harborside designed to attract heritage tourism. This meant that, even as Wildwalk was fronted by a late nineteenth-century leadworks made with the rubble of gray Pennant sandstone and quaintly decorated with Bath stone quoins and dressings, there stood just behind this building an impressive ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) roof which covered the attraction’s tropical house. This dramatic contrast was a visible manifestation of an architectural formalism that undermined several aspects of the building’s function, a factor which itself may have weakened the attraction.³

Problems like these notwithstanding, I shall make the case that perhaps the main reason why Wildwalk failed to fulfill its potential was that its exhibits engaged in problematic dynamics of transmediation (Lindahl Elliot 2006a, 47). Such dynamics are a key aspect of mediazation, and involve the transposition of aspects of a mode of representation or display from one context to another. As I began to note above, Wildwalk attempted to recombine elements of various genres in order to create a peripatetic version of a wildlife TV documentary. I use “peripatetic” in reference to the walked nature of the attraction, but also to refer to the original etymology of the word, which invokes the legend of Aristotle teaching while walking around the colonnaded Lyceum in Athens. Wildwalk was designed to teach visitors about the evolution of life on earth, and more specifically, about the evolution of biodiversity on the planet. It is on this level that it is possible to identify and analyze what were at once the most provocative, and arguably the most problematic, aspects of Wildwalk’s design.

The analysis I offer will intertwine two methodologies. The first, a social semeiotic⁴ approach drawing on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, will identify the characteristic signs employed by each of the different modes of representation and/or display, and will chart the changes produced by their transmediation within Wildwalk. The second methodology will employ a genealogical mode of inquiry to at once problematize and historicize those same modes (Foucault 1984).