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In 1983 health problems forced Parsons to step down as head of the NHU, but he continued at the BBC until 1988 as head of Natural History Development, a position that involved searching for new commercial possibilities for the NHU and BBC Enterprises. In an interview that Parsons gave Attenborough a couple of years before he died, he suggested that it was during this period that he had the idea of a new kind of visitor attraction:

while I was head of development, I’d, one of the ideas which I tried to get [BBC] [E]nterprises involved with was a rather different type of visitor attraction, which I called the Electronic Zoo. The reason for this was that, that I’d become very disenchanted with existing zoos. I’d become rung up, during the years that I was Head of Development, I was constantly being rung up by Natural History Museums and Zoos, and, who were really sort of begging for bits of film, and for advice on how to run bits of audio-visual exhibits. And I just felt, well this, we shouldn’t be gluing on audio-visual exhibits onto existing zoos and museums, it’s not going to be very successful. But there is a good case for actually using the resources of our industry, and creating a different type of attraction, which is going to be much more holistic. (Parsons 2001)

In the same interview, Parsons also noted that he’d attended a meeting in the United States with several leading zoologists, which clearly marked a key point in the development of his ideas. At this meeting there was a sense of growing environmental crisis that needed to be urgently addressed. The meeting was attended by Paul Erhlich, Peter Raven, and Tom Lovejoy, and so it may be deduced that one of its central concerns was the promotion of the then new concept of biodiversity as a cornerstone of a new ethic of conservationism. Henceforth, biodiversity would become a key theme in Parson’s plans for Wildwalk.⁷

After 1988, Parsons set up a company devoted to making natural history documentaries for IMAX-affiliated theaters around the world. This company brought him into contact with museums associated with such theaters. Equally, the new business generated profits that Parsons devoted entirely to the promotion of the Wildwalk idea (Parsons 2001), which he conceived as an “electronic zoo.” Today, such a zoo might be described as a “virtual zoo”; Parsons’s choice of words reflected the vocabulary of his time: at a time when the Internet had not yet materialized, he anticipated that the “electronic revolution,” which had been “made possible by the development of micro-chips,” “would undoubtedly have a profound effect on wildlife television as well as the rest of the industry” (Parsons 1982, 361).

In fact, zoos had already been transformed, at least partly by the success of older forms of TV production. During the 1980s zoos had begun their own far-reaching dynamic of transmediation, a dynamic which would in some respects influence the design of Wildwalk itself. An account of the changes in zoos is thus required in order to explain this influence, and also to explain how Wildwalk in turn translated the transformations.

When Parsons began his career in television, zoos played a key role in natural history television. During the 1950s television producers regularly transmediated the zoos’ modes of representation and their characteristic techniques of display to the context of early broadcast television. They borrowed zoo animals and their curators to make programs that were little more than televised keeper talks. As Attenborough put it in his memoirs, “The most successful animal programme on television in the early 1950s was a series in which George Cansdale, then Curator of Mammals in the London Zoo, exhibited his charges on a large table covered by a door mat” (2002, 31).

The programs were, if anything, a poor version of a zoo naturalism which, until the early 1960s if not much later, was usually based on three main criteria: guaranteeing the visibility of animals to visitors; keeping animals in (and visitors out of) enclosures; and maintaining asepsis. In practice this meant that animals were often displayed in relatively small displays with hard surfaces. These displays prevailed because the popular appeal of zoos for most visitors continued to rest on two contradictory pleasures: first, experiencing in close proximity the sheer living presence of what were thought to be wild animals; and, second, experiencing the character of zoos as the “original” heterotopias of nature, understood in quasi-encyclopedic terms, as a kind of tour of all the major animal classes, or later as something akin to an ABC book of nature for children.

The underlying semeiotics of this naturalism can be clarified by returning to Peirce. Insofar as each specimen in a zoo is an actual occurrence of a species, it is not just an index, but what Peirce terms a sinsign. As he puts it, “A Sinsign (where the syllable sin is taken as meaning ‘being only once,’ as in single, simple, Latin semel, etc.) is an actual existent thing or event which is a sign. It can only be so through its qualities”: a sinsign forms a sign “through being actually embodied” (Peirce 1998, 291). A banal but good example is a buzzer that makes itself known by the actual event of buzzing.

Despite being almost literally framed by zoo displays (in enclosures with bars, or indeed other less obvious barriers), zoo animals have traditionally been displayed as if they were no more (and no less) than iconic sinsigns, that is, as if they were simply themselves, which is to say “wild animals,” albeit “in captivity.” As such, their presence in zoos has more often than not been interpreted as rhemes: a rheme, Peirce proposed, is “a sign which is understood to represent its Object in its characters merely” (1998, 291). From the perspective of his baroque vocabulary, zoo animals may thus be regarded as rhematic indexical sinsigns (1998, 294): the actual occurrence of so many types (sinsign), but where each occurrence is “really affected” by its object (index), and where the object in effect points at, or appears to point at, nothing other than itself (rheme): “See me, I am an Alligator”; “See me, I am a Bear”; “See me, I am a Camel”; and so forth.

So long as this “rhematism” was unquestioned, zoos were safe. However, the late 1950s and the 1960s saw the beginning of two social changes which were to generate a crisis for zoos. The first of these changes is widely recognized, and involves the rise of what became known eventually as the animal rights movement. At first, this movement entailed a relatively gentle and romantic criticism, of the kind found in books and films like Joy Adamson’s Born Free (1960 and 1966, respectively). By the 1970s, it had become a determined attack on the speciesist ethics of zoos. Animal rights activists sought not just to close down specific zoos with poor animal welfare records but to end the very genre of the zoo.

A second, often overlooked, change involved natural history television. Even as the BBC employed zoos and curators for its natural history television, some of its programs started to employ footage shot by amateurs and a few professionals beyond zoos. Eventually, the amateurs were replaced by professional BBC production teams that traveled further and further afield, making programs which might still be linked to zoos (as in the case of Attenborough’s Zoo Quest, or indeed Parsons’s work with Gerald Durrell), but which foreshadowed the development of genres that would become almost entirely independent of zoos. While zoo shows continued, by the early 1960s a growing number of wildlife TV programs were organized around footage obtained in natural reserves and other areas of outstanding ecological interest. These areas now became the symbols, which is to say the convention, the symbolic measure, of “nature itself.”

These changes meant that, during the 1970s, zoos were increasingly forced to fight a battle for survival on two fronts: even as the fundamental ethos of the zoological gardens was questioned, its underlying semeiotic was undermined by new, media-based forms of naturalism of the kind I described earlier. The most forward-thinking zoos responded in two ways.

First, they attempted to recast zoos as Noah’s arks in waiting, a reservoir of animals which might one day save whole species from extinction. In the first two or so decades, only a handful of zoos could back up such claims with bona fide ex situ and/or in situ conservation projects, and even now the validity of this kind of claim continues to be disputed (see, e.g., the PETA website or, for a more sustained analysis, Margodt 2000). Parsons himself was highly critical of the claims; as he put it in the interview with Attenborough, “I felt that zoos were making this big thing about you know, being, you know great for conservation and education. [But] apart from Gerry Durrell I thought it was a load of baloney quite frankly” (Parsons 2001).

Second, zoos transformed their displays to transmediate aspects of the wildlife documentaries’ techniques of observation. New “naturalistic” displays were ostensively “closer to nature,” while later, “immersive” displays referred to the idea that visitors might in effect break the traditional boundaries between the observer and the observed in order to actually enter the display space itself.

I have made the case elsewhere that, rather than being “closer to nature,” naturalistic exhibits actually engaged in new forms of transmediation (Lindahl Elliot 2005a). Aspects of this change have a long history, and go back at least as far as the late nineteenth century, to figures such as William T. Hornaday, who revolutionized natural history museum displays and then attempted, paradoxically, to extend the three-dimensional diorama principles from the Smithsonian’s National Museum to the future Bronx Zoo (Hanson 2002).

By the time that plans for Wildwalk were being drawn up, the “source” of transmediation for zoos was arguably wildlife documentaries on television, and other nature media such as wildlife photography in nature magazines and coffee table books. In the new technologies of exhibition, the apparent rhematism of zoo displays tacitly invoked the naturalism of the nature media, creating what I describe as hypernaturalistic modes of display. The evidence for this change can be found not just in the displays themselves, but in a variety of literatures. First, zoo leaflets, guides, and other promotional materials began to present zoo animals much as wildlife photography and filmmaking did their wild cousins. Additionally, a new generation of zoo designers employed not just the vocabulary of landscape painting (McClintock 2005), but actual photographic media as part of the process of recreating habitats (Malmberg 1998). In zoo design forums, some observers even began to directly propose the need to transform the zoo visiting experience into a cinematographic one (Maier 2005).

Thanks no doubt to a much broader cultural logic of mediazation, the strategy appears to have worked: zoo attendance levels, which had undergone a long period of decline since the 1960s, began to attain new records in some zoos with the new generation of displays.⁸ The 1990s and 2000s witnessed an extraordinary investment in new displays and, in some cases, in all-new zoos such as Disney’s Animal Kingdom, an $800 million, 500 acre facility in Florida. My own research into zoo visitors suggested that, by the early 2000s, many visitors were interpreting displays with reference to a variety of media representations. For example, visitors to one zoo complained that the lions were unhappy because they were “inactive” (arguably a tacit incorporation of the hyperkinesis analyzed earlier); and, after Pixar premiered Finding Nemo, clownfish not only became a star attraction in zoos with aquariums, but were interpreted with reference to the film’s narrative (Lindahl Elliot 2005b).

It would, however, be a mistake to deduce from this remarkable turnaround that the “new zoos” succeeded simply by emulating the naturalism of wildlife documentaries on television. While the zoos sought to elide the visiting experience with viewing experiences of the kind associated with films and wildlife documentaries on television, their displays continued to be grounded in what, with Peirce, we might describe as dynamical objects. For Peirce, a dynamical object is one that exists independently of an act of representation, and which can generate signs in its own right. It contrasts with immediate objects, which are the objects generated by way of the act of representation, or to simplify it, the object that a sign conjures.9

This semeiotic difference is key to the difference between zoos and wildlife documentaries. In the case of wildlife documentaries, wild animals are necessarily reduced to immediate objects, however lifelike the audiovisual representation might seem. Put more simply, the represented animals are physically absent from the audiences at the moment of being seen. It might be suggested, in this sense, that zoo animals “correct” this “problem” by presenting the “real McCoy.” In fact, zoo animals are simultaneously dynamical and immediate objects: living, breathing creatures with a real, if drastically limited, capacity to determine their own presentation (by way of their sheer sinsignal presence, by way of their “antics,” or indeed simply by disappearing into the furthest corner of the enclosure); and the imagined creatures that visitors and the zoos themselves represent by way of additional signs (what Peirce called “interpretants”) and, by so doing, anthropomorphicize with reference to concurrent display practices and a myriad of prior experiences. Zoo animals might, in this sense, be described as “re/presentations,” where the oblique is meant to highlight the ontological ambiguity of the displays.

While Parsons was very critical of most zoos’ conservationist claims, he was undoubtedly aware of their success in attracting new generations of visitors. For Wildwalk, he sought to borrow from their semeiotic when he conceived a museum which included many living animals and immersive exhibits. By 2002, Wildwalk had one mammal species, five bird species, two species of reptiles, four species of amphibians, 80 species of fish, and 29 species of invertebrates. Including the ants in a leafcutter colony, Wildwalk had on display over 80,000 specimens of living creatures. Wildwalk’s botanical house was divided into two halves: the first described the rise of the plant kingdom, and the second was an immersive, walk-through “tropical forest” with live birds, leafcutter ants, and an aquarium with tropical fish.

As I shall 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.”