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By now it will be clear that Wildwalk made its own classification complex by transmediating several very different traditions of representation and display. It is no coincidence that, during its lifetime, the attraction was characterized by its designers, architects, and promoters in a variety of ways: as a “multimedia wildlife center,” a “natural history exhibition,” a “natural history center,” an “ecology science center,” and as I noted above, an “electronic zoo” by Parsons himself.

The At-Bristol charity itself classified the overall At-Bristol complex as a science center, thereby defining Wildwalk as a science center as well. This is ironic given the disastrous implication from the point of view of state funding. It is also peculiar given the fact that, in the early 1990s, John Durant, At-Bristol’s first chief executive after the complex opened and a leading figure in Britain’s Public Understanding of Science (PUS) movement, offered a characterization of science museums and centers which located Wildwalk firmly in the former type. He characterized science centers as generally consisting of one or more relatively open spaces with freestanding interactive exhibits which visitors play with in order to arrive at an understanding of a scientific or technological principle. By contrast, he characterized science museums as having smaller, relatively closed spaces with a mixture of permanent and temporary exhibitions which are scripted around a “story” about a particular area of science and technology. Such a story, he suggested, is told by way of a variety of objects, captions, interactives, and audiovisual/electronic media (Durant 1992).

This account notwithstanding, a case can also be made that Wildwalk was a “participatory” museum, an instance of the genre that San Francisco’s Exploratorium has often been credited with having started in 1969, and which has an explicitly pedagogical and even emancipatory function (Hein 1990). The Exploratorium made use of the theories of Richard Gregory (Henning 2006, 85), a Bristol-based psychologist of perception who, in 1978, opened up his own science center in Bristol known as Exploratory. Exploratory was the first British science center, and At-Bristol was designed to replace it. Central to both institutions’ approach was the idea of constructing exhibits that not only gave visitors center stage, but enabled them to “have fun exploring their own sensory and cognitive responses” (Henning 2006, 85).

In Wildwalk, such explorations were not an end in themselves, but part of an effort to render intelligible scientific knowledge, a key function of the new kind of science museum/center (Hein 1990). Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this was the hands-on character of the displays and the attraction’s many audiovisual consoles, which used games to teach about individual species (or ecological phenomena) even as they attempted to make tangible a broader theory of evolution. More than evolution per se, Wildwalk sought to illustrate the principle of a growing (evolutionary) biodiversity via a peripatetic narrative about the origin and growing complexity of life on earth.

Architecturally speaking, it did so via a “black box,” with a botanical house at the front and an IMAX theater at the back. Its entrance prefigured the aforementioned narrative by way of a curving corridor that began with four large photographs showing different biomes, and then moved on to smaller and smaller images of particular life forms: the photographic building blocks, as it were, of nature. These were followed by a time line that started with a straight line representing the present but ended up spiraling “back” (in walked direction, forward) to the emergence of life on the planet. Quoted along the top of this time line was a famous fragment of On the Origin of Species: “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” The quote was taken from the last sentence of On the Origin of Species, which stated in its modified version (which added “by the Creator”) that

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (Darwin [1872] 1994, 428–429)

And “cycling,” or circling, was what Wildwalk required its visitors to do: the attraction set out a route which spiraled across the building and over two floors. This route was divided up into several distinct spaces and galleries. The first space, on the ground floor, comprised two galleries, “A Simple Beginning” and “Building Bodies.” Offset to one side was a dark atrium spanning the entire height of the black box, whose main feature was an abstract light sculpture, superimposed on large screens with images. As the lights came on and off, they interacted with the screens, representing the progression in time from the simplest to the most complex life forms. In this, as in the rest of the interior spaces of the museum, an overall chiaroscuro but futuristic lighting effect was combined with the gaudy, almost cartoonesque colors associated with the work of John Czáky Associates, one of Britain’s leading interior design companies for museums and exhibitions.

As in the first episodes of Life on Earth, the first half of Wildwalk’s ground floor was devoted to the beginning of life in the oceans. “A Simple Beginning” described the start of life via single-celled organisms, primarily via screens with looping montages, and via simple touch screens. Building Bodies – the same title as that of the second episode of Life on Earth – then explained how single-celled organisms evolved to become complex multicellular organisms. This space combined casts of fossils, which visitors could see and touch, and aquariums with live invertebrates and fish.

After observing the aquariums, visitors crossed a threshold in the form of a doorway between the relative darkness of the first two galleries and the daylight of the first of two immersive exhibits (“Plants on Land”) situated in the botanical house. This threshold – and three later ones involving similar passages from dark to light/light to dark – was the closest that the peripatetic narrative came to having an “edit point” of the kind that allowed Life on Earth to engage in the forms of ubiquitization that it pioneered. In Wildwalk such a transition took visitors not so much from one era to another, but to different life forms.

In some respects this space contradicted the raison d’être of the kind of immersion found in the more spectacular zoo displays. On the one hand, the ETFE “tent” used to allow sunlight into the botanical house meant that visitors could look out of the attraction, and see the utilitarian buildings of the Canon’s Marsh regeneration. On the other hand, the plants in the exhibit were meant to re/present not an existing biome (as was often the case in zoos), but the evolution and growing complexity of plants on land: visitors made their way up a serpentine walkway that took them from simple mosses and liverworts, horsetails, ferns, and conifers to the flowering plants. This meant, first, that the narrative appeal was 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 to the move away from the object-centered museum (Henning 2006, 85). In Wildwalk’s 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.