By Nils Lindahl Elliot

Bristol’s Wildwalk visitor attraction, formerly known as Wildscreen, opened in 2000. A part of the Millenium Project-funded at-Bristol complex, the facility was originally described as a ‘showcase for the wonders of the planet’, a place where ‘live exhibits [would] be combined with state of the art technology to help visitors get the most from their visit’, where ‘a stunning botanical house and giant IMAX cinema [would] further bring the experience to life’(1). Unfortunately, the attraction failed to attract sufficient visitors to cover its running costs, and the site was closed in 2007. The building will now house a 6000 square-metre aquarium, to be run by Blue Reef Leisure. In this post, I’d like to offer an analysis of what may have gone wrong with Wildwalk. I’d also like to consider the kind of venue that might have replaced it, and that might still be set up in Bristol, or perhaps in a larger city.

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Bristol is widely regarded as the ‘Mecca’ of wildlife documentary producers. It is the home of the BBC’s Natural History Unit (NHU), and also of a number of independent production companies specialising in wildlife filmmaking. Every two years, the industry holds Wildscreen, arguably the most important natural history film festival in the world, and an opportunity for wildlife filmmakers to meet and talk shop.

Many years ago, Christopher Parsons, a former producer, head of the NHU, and founder of the Wildscreen Trust, had the idea that Bristol ought to have a visitor attraction that might be something akin to a ‘walk through’ natural history documentary. This idea was arguably as novel as it was unworkable. A key feature of natural history documentaries—and indeed of all the documentaries that adhere to the codes of what Noel Burch once described as the Institutional Mode of Representation (2)—is the semiotic figure of a ‘ubiquitous observer’, i.e. a virtual observer that is apparently able to represent anything from any angle, and at any point in time. I will say more about this observer below; here I suggest that a strong case can be made that, on this point alone, a visitor attraction that effectively turned back the clock of audio-visual corporeality was condemned to fail.

Or was it? We may never know, for the visitor attraction that was eventually built with some of the £90 million invested in the at-Bristol complex (by the National Lottery, the Millenium Commission, the South West Regional Development Agency, the Bristol City Council and ‘commercial partners’ such as Nestlé) was reportedly not what Parsons had in mind. After a series of re-interpretations of his proposals first by the project designers and then by the people who actually built the facility, the attraction went from being a walk-in natural history documentary, described initially as an ‘electronic zoo’, to a hybrid that combined the features of a variety of popular genres. As visitors walked into the attraction, the first part of the exhibit was very much a contemporary natural history museum tracing the evolution of life on Earth. Towards the end of this section, there were some aquariums with live specimens; whenever I visited Wildscreen (and then ‘Wildwalk’), it was interesting to note that it was these displays that had the most people milling about them.

After seeing the aquariums, the visitors went out into the first of two walks through state-of-the-art greenhouses. The first was a greenhouse that was meant to trace the development of plants from mosses to complex flowering plants. One of the attractions of this part of Wildwalk was that it was possible to see the urban landscape just beyond the glass walls; unlike some visitor attractions that attempt to immerse visitors in a ‘total’ simulation, this space did not attempt to hide its urban location.

At the end of the first greenhouse, visitors went back into the natural history museum-like space, this time with interactive video consoles placed side-by-side with several glass cases containing live specimens. The different species on real or virtual display were grouped in broad classes such as ‘insects’, ‘amphibians’ etc. In one of the displays, visitors could use remote controls to point a small video camera at an insect. Towards the end of this part of the exhibit there was a science-education-cum-children’s-play-area. Then it was out into a second greenhouse, this time a representation of a tropical forest with several live birds and butterflies, as well as an aquarium with fish from Amazonia.

The last section included a ‘news room’ with computer consoles where visitors could find out about a variety of environmental issues, and an interactive display that explained the ins and outs of different forms of recycling.

This brief account begins to give a sense of the hybridity of the attraction, a hybridity that was at one and the same time what made Wildwalk an innovative, but also a somewhat difficult attraction to visit. What was problematic was not the hybridity per se, but the attraction designers’ failure to engage in a systematic analysis of the inter-relation between very different techniques of observation. Put simply, each of the genres which Wildwalk recontextualised—natural history museum, botanic garden, aquarium, zoo, and TV documentary—is associated with its own ‘way of seeing’. For example, it is not the same thing to attend to an image of a scorpion in a natural history documentary, and an actual scorpion in a jewel-box display in natural history museum, let alone a zoo. As I began to note earlier, one of the characteristics of realist forms of cinematic representation is the production of a ubiquitous observer that apparently enables spectators to travel anywhere at any time to see any thing. The mobility of such an observer stands in stark contrast with that of, say, a visitor standing in front of a zoo display. The problem is not that the former mode of observation is ‘better’ than the latter, though many visitors might think so. It is that each mode is associated, amongst other things, with a particular corporeality, one which cannot simply be transposed into a new space with little or no thought for the implications of the changed space. For example, one does not normally stand and watch a whole natural history documentary; but if one is just shown short clips bereft of the documentary’s characteristic narrative form (arguably a key part of this genre’s pleasure), then the experience is not likely to be a particularly good one unless something else replaces the original pleasure. Make this category mistake enough times, with enough different genres, and you have a recipe for a confusing, and perhaps even boring visitor attraction.

From this perspective, one problem, if not the problem with Wildwalk was that it neglected to pull together the various modes of observation in relation to a coherent project on the level of the subject of enunciation. That is to say, on the level of the symbolic process that guides the spectator’s gaze ‘from within’ a representation. The attraction’s appeal to an over-arching narrative about evolution and complexity—a narrative that was not actually noticed qua narrative by many visitors—was a thematic, and not an ‘enunciative’ strategy. In the absence of a serious consideration of this problem, it is not surprising that a couple of visitors reportedly paid to go in, and walked through the entire attraction thinking that they were on their way to the adjacent IMAX theatre. While this is no doubt an extreme example, it speaks volumes of Wildscreen’s inability to arrive at a form that was not only different, but recognisably different.

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It may seem somewhat perverse to propose an alternative now that the attraction has closed. In fact, CMCEE was going to conduct visitor research at Wildwalk in the autumn of 2007, with a view to proposing practical alternatives for the site. Alas, I received news of the proposed closure while I was conducting research in the Panamanian rainforest, and so it was not possible to take part in the discussions that immediately preceded the closure.

The following is one of the possibilities that might have been explored: Wildwalk could have become a museum of natural history photography. This option would have required a significant refurbishment, but would have provided a platform on which to begin to solve the issues identified in this post. The change to the genre of a museum would also have helped to deal with the long-term funding problems. Wildwalk could have applied for the UK’s state subsidy for museums—a subsidy which, bizarrely, is not available to science centres. The new attraction would have exchanged its live animal exhibits for a series of displays describing the history of modern visual and audio-visual representations of wildlife. Many of the building’s wonderful design features would have fit with this proposal; not least, the presence of an IMAX theatre, which could have been used to screen a really good documentary about the history of the genre.

Unfortunately, this or any other similarly innovative project will have to find a different venue. It now looks like Bristol will simply get another aquarium—one that is unlikely to be as innovative as those in Plymouth or Hull, but which will almost certainly compete with the Bristol Zoo, which already has a good aquarium. Perhaps some far-sighted philanthropist can be talked into providing the funds for an all-new attraction that does justice to Bristol’s role as the ‘Mecca’ of natural history filmmaking?

References

(1) Wildscreen-at-Bristol Press Pack, 1999.
(2) Noel Burch (1990) Life to Those Shadows. London: BFI.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved