Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
12
Virtual animals in electronic
zoos
The changing geographies of animal capture and display
Gail Davies
In a world despoiled by overdevelopment, overpopulation, and time-
release environmental poisons it is comforting to think that physical
forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstituted as
informational patterns in a multidimensional computer space. A
cyberspace body, like a cyberspace landscape, is immune to blight and
corruption.
(Hayles 1993:81)
To the same degree as man
[sic]
has raised himself above the state of
nature, animals have fallen below it: conquered and turned into slaves,
or treated as rebels and scattered by force, their societies have faded
away, their industry has become unproductive, their tentative arts have
disappeared…. What visions and plans can these soulless slaves have,
these relics of the past without power?
(Buffon, quoted in Berger 1980:10)
Introduction
The creation and exhibition of knowledge about plants and animals in the practices
of natural history are intrinsically geographical enterprises. The processes of
constructing and representing natural history are those of identifying and defining
the spaces that non-human organisms occupy in human culture. This is evident in
the localised, place-based, observations and descriptions of amateur practitioners in
the wake of Gilbert White, as much as in the wide-ranging collecting and theorising
which emerged in European taxonomy following Carl von Linné. Our knowledge
of plants and animals is created by moving between worlds: the inner and outer
spaces of habit, form and function; and moving across space between field,
laboratory and zoological institute (Keller 1996; Outram 1996; Pratt 1992).
Animals are fixed in representational spaces connecting these realms as botanical and
zoological illustrations in encyclopaedias and notebooks (Blum 1993); as preserved
and dried specimens in herbaria and natural history museums (Stemerding 1993); as
living representatives in zoological and botanical gardens (Anderson 1995); and,
