Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Additionally, while 'local' film-makers are active in those parts of India and Africa
where highly valued indigenous animals can be filmed on location, their relative lack
of resources means they are rarely able to produce images of sufficient quality for
broadcast in the West. These same animals have also been used to pioneer the
development of IMAX® cinema. Projecting images up to 70 feet across and 70 feet
high, IMAX® screens offer an all-encompassing vision of wildlife that has been used
to convey new experiences of landscapes and animals. The first IMAX® films
feature penguins in the Antarctic, East African safaris and images of mountain
gorillas. The electronic zoo is at the centre of networks of wildlife film-making
companies who facilitate the collection of images of 'exotic' animals filmed at
research sites throughout the globe for sale to television networks, cable channels
and other forms of display in the West. The unequal spatial movements in these
new media empires, which mirror the trading empires of the zoo, remind us that
technologies are implicated in, rather than offering solutions to, the realities of
uneven geographical development (Gillespie and Robins 1989).
The use of film as an intermediary in the networks of the electronic zoo also
enables further dislocation between places and scales, which adds value and
authority to the images of wildlife. Film has emerged as an important
methodological tool within scientific disciplines that rely on field practices of
observation and description (Cartwright 1992; Haraway 1989; Winston 1993),
facilitating attempts to mirror more closely the idea of mechanical objectivity that
has constituted the highly mediated world of present-day life science (Mitman
1993; Vernon 1993). Film can also accommodate the conventions of realism central
to the traditional representational practices of the museum diorama or zoo
panorama (Mitman 1993:640), thus functioning as a border object in the worlds of
both science and entertainment. The positioning of film as a scientific method of
inscription enables film-makers to claim authority for their images as transparent
mediators between field observation and exhibition. The realist coding of film
eliminates the evidence of its own creation such that these intense images of animals
bear few traces of the material objects of human and animal labour that formed
them. There is a long history of removing humans from the images of natural
history, as well as removing traces of the human and animal interaction in the
creation of these representations.
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This legacy of authority and trust in natural
history film-making looks set to continue in the computer-generated images of virtual
animals in the electronic zoo. However, the images created of pristine animals and
natural habitats exist in tension with the discourses of a nature under threat. The
animals in ARKive, the world's known endangered or extinct species, are being
gathered from a growing number of natural history film-making companies (existing
images on the ARKive showing provenance from the BBC Natural History Unit,
Planet Earth Pictures and the Natural History Photographic Agency, among
others). Despite strong criticism of the conservation claims of traditional zoos,
natural history film-makers have been able to distance themselves from
responsibility for protecting those animals that they film (Mills 1989, 1997). The
collection of these images within the ARKive of the electronic zoo appears to
