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the visitor to the electronic zoo there is no ambiguity about what the animal might
mean, for the kinds of perspective we can take and interaction we can have with
these images are curtailed at the site of film-making. The spaces where ordinary
people can see themselves interacting with animals are excluded from these
admittedly stunning, but experientially empty, images of wildlife. As a consequence
we risk losing the opportunity to learn from these animals; not only about them,
but also about ourselves. Our interactions with animals are lessened by their coding
as merely information. As animal identities are increasingly defined through
genetics, with species reduced to strands of DNA whose existence is separate from
their corporeality, so their existence as pixellated icons in digital images removes
these animals from everyday spaces into the realms of a purified nature where they
become visible, knowable and immortal, but untouchable. The embodied animal
does remain woven into these networks of the electronic zoo, it is true, but the
terms and effects of power—and the ethical issues associated with natural history
film-making—become more difficult to trace through the elongated networks
around this new medium of animal display.
Of course, the achievement of the electronic zoo will never be secure or certain.
Turkle (1995), for one, reminds us that people adopt multiple identities in
relationship to different kinds of technology, and I look forward to the new kinds of
creativity which are sure to emerge around these images of animals. For the animals
themselves, however, the situation is perhaps more problematic. Their bodily presence
is central to their expressions of agency and identity, for it is through the places that
they inhabit and how they act within these spaces that they are able to contest our
understandings of them. As Philo (1995:656) suggests:
[M]any animals (domesticated and wild) are on occasion transgressive of the
socio-spatial order which is created and policed around them by human
beings…. [A]nimals often squeeze out of the places—or out of the roles that
they are supposed to play in certain places—which have been allotted to them
by human beings.
I would suggest that the further marginalisation of many animals, as they end up
inhabitating either diminishing areas of wilderness or electronic spaces within the
city, removes their capacity to interact and to act in ways evident in everyday worlds.
Animals are rendered both fully visible and fully controllable within the spaces of
the electronic zoo, encoded and transformed into information on ethology and
genetic biodiversity. The ability of the electronic zoo to speak for animals through
the socio-spatial networks constructed around it is more secure than in the
traditional zoo, one of the reasons for its success. The capacity of animals as active
subjects within these geographies is correspondingly diminished. The important
constituents of their lives are made visible to us in the exhibition spaces of the zoo in
the centre of the city, remaining separate from their bodies. This was arguably also
the case in the traditional zoo where the body of an animal scientifically stood in for
the large species. However, for the viewing public it was the personalities,
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