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Picturizing science: The science documentary as multimedia spectacle Josè van Dijck International Journal of Cultural Studies 2006; 9; 5 DOI: 10.1177/1367877906061162 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ics.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/1/5

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ARTICLE

INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studies Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi www.sagepublications.com Volume 9(1): 5–24 DOI: 10.1177/1367877906061162

Picturizing science The science documentary as multimedia spectacle ●

José van Dijck University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

A B S T R A C T ● At the turn of the millennium, science documentaries show a particular penchant for the abundant use of animated visuals, obviously facilitated by new digital television techniques such as videographic animation and computer animatronics. Analyzing two recent science documentary series (Walking with Dinosaurs and The Elegant Universe) this article discusses how scientists and television producers deploy digital animation to convince viewers of the plausibility of scientific theories in the fields of paleontology and physics. The question guiding these analyses is how the use of digital animation is grounded in ambiguous epistemological and ontological claims. Rather than lamenting the advancing pictorial effect and the demise of realism in ‘postmodern’ science documentaries, it is argued that the multimedia mix of words, sounds and images both reflects and transforms our claims to knowledge. In fact, science documentaries do not illustrate but enable scientific claims; they visualize knowledge while substantiating hypotheses. ● ● cultural analysis ● digital animation ● narrative modes science documentary, television documentary ● visual styles

KEYWORDS ●

Introduction After its initial launch in 1999, the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs became an immediate hit with television audiences around the world, even if this reinvigorated genre of the natural history documentary drew profound



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I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 9(1)

criticism from renowned science commentators. At the heart of this criticism was the complaint that digital animation overwhelmed documentary intentions and that the series, despite its technical novelty, failed to offer a ‘new and improved’ approach to disseminating scientific knowledge. Others resented the BBC’s claim to present an accurate vision of paleontology, while favouring spectacle and edutainment at the expense of factual representation and realism. Walking with Dinosaurs gave rise to a number of academic inquiries, some of which called the series a ‘turning point’ in the history of science documentaries (Darley, 2003; Jeffries, 2003; Scott and White, 2003). British media theorist Andrew Darley (2003) disparaged the documentary’s postmodern style and techniques, rhetorical approach, and overall aesthetic orientation. Its most noted feature – the use of special effects and computer animation – allegedly drives science producers’ affinity for spectacle and edutainment further towards contemporary filmmakers’ preference for simulation, pastiche, and hyper-realism. According to Darley (2003: 229) Walking with Dinosaurs exemplifies the so-called postmodern science documentary, which falls prey ‘to contemporary aesthetic strategies that tend to negate representation and meaning (content), promoting instead the fascinations of spectacle and form (style)’. Indeed, recent science documentaries show a particular penchant for the abundant use of animated visuals, obviously facilitated by new digital television techniques such as videographic animation and computer animatronics. Computer engineers can create moving pictures out of pixels without the necessity of an analogue referent – a technique that lends itself well to illustrating abstract theories or speculative scientific hypotheses. However, I disagree with Darley’s and other’s critique that a) there is a sharp division or turning point between the so-called modernist or realist paradigm in science documentaries and the postmodernist or ‘fictionalist’ paradigm, and b) that visual spectacle (‘form’) in this series overrules scientific claims to knowledge (‘content’). For one thing, science documentaries have never been objective popularizations of science, but have always relied on realist (e.g. visual and narrative) effects to convey the suggestion of trustworthiness and validity. Series like Walking with Dinosaurs do not negate realism; on the contrary, one of the series’ most remarkable features is its adherence to the dominant realist paradigm, despite its abundant use of visual spectacle. Besides, the constitutive role of visualizing technologies in contemporary science is nothing new or disturbing; media technologies have never just served as tools for dissemination or popularization, but have always actively shaped scientific knowledge. The current tendency to embellish science documentary with digital ‘pictorial’ techniques neither signals a break with the conventional genre,



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van Dijck ● Picturizing science

nor does it imply a victory of form over content or aesthetics over science. To support my claim, this article proposes a framework for analysing science documentaries and natural history documentaries in terms of visual and narrative rhetoric.1 The model typifies the science documentary as a mixture of narrative modes and (tele)visual styles, the various combinations of which help construct and sustain a particular claim to knowledge – propositions of how things are, were, or could be. After applying this model to Walking with Dinosaurs, a series intended to present a reconstruction of prehistory, we will turn to another recent documentary series, The Elegant Universe, and extend the analytical model to the representation of an abstract and speculative branch of science: theoretical physics. It will be argued that these documentaries’ truly remarkable feature is less their heavy use of visual aesthetics and animatronics than their prolonged reliance on conventional realist effects. Moreover, these analyses aim at disclosing how visual styles and narrative modes are constitutive, rather than illustrative, elements in the production of scientific claims to knowledge.

Narrative modes and visual styles in science documentaries Science documentaries made for television have a longstanding tradition of realism, a tradition cemented in the narrative modes of explanation and exposition, and displayed in the visual styles of realist footage, in some cases complemented by symbolic images. They are historically characterized as linear, expository, and didactic tales – features that were always regarded as the benchmarks of quality science programs such as the British series Horizon (BBC) and its American counterpart Nova (PBS) (Gardner and Young, 1981: 177). Since the beginning of science programming, the big challenge for television producers and scientists alike has been to reconcile the inherent unruliness of science with the laws of visualization enforced by a medium primarily valued for its ability to entertain a large audience with moving images. Much of science seemed to be unsuitable for television: its disciplinary content was either too abstract (physics) or too theoretical (mathematics), its subject matter too remote in time (prehistory) or place (cosmology), its research object too infinitesimal (molecular biology) or inaccessible (genetic therapy) for cameras to convey ‘realistic’ images. In past decades, technologies for scientific imaging and televisual recording have yielded impressive new views, including, for instance, the endoscopic camera that can film inside our bodies and the satellite transmission enabling real time images from other planets (van Dijck, 2005). Yet despite television’s grateful incorporation of every new imaging instrument for the purpose of popularization, there will always remain scientific areas that resist ‘realistic’ visualization. In order to show the imperceptible and to render the invisible imaginable, television producers, from the very onset,


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have wielded an array of visual and rhetorical strategies to visualize and narrate what science can never show and tell. Arguably still the dominant storytelling strategy in science documentaries today is the coupling of expository and explanatory modes of narrative with realistic and metaphorical visual styles.2 In this hierarchical constellation, visual modes are subjugated to the authority of the narrative mode – words reign over visuals. The expository mode in its most prototypical form consists of a voice (or voice-over) explaining what a scientific idea, paradigm, or discovery entails. Frequently, this voice is embodied by a scientist, who may also serve as the host of the program. An invisible, anonymous voice-over can be alternated by on-camera expositions of scientists, whose authority is an indispensable asset to this narrative mode. Viewers are more likely to trust claims made by the very persons who researched them and whose authority is institutionally legitimate. Closely related to the expository mode is the method of explanation: someone clarifying how science works. Not all brilliant scientists are also good teachers; it is therefore quite common for television producers to rely on voice-overs for this specific task. Elucidation commonly involves the use of rhetorical strategies to enhance public understanding of scientific processes. Metaphors or analogies are universal tools for explanation, but they are also directive instruments, attaching quotidian, ideological, or political meanings to scientific subjects (Bucchi, 1998; Nash, 1990; van Dijck, 1998). The explanatory mode encompasses many rhetorical strategies: from metaphors to personal stories by scientists, from detailed instructions by technicians to historical excursions. Obviously, the more ‘visualizable’ the explanation, the better. Within the realist paradigm of science documentary, expository or explanatory modes are often stitched onto video footage showing actual or symbolic events to produce a realistic or metaphorical effect. Much of science can be captured on film: if you want to show at what temperature ice melts, or if you want to demonstrate what threat forest fires pose to the animal population, you go film where the action is. Film or video footage of ‘science in action’ or ‘scientists at work’ is often used in connection to shots of scientists talking on-camera, enhancing the expository mode. When the subject matter prohibits realistic filming, producers often resort to metaphoric visualization; shots of common objects, processes, or events are linked to scientific ideas by means of analogy. For instance, in order to visualize geneticist David Suzuki’s explanation of genetic mutation in his eightpart documentary series The Secret of Life (1993), directors used the extended metaphor of the ‘language of life,’ filming Suzuki sitting amidst stacks of printed pages, archives, and endless rows of books in libraries. Visual metaphors, like textual ones, are never neutral conduits for science, but are attempts to attach concrete, everyday meanings to theoretical ideas or scientific assumptions. Symbolic images are quite compatible with video footage of ‘real’ science and scientists and they hardly compromise the



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reality effect; particularly if coupled onto an explanatory narrative mode, the metaphorical effect enhances rather than interferes with the illusion of reality. The two narrative modes (expository and explanatory) and televisual styles (realistic and metaphorical) together inform what I will call the ‘realist paradigm’ in science documentary – the most important markers of quality science programming produced by institutions like the BBC and PBS in the past 50 years. Western media still celebrate science’s foundation in empiricism and positivism – the notion that all knowledge derives from observational experience – and grounds this foundation in the conventions of electronic-realistic representation. The scientific claim of film and video to observational truth, according to Brian Winston (1995: 137), is built into the media apparatus as well as inscribed in the documentary genre: ‘The documentary becomes scientific inscription – evidence.’ Science documentary’s reality effect is rooted in technology and cultural form – a contract between makers and viewers pertaining to visual recording devices that inscribe ‘what science is’ or ‘how it works’. Even though this contract is knowingly compromised by scripts, post-production editing, camera angles, and a host of technical-rhetorical devices, they do not infringe on the agreement between image and viewer. As Roger Silverstone (1985: 178) sums up cogently: ‘The plausibility of a documentary film lies in its naturalization, in its internal coherence and in its matching of its own reality to a reality which ‘everyone knows.’ Quite a few cultural theorists and social constructivists have pointed to suggestive, symbolic images that help construct scientific claims in documentaries as ‘truth’ rather than as hypotheses or claims to knowledge (Gardner and Young, 1981; Hornig, 1990). These criticisms particularly pertain to the natural history documentary, a (sub)genre which set the standard for the presentation of science on television both in terms of content and style (Jeffries, 2003). Detractors contend it is precisely the misleading combination of narrative authority and symbolic or metaphoric images that renders these documentaries’ claims to veracity and accuracy controversial (Crowther, 1997; Haraway, 1989). In the past 25 years, however, the realist paradigm in science documentary has been compromised each time innovative (tele)visual styles and expansive narrative modes were pushed to the fore, forcing documentarymakers to adjust their means of storytelling if they wanted to appeal to an audience increasingly acculturated by Hollywood productions. The perennial unattractiveness of the documentary form was that it could not tell past stories, and neither could it speculate about consequences or implications, due to a lack of ‘real’ footage that might serve as evidence to a voice-over or interviewee. In science documentary, particularly, the need for reconstruction and speculation was poignant because scientific discoveries were never captured in real time, and the relevance of many scientific discoveries and claims lay in the future – applications that had yet to


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emerge. Showing historical triumphs of science on television was inherently difficult if one could not resort to the techniques of fiction: the only suitable form in the realist mode was the talking head of a reminiscing scientist, looking back on ‘what happened’ at this memorable moment. By the same token, only legitimate spokespersons were authorized to speculate on the future of particular developments in science. Yet none of these modes was even remotely attractive without accompanying moving images. Whereas photographic stills of historical events and symbolic shots of potential implications could fill some of that void, the visual styles of fiction film substantially increased the narrative potential of television documentary. Documentary television producers, when first using reconstructive and speculative modes, came under fire when they started to use these modes in conjunction with a new visual style that allegedly breached the contract between image and viewer. After the American evening news had included a reenactment in one of its news features – a scene played out by actors in an actual environment – critics and scholars lamented the beginning of a downward spiral of trustworthiness.3 As more film-makers followed suit and incorporated the ‘fiction effect’ into the documentary genre, science documentary makers adopted this style to enhance the reconstructive mode (Winston, 1995: 254–5). BBC producers asked scientists to ‘re-enact’ or play out scenes to show how important scientific discoveries had materialized. For instance, a biologist agreed to restage her voyage through the Australian desert, where she first got her brilliant insight in plant genetics when her car got stuck after a sand storm messed up the fuselage. Scientists, initially weary that their being drafted into professional acting would compromise their serious status, even if playing former versions of themselves, were persuaded by the increased dramatic appeal of science programming. After 1980, BBC and PBS science documentaries increasingly included reenactments and staged scenes, visual styles that greatly expanded the creative possibilities of producers and directors. Series like Horizon and Nova even embraced popular hybridizations like docu-drama to enliven historical episodes of science, such as a reconstruction of the double helix discovery by Watson and Crick (Franklin, 1988). Reenactments, however, were almost invariably paired off with the authoritative expository mode, often voiced through a reminiscing scientist. As a result, the fiction effect was made subordinate to the reality effect. Besides reenactments becoming an accepted visual style in science documentaries, we can more recently witness an increasing use of digital animations to embellish this genre, causing what has also been called the ‘pictorial effect’ (Mitchell, 1992). Naturally, pictures and animation have always been used in science documentaries to visualize abstract projections, yet drawings, diagrams, flow charts, or cartoon-like illustrations always explicitly signalled their artificiality and accentuated their animated quality. With the emergence of digital video, we are witnessing a new type of ‘picturizing’: videographic animation and computer animatronics allow computer



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engineers to create moving images out of pixels that look like analogue video footage. In other words, digital videographics takes analogue video footage as its benchmark for reality, whereas the truth-claim for video footage was rooted in its verisimilitude. For producers of science documentaries, the use of digital video animations appears to be particularly fruitful in areas that conventionally resist visualization, such as the very abstract, remote, or inaccessible. In combination with the speculative mode, picturization allows visual substantiation of conditional, hypothetical, or even speculative scientific claims stating ‘this could have happened in the past’ or ‘this is what could happen, if . . .’. This new visual style, in connection to the speculative mode, again expands the potential of rhetorical strategies for science documentary producers. The pictorial effect, though, should be viewed in the context of its ubiquitous implementation in visual culture; its smooth incorporation into the science documentary cannot be seen apart from the abundant use of videographics and digital animation in all sorts of audiovisual genres. The immense quantity of digitally generated images in Hollywood productions, from Batman to Jurassic Park, as well as in video games like Lara Croft, have undoubtedly whetted the appetite and facilitated the acceptance of videographic embalming in science documentaries. Images are becoming more artefactual objects and pictures, not replications of the real, and their accumulation in audio-visual productions has an overwhelming aesthetic connotation, rather than a truthful or illusionist one (Cubitt, 2004). As digitization enables near-perfect imitation of video footage, the pictorial effect’s prominence is augmented in relation to the reality effect, the metaphorical effect, or the fiction effect. Let me reiterate in a schematic fashion the various styles and narrative modes we have identified so far.

Visual styles Film/video footage Symbolic visuals

Narrative modes

Reality effect

Expository mode

‘this is what science is’

Metaphoric effect

Explanatory mode

‘this is how science works’

Reenactments

Fiction effect

Reconstructive mode ‘this is what happened’

Digital animations

Pictorial effect

Speculative mode

‘this is what could (have) happen(ed)’

Figure 1 Visual styles and narrative modes


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The upper and lower blocks in the diagram may seemingly ground the televisual mediation of science in a realist vis-à-vis a fictionalist paradigm (or, for that matter, the assumed modernist versus postmodernist scheme). However, none of the visual styles or narrative modes distinguished in this diagram is intrinsic to one specific type of documentary. Within the realist paradigm, re-enactments and digital animations are commonly used to back up specific explanations. Even before the implementation of digital technologies in science documentaries, producers regularly deployed pictorial effects and speculative modes to embellish scientific claims. Now that the speculative mode is taking prominence, science programs effectively incorporate elements of the realist paradigm to affirm their documentary status. In other words, the two halves of this diagram are mutually dependent: it is the actual combination of styles and modes that helps build powerful rhetorical claims to knowledge in television documentaries. The following will illustrate the intricate interweaving of visual styles and narrative modes when analyzing two examples of recent science documentaries. Walking with Dinosaurs takes the reconstructive mode as a point of departure as it re-animates extinct species from prehistory; The Elegant Universe assumes the speculative mode to explore the highly abstract and hypothetical subject matter of ‘string theory’. This layered model is not aimed at identifying distinctive technical and aesthetic features of these documentaries as if they intrinsically defined the genre; instead, it offers a framework for analyzing how these documentaries’ respective claims to knowledge are constructed through various combinations of narrative modes and visual styles, thereby using innovative fictional techniques while heavily relying upon realist conventions. The reconstructive mode: Walking with Dinosaurs There are scenes that really are very good science and there are those which are more speculative, like mating. How on earth will we ever know how dinosaurs mated? We’re not always showing people stuff that we know is right, we’re showing people our best guess. (Tim Haines, producer of Walking with Dinosaurs)

When Walking with Dinosaurs was first aired in 1999, the six-part series was advertised by the BBC as ‘a window on the lost world’ allowing viewers to ‘believe they were watching living creatures in their natural habitat’. Digital animations of the Tyrannosaurus rex, the Optalmosaurus, Stegosaurus and a number of other prehistoric animals populating planet earth 65 million years ago, vivified paleontologists’ research by visualizing their claims on our television screens. Like its sequel Walking with Beasts (2001), this series popularized a somewhat dusty academic discipline to an audience substantially younger than the average science documentary



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viewer (Scott and White, 2003). The success of Walking with Dinosaurs was primarily due to its technological production mode – the use of digital animations and animatronics – cleverly hooking into a new cinematic tradition established by Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World (1997). While the BBC adopted some of the visual styles wielded in these Hollywood blockbusters, it strategically framed the series as a natural history documentary. The ‘reality effect’ of Walking with Dinosaurs lies in its ability to make a hypothetical reconstruction from the past, produced entirely in fictional and pictorial styles, subservient to the explanatory and expository narrative modes, anchoring animated fiction in the realist paradigm of science documentary. Walking with Dinosaurs utilizes three different types of visuals. First, there is the footage of landscapes, filmed in Chile, California, and New Caledonia – not because the prehistoric animals presumably lived there, but because these sceneries resemble the biotope of dinosaurs at the time: sparsely vegetated steppe without grass. Secondly, there are scenes in which specially constructed clay models of creatures serve as props in close-up shots.4 These models are like puppets set in motion by people and machines; in the editing stage, these props were digitally manipulated to make them walk, eat, or move ‘correctly’, that is, according to scientific conjectures. Finally, there are scenes that are generated entirely by digital animatronics. Animated creatures and filmed models all seamlessly merge with their ‘natural habitat’, blending into a single visual style: the realist style of a natural history documentary. Enhancing the realist effect are shots marking the unobtrusive presence of an ‘actual’ camera crew: the camera lens gets accidentally clouded by a mating dinosaur’s saliva, or gets speckled by water drops when two animals are fighting. Undoubtedly the most notable feature confirming Walking with Dinosaurs’ genre label is its narrative mode of explanation. A neutral, invisible voice-over comments on every scene as if it is taking place in real time, explaining in the present tense how dinosaurs go about daily acts like eating, mating, surviving: ‘A young male tries to attract the attention of a female by walking next to her, but mating can be a dangerous act for the female Diplodocus.’ As Scott and White (2003: 321) have noticed, the voice-over impersonates ‘an authoritative commentary by an omniscient narrator, combining the “objective” discourse of scientific knowledge (facts and figures) with touches of anthropomorphism’. The voice-over firmly anchors the series in the narrative mode of explanation, but more than that, it articulates the reconstructive mode (‘this is what assumedly happened’) in the typical linguistic features of real-time exposition (‘this is what happens’). Reconstruction and speculation hide behind an expository sheen of realistic visuals authenticated by a mixture of voice-over, ‘real-time’ (fabricated) sounds of animals, and background music to accentuate tense or romantic moments. It is exactly this mixture of scientific reconstruction


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and speculative imagination that turns Walking with Dinosaurs into attractive television, but this very blend also subverts the contract between maker and viewer as to what the images actually show. Part of the series’ claim to authentication (or scientific reconstruction) is made not in the documentary itself, but in the accompanying The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs series. The meta-documentary recounts how 100 scientists were involved in this monster production. Indeed, the involvement of scientists in television documentaries is nothing new, as scientists’ participation in Hollywood (science) fiction is now the rule rather than the exception (Frank, 2003). In line with the conventions of the natural history documentary, no scientist appears on camera in the documentary proper; yet in The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs, they have ample opportunity to show off their authority and validate the program’s claim to scientific truth. Paleontologists explain head-on what evidence they found to substantiate their claims, before properly instructing computer engineers how to go about ‘animating’ the models. Sometimes the skeletal structures of living animals, such as elephants, were used to teach engineers and scientists about the most likely locomotion of prehistoric beasts. But The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs also reveals that not just paleontologists served to guarantee the accuracy and veracity of the series’ scientific claims; media technicians and animation experts were actively engaged in scientific work. Technicians sometimes refuted accepted knowledge in paleontology because their models showed a specific locomotion to be impossible. As one scientist comments in the programme, paleontologists actually learned from animation programmers because they helped them ‘prove’ how the Diplodocus walked, how it moved its legs and arms, how the animals grazed and fought. The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs, in addition to illustrating how the series was made, also shows how science is made: technicians help scientists establish their claims by using the very tools that turn them into attractive spectacle. What makes this meta-documentary so important, in my view, is the observation that its prominent visual style (animation) is no longer used as an illustration, but that computer graphics are an integral part of constructing science – an observation made earlier by social constructivists and philosophers of science (Latour, 1990; Lynch and Woolgar, 1990). Models and representations visually melting into a seamless whole demonstrate how scientific claims are intrinsically dependent upon their visualizations. Computer animations are concurrently instruments of mediating and constructing science. The pictorial effect, serving to ‘authenticate’ the realistic effect, is part of the scientific process, which is at the same time and by the same means a creative process to turn science into television. Visualization and scientific argumentation are mutually contingent. As this series seems to sustain, digital ‘picturization’ is not just an effect but a constitutive tool of science. Meanwhile, the series Walking with Dinosaurs derives



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much, if not all, of its scientific trustworthiness from its unarticulated framing as a realist documentary, in which voice is supposed to reign over visual. The reconstructive mode seems merely ‘illustrated’ by digital effects and animation, assuming its subordination to the conventional narrative modes of exposition and explanation. However, my interpretative analysis reveals this to be an effective rhetorical tactic aimed at anchoring the documentary’s truth-claims in accepted realist conventions.

The speculative mode: The Elegant Universe The decision to use animation, to use a lot of it, was completely essential to the process, because when you’re doing that project about string theory, when you’re talking about things that really cannot be seen, that can only be imagined, I don’t know any other way to do it than through metaphor and animation. (Paula S. Apseil, senior executive producer of The Elegant Universe)

A similar blend of realist claims to scientific truth and animated visual aesthetics can be traced in a science programme that is primarily informed by the speculative mode. The Elegant Universe, a three-part documentary series aired by PBS in 2003, manages to make a very difficult, highly abstract and hypothetical subject from the field of theoretical physics imaginable to laypersons. The world of string theory – ‘a world stranger than science fiction’ according to the PBS announcement – conjectures a reconciliation of Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity, Albert Einstein’s discoveries on relativity, Niels Bohr’s findings in quantum mechanics, and James Maxwell’s mathematical equations describing electro-magnetism into a unified ‘theory of everything’. String physicists assume the existence of a subatomic level where ‘strings’, entities smaller than particles or quarks, generate a variety of shapes, from black holes to membranes. An important tenet of string theory is the existence of not 4, but 11 dimensions – dimensions that we cannot see or even make visible – and a possible infinite number of parallel universes. It claims to bring together the divergent sets of laws formulated by famous physicists, and also prophesies a coherent explanation for all manifestations of matter now and in the future. As Brian Greene, physicist at Columbia University and host of The Elegant Universe suggests, questions of philosophy or religion may soon become questions of physics. String theorists’ hypotheses are, not surprisingly, fiercely disputed amongst scientists, but how does this television documentary render their claims plausible and even likely? The overwhelming use of digital animation and videographics in this series is partly responsible for a persuasive presentation of a contentious theory, but its scientific claims are ultimately validated by the explanatory


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mode. In contrast to Walking with Dinosaurs, The Elegant Universe relies on the conventional narrative strategy of an expert commentator. Host Brian Greene is an authority in the field and an engaging storyteller who lucidly explains the most difficult concepts by means of metaphors and analogies. He uses a cello to explain string vibrations, an analogy between a cup of coffee and a donut to illustrate the significance of shapes, and sliced bread to exemplify the existence of parallel universes. But Greene’s explanatory narrative is never simply illustrated by pictures of everyday objects; all images, even those of the host himself, are choreographed into fast-paced animated sequences, to such an extent that it is impossible to distinguish video footage from morphing animations, or material objects from pictorial metaphors. For instance, Brian Greene’s talking head appears on a slice of bread that he himself is cutting; in the same visual style, a cup of coffee digitally morphs into a donut. Even textual inserts, such as mathematical formulas or letters (G for gravity, EM for electromagnetism) smoothly change into visuals, just as the sound of strings transforms into images. To enhance the explanatory mode, Greene’s words are frequently alternated by single quotes from an impressive parade of top-notch physicists. Initially, their talking heads appear in straightforward on-camera interviews, their authority signalled by name, title, and institutional affiliation.5 But in subsequent scenes, their images are retouched to appear for example on large screens over Broadway or, when a scientist explains the existence of more dimensions, the screen shows his multiple faces. Animations ‘hijack’ the explanatory mode, subjecting all video footage to the elasticity of digital graphics; the hypothesized universe of string theory seems already real in the world of multimedia, where text, sound, video footage, and animation all merge into a unified visual style. For the large part, The Elegant Universe relies on the speculative mode, yet it also includes reconstructive parts in which historical events are reenacted, suggestively lacing history onto the future. Standing in the doorway of what used to be Einstein’s house in Princeton, New Jersey, Brian Greene recounts the legend of how this famed scientist chased the holy grail of physics until he ran out of time. Various milestones in the history of physics are re-enacted, suggestively pairing off historical geniuses with the brilliant minds of string theorists today. The story jumps back and forth between Niels Bohr working in his office and John Schwarz, one of the early advocates of string theory in 1973, anxiously pacing in front of a blackboard filled with formulas; between an impersonated Caluzzo in debate with Einstein, and Ed Witten, whose 1995 paper reconciling various strands of string theory secured him the epithet of ‘Einstein’s successor.’ Reenacted scenes can hardly be distinguished from black-and-white photographs, retouched and animated to make them look like historical footage, and actual video footage projected in slow motion is frequently interrupted by visual tricks, like formulas leaping off a blackboard. In several instances, the viewer is catapulted from the history of physics straight into the future.



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After recapturing Einstein’s discovery of how space can stretch and warp, host Brian Greene explains how string theory can also account for space being ‘ripped apart’ so that an extra dimension becomes feasible. A proven theory is thus equated with a current hypothesis, and subsequently stitched onto a prediction of future implications. ‘Can you walk on the Mount Everest, eat a baguette in Paris, and still be back in New York on time for your morning meeting?’ Greene ponders, while his movements are smoothly sealed onto morphing backdrops. Past, present, and future – proven theories, hypothetical claims, and speculation – all blend into the visual style of an animated universe, where the differences between realism, fiction, and science fiction appear virtually obsolete. The Elegant Universe presents a multimedia spectacle which magically turns hypothesis into feasibility, and speculation into proven claim. But does the science represented in this documentary still pertain to questions of truth and falsehood or, perhaps more relevant here, to representational criteria of fact or fiction? Several detractors interviewed for the programme point out the weakness of string theory: even if this theory will prove to be mathematically sound, it can never be put to a test. Indeed, the programme’s host Brian Greene admits that ‘testing’ string theory is impossible; even the giant atom smashers, currently being built by Fermilab in Texas and by CERN in Switzerland, will at best deliver circumstantial evidence for the existence of strings, sparticles, or gravitons. And yet, throughout the program, Greene subjects the laws of physics, along with the assumptions of string theory, to ‘experiments’ in virtual reality, executed in digital architecture. For instance, when he wants to show how the laws of electromagnetism interfere with the laws of gravity, Greene is filmed jumping from a tall building but magically landing on his two feet. This animated scene is, of course, an imitation of a made-in-Hollywood Batman leap, constructed in such a style that even if you don’t believe in the existence of flying human bats, you have to admire the reality-effect caused by its visual artifice. In the two-dimensional world of film and multimedia, the 11 dimensions of string theory can at least be turned into a visual reality – a universe that is governed by the rules of animation but subjected to the laws of verisimilitude and realism. Ultimately, the answer to the million-dollar question, posed at the end of the series – ‘Can string theory be wrong?’ – is as simple as it is revealing. Brian Greene philosophizes that so much of string theory makes sense, ‘it has got to be right’, and his judgement is supported by Nobel-prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, saying: ‘I find it hard to believe that that much elegance and mathematical beauty would simply be wasted.’ Ordinary viewers, overwhelmed by three hours of digital videography, may find it hard to believe that the sophistication and elegance of this multimedia spectacle would be wasted. Qualifications of verification and trustworthiness are subtly replaced by qualifications of aesthetics and persuasiveness.


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And yet, despite its visual fireworks and aesthetic overload, the documentary astonishingly relies on the authority of voice(-over) and words to establish the trustworthiness of its claims. Like Walking with Dinosaurs, The Elegant Universe includes reenactments and animations to ‘picturize’ scientific theory that is otherwise too abstract to be understood by nonphysicists. In addition, the speculative mode accounts for playful visual tricks borrowed directly from fiction to enhance the documentary’s metaphorical and pictorial effects. But it is the distinguished commentary and appearance of physicist Brian Greene (supported by a large number of authorities in the field) who, at all times, subjects the artificiality of images to the ‘authenticity’ of his words, much like the neutral voice-over in Walking with Dinosaurs takes command of the animated pictures of conjectured prehistoric beasts. Even if visual spectacle seems at times to overwhelm the rational content of the science presented, it is in fact the rhetorical choreography of carefully intertwined narrative modes and visual styles that ultimately grounds both documentaries in a conventional realist paradigm. The authority and trustworthiness of its proposed scientific claims are ultimately contingent upon the reality effect created by the documentary’s producers. In the previous section, I explained how Walking with Dinosaurs, rather than being a popularized version of paleontology, actually helped construct its scientific claims – an observation that becomes particularly manifest in The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs episode. Along similar lines, the makers of The Elegant Universe, in the bonus material added to the DVD version, comment on the crucial function of animatronics to the construction of string theory. Without the possibilities of computer animation there would have been no documentary, but there also would have been no theory: computer graphics enable scientists to imagine the possible shapes the ‘materialist world’ can assume. In The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs, producer Paula Apseil explains how the scientific claims of string theory are contingent on new modes of visualization: ‘We could not have told the story of string theory and we could not have visualized all the aspects of the universe which string theory says could be true, if we would not have used animation.’ For instance, the contention of string theorists that the ‘big bang’ was not the beginning of evolution, and therefore that history or space has no beginning or ending, is perfectly in tune with the notion that visual images in this series lack an original in the real world. Computers and multimedia environments have turned the world of science into a large database of digital images, a database in which the footage does not bespeak an original in the empirical world. Past, present, and future claims are all ‘pictorial input’ ready for morphing: Einstein’s historical life and ideas evolve into Brian Greene’s projected existence into parallel universes. In fact, the multimedia representation of string theory does not illustrate but enables its claims; it not only helps visualize, but to some extent substantiates its hypotheses.



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In the past, documentaries based in the realist paradigm seemingly displayed science within the logical order of empiricism, affirming the Platonic hierarchy between reality and representation, thus constituting the mastery of words over visual illustration, of explanation over speculation, and of reality over fiction. The linear order of history, the empiricist order of science, and the representational order of science documentary were all grounded in the same ontological claims: what likely happened in the past or potentially happens in the future cannot be ‘authentically’ filmed, it can only be illustrated by artificial means. Recent documentaries like Walking with Dinosaurs and The Elegant Universe apparently subvert the proclaimed ontological order between science and reality vis-à-vis representation and fiction. And yet, more than ever, the science documentary relies on the presence of realist features, such as an authoritative voice-over, a well-respected host, or the appearance of an impressive number of experts in the field, to anchor its claims to trustworthiness in the realist paradigm. The science documentary, while subverting its own ontological claims, paradoxically affirms the hierarchy of ‘science’ over ‘fiction’, of ‘content’ over ‘spectacle’, and of ‘popularization’ over ‘construction’.

Conclusion Many academics and commentators, like Andrew Darley (2003: 229) conclude that documentaries like Walking with Dinosaurs, and by extension The Elegant Universe, emanate from a cultural context that favours simulation and hyper-realism, and therefore negates realism. Darley and others observe a sharp turning point between the evidently modernist (or realist) and postmodernist (or fictionalist) documentary genre, the latter of which is resented because its aesthetic strategies and high-tech visual spectacle tend to overwhelm scientific content. Indeed, the technological is a significant part of a larger cultural transformation that some have labelled the ‘postmodern condition’ (Harvey, 1990; Lyotard, 1984). However, as I have argued in this article, assuming an intrinsic divide between modernist and postmodernist documentary genres may be ahistorical and insufficient as a mode of criticism. Applying a model that distinguishes visual styles and narrative modes, it becomes clear that the realist paradigm of science documentary, even in its earlier stages, incorporated fictional and pictorial styles as well as speculative and reconstructive narrative modes. And vice versa, while the multimedia spectacles produced by the BBC and PBS thrive on the dominant modes of speculation and reconstruction, their status and authority as science documentaries is ultimately contingent upon their use of explanation and exposition. Every a priori distinction between modern and postmodern, as Bruno Latour (1993) has convincingly argued, is epistemologically flawed because it hinges on fallacious dichotomies between science


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and representation, between scientific object and active agent, and between science and culture. Latour’s argument that ‘we have never been modern’ also applies to the science documentary: there has never been a purely ‘realist’ paradigm in science programming. Arguing from a somewhat different angle, John Corner (2002: 266) has launched the term ‘postdocumentary’, not to proclaim the end of documentary as a truthful cultural form, but to signal ‘its relocation as a set of practices, forms, and functions.’ He argues that the legacy of documentary is still at work in current styles of televisuality, reaffirming the realist contract between viewers and makers but concurrently subverting it in favour of innovative claims to knowledge. Since digital technologies are changing our ontological relationship with the image (Manovich, 2001), we need a more refined analytical armamentarium to discuss the intrinsically mediated construction of scientific knowledge. The model proposed in this article provides such analytical tool, allowing viewers to recognize the constructedness of documentary texts. And yet, it is not enough to identify the construction of documentaries; it is even more important to understand how science and documentary are mutually contingent and interdependent constructions of scientific claims. Science documentaries never served as mere illustrations of what ‘science is’ or ‘how it works’. The documentary’s status as a ‘popularization’ or an ‘illustration’ was taken for granted, but like any imaging tool used by scientists, television is equally instrumental to the construction, dissemination, and (dis)approval of its often hypothetical claims. The popularity of scientific claims is inevitably defined by the available technology and preferred aesthetics of contemporary media – media that enabled the construction of these claims in the first place. From Galileo’s telescope to Etienne-Jules Marey’s stereoscope, tools of visualization have moved easily between scientific investigation and entertainment (Hankins and Silverman, 1995; Topper, 1996). Therefore, I propose to consider science documentaries as a form of ‘visual thinking’ or of ‘picturizing science’. We do not illustrate science with images, we construct images and deploy media technologies to ‘think’ science (Burnett, 2004). Computer graphics and animatronics are to 21st century physicists and paleontologists what the microscope was to 19th century biologists: new instruments allowing for new claims, but also for a retooling of the imagination. Animated dinosaurs and virtual parallel universes are not illustrations of science – they are part of science in action. Rather than lament the current effacement of science documentary’s realism, we need to develop analytic models and tools that help clarify how science and science documentaries shape our world in tandem. Computers and digitization are certainly not a radical break with previous scientific practices which were always also mediated practices: the success of scientific claims often depended on the success of their visualizations. Analysis



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of two recent science documentaries reveals how the constructions of science and media are closely aligned and intricately intertwined. As argued in this article, the pictorial effect and speculative narrative mode may infiltrate and even dominate a television programme, and yet producers choose to pay careful tribute to the realist features of the documentary genre. Even the most radical deployment of the pictorial effect in The Elegant Universe still results in a typical representationalist view of the world, as it anchors its speculative claims in explanatory and expository modes to account for the documentary’s evidentiary status. Its mixture of visual styles and narrative modes signals the paradoxical yet imperative cohabitation of diverging ontological paradigms. More concretely, it demonstrates how a set of scientific hypotheses (‘this is a possible theory to account for the existence of parallel universes’ or ‘this is our best guess of how dinosaurs walked’) is articulated in a set of televisual claims to truth (‘this is what string theory is’ or ‘this is how dinosaurs walked’). Perhaps more interesting than identifying or lamenting the postmodern genre of science documentary is to examine how the multimedia mix of words, sounds, and images transforms our claims to knowledge. Science documentaries offer a unique opportunity to bare scientists’ and media producers’ struggles with old and new epistemological and ontological paradigms. Replacing attenuated realist claims of what science is, how it works, how it happened, or what could happen, we should foreground the question of how science (documentary) shapes our world. Towards that end, The Making Of episodes accompanying these documentaries form an integral part of the viewing experience: they teach viewers how technology shapes both science and media, and demonstrate how programme makers and scientists decide what to show, how to show it, and why to show it that way. The science documentary is a meeting place for the didactic and the scientific, the truthful and the elegant; yet it is precisely the awe-inspiring presence of accredited scientists or the overwhelming elegance of multimedia spectacles that obligate viewers to acknowledge its contents’ stratified texture. Acknowledgement I would like to thank the anonymous referees of the International Journal of Cultural Studies for their comments; they have helped to substantially improve a previous version of this article.

Notes 1 This article will refer to the natural history documentary as a special subgenre of the science documentary. Even though many relevant comments can be


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made about the distinctions between these two, these differences are beyond the scope of the main argument here. I use the term ‘narrative mode’ to indicate that every science documentary – or every television programme for that matter – tells a story about science using a particular strategy, both in terms of rhetoric and in terms of aesthetics. By ‘(tele)visual styles’ I mean the effects created by using a specific type of image or image processing in relation to the truth-claim implied by that choice. For instance, a realist effect is an effect that is implicitly ascribed to unedited, unaltered video footage. Naturally, moving images of whatever technological basis are always intrinsically contrived, but visual styles have gradually come to connote particular effects. In 1988, the ABC Evening News, for instance, used a re-enactment to reconstruct how an American spy had probably managed to steal secret information from a government building. For a detailed analysis of news documentary, see Beattie (2004), chapter 9. Construction of animated dinosaurs is a painstaking process, as we can read on the website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dinosaurs/tv_series/making_of.shtml): ‘Not every dinosaur image was computer-generated; many of the close-up shots used animated models. This is because whilst computer graphics are good, they are better for long distance shots. Animatronics are more realistic in close up work, such as when a dinosaur is eating or drinking. Initial models are made in clay, then a series of inverse moulds are made from which the final product is produced. Textured skins are stuck on top and painted, using a “plasticised” paint to allow for movement. Mounts are added for handholds plus motors to operate the nostrils, eyes or other body parts.’ A large number of highly esteemed physicists appear in this programme. First, there are the ‘grand old men’ of string theory: John Schwarz, Michael Greene, and Ed Witten. Secondly, a number of authorities in various subdisciplines of physics comment in this program, including Walter G. Lewin (MIT), Steven Weinberg (Universty of Texas), Peter Galison (Harvard University), Alan Guth (MIT), Joseph Polchinski (UC Santa Barbara), S. James Gates (University of Maryland), and Michael Dugg (University of Chicago).

References Beattie, K. (2004) Documentary Screens: Nonfiction, Film and Television. Houndmills: Palgrave. Bucchi, M. (1998) Science and the Media: Alternative Routes in Scientific Communication. London: Routledge. Burnett, R. (2004) How Images Think. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Corner, J. (2002) ‘Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions’, Television and New Media 3(1): 255–69. Crowther, B. (1997) ‘Viewing What Comes Naturally: A Feminist Approach to



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Television Natural History’, Women’s Studies International Forum 20: 289–300. Cubitt, S. (2004) The Cinema Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Darley, A. (2003) ‘Simulating Natural History: Walking with Dinosaurs as Hyper-real Edutainment’, Science as Culture 12(2): 227–56. Frank, S. (2003) ‘Reel Reality: Science Consultants in Hollywood’, Science as Culture 12(4): 427–69. Franklin, S.B. (1988) ‘Life Story: The Gene as Fetish Object on TV’, Science as Culture 1(1): 92–100. Gardner, C. and R. Young (1981) ‘Science on TV: A Critique’, in T. Bennett (ed.) Popular Television and Film, pp. 171–93. London: British Film Institute. Hankins, T.J. and R.J. Silverman (1995) Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Haraway, D. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge. Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge: Blackwell. Hornig, S. (1990) ‘Television’s NOVA and the Construction of Scientific Truth’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7(1): 11–23. Jeffries, M. (2003) ‘BBC Natural History versus Science Paradigms’, Science as Culture 12(4): 527–45. Latour, B. (1990) ‘Drawing Things Together’, in M. Lynch and S. Woolgar (eds) Representation in Scientific Practice, pp. 19–67. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lynch, M. and S. Woolgar, eds (1988) Representation in Scientific Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1992) The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the PostPhotographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nash, C., ed. (1990) Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Story-telling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature. London: Routledge. Scott, K.D. and A.M. White (2003) ‘Unnatural History? Deconstructing the Walking with Dinosaurs Phenomenon’, Media, Culture and Society 25: 315–32. Silverstone, R. (1985) Framing Science: The Making of a BBC Documentary. London: British Film Institute. Topper, D. (1996) ‘Towards an Epistemology of Scientific Illustrations’, in B.S. Baigrie (ed.) Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science, pp. 215–49. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.


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van Dijck, J. (1998) ImagEnation: Popular Images of Genetics. New York: New York University Press. van Dijck, J. (2005) The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging. Seattle, WN: University of Washington Press. Winston, B. (1995) Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute.

Audio visual references Jurassic Park (1993) Director: Steven Spielberg. Based on a novel by Michael Crichton. The Lost World (1997) Director: Steven Spielberg. Based on a novel by Michael Crichton. The Elegant Universe (2003) Producers: David Hickman, Joseph McMaster and Julia Cort. Host: Brian Greene. Part of the PBS series NOVA (WGBH Educational Foundation). Premiered in the US on December 27, 2003. The Secret of Life (1993) Host: David Suzuki. Eight-part documentary PBS series (WGBH Educational Foundation). Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) Producer: Tim Haines. BBC/Discovery/TV Asahi co-production in association with Pro Sieben and France 3. Premiered in Great Britain on 4 October, 1999. The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) Producer: Tim Haines. BBC/Discovery/TV Asahi. Aired October 11, 1999. Walking with Beasts (2001) Producer: Tim Haines. Narrator: Kenneth Branagh. BBC/Discovery. Aired October, 2001.

● JOSÉ VAN DIJCK is Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam and chair of the Department of Media Studies. She is the author of Manufacturing Babies and Public Consent: Debating the New Reproductive Technologies (New York University Press, 1995) and ImagEnation: Popular Images of Genetics (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Her latest book is titled The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005). Her research areas include media and science, (digital) media technologies, and television and culture. Address: Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, Turfdraagsterpad 9, 1012 XT Amsterdam,The Netherlands. [email: [email protected]] ●
