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Willard Whitson: I don't have slides, so we can turn the lights
up. Well, even though I've left the American Museum, this is the project
in my life that just won't go away. So it's a pleasure to be back
here. And it's interesting to be here. The focus of this session has
to do, obviously, with educational programs related to biodiversity
and, of course, with the IMAX film that's being developed. And it's
interesting to consider the process of developing a permanent Hall
of Biodiversity. As Joel was saying, all of our projects are curatorially
driven, in that the exhibits here at the American Museum flow from
the research and science that's conducted here. But when we polled
the curators, virtually to a person they all said, "What, are you
nuts? That is not a suitable topic for a permanent hall, given the
dynamic nature of the material. It's not something you want to cast
in stone. You can't do it. You should make a movie." Now we've come
full circle, and a movie is being made. So I think there's some vindication
there on somebody's part.
I thought I'd give you today a kind of overview of making an exhibit
using the Biodiversity Hall as a specific example. How do you go about
making selections? What are the considerations that come into play?
There are four elements that drive or shape a museum exhibit and the
first is content. What is it that you want to say? Joel very eloquently
described what the Biodiversity Hall is about and, on some levels,
it's pretty straightforward. So you develop your content for the exhibit.
You determine what I'll call "the draw." What is the shape of that
exhibit going to be? What are the media that you're going to use?
What form will the exhibit take to reflect and express that content?
And then, what's the institutional role of your exhibit? What does
it mean to the institution? The Biodiversity Hall, and I'll talk a
little bit more about this, actually does not stand alone within this
institution. It fits into a broader intellectual context. It certainly
relates to the research that goes on here. It is, in some ways, an
intellectual linchpin for the other exhibits here at the museum. And
then there are other relationships, other roles that it serves. But
that's a fundamental consideration: How does this program fit into
your overall institutional program? And then, the last and, on the
one hand, kind of mundane consideration is, what are the other uses
for this thing that you are creating? In this case, it's a public
exhibition, a permanent or core exhibition. That's the term we use
now. Permanent implies that something's immutable and it's just going
to sit there and gather dust, specimens notwithstanding.
So how's it going to be used for supplemental educational programs
or complementary educational programs? Are groups going to gather
there? If so, where? How are your school groups going to interact
in the space and interact with the content? Is it going to be a space
that's used for rentals? More and more institutions like the American
Museum of Natural History, certainly the Academy of Natural Sciences,
make an increasingly large percentage of their revenue from renting
out spaces—whether it's for weddings or bar mitzvahs or parties
or symposia, you name it. And then also for meetings—are meetings
going to be conducted there? And, of course, parties—all kinds
of activities. There are others, but those are sort of the four overarching
forces that will shape a program.
What's the history of the Biodiversity Hall? As David, I think, mentioned,
this project actually started as a temporary exhibit. The American
Museum, like other institutions, creates exhibits that have a finite
life span. Within the exhibit, we have changing exhibit spaces that
house these temporary exhibits. Oftentimes, they move on to other
institutions and so there's a kind of cross-fertilization among institutions.
It's a way to stimulate interest in your program so that your visitors
keep coming back. It's not the same old place and so forth. So this
was going to be the second in a series of issues-oriented exhibits
that actually started with an exhibit on global warming.
This project spanned two administrations, the presidency of the museum
changed hands once, and the internal administration within the exhibit
department changed hands three times in this process. Ultimately,
what was going to be the second in a series of issues-oriented exhibits
became the first sort of issues-oriented permanent, or core, exhibit.
And as Myles and I were talking earlier, it even had kind of a half-life
as what we called a semi-permanent exhibit. We never knew what that
meant, so fortunately it went by the boards.
Anyway, so what do you do? A decision's made to make this exhibit.
A team is assembled. Given the scope of the exhibit, as I like to
say, it's a simple yet infinitely complex story, full of seeming paradoxes
and contradictions, and I'll go into what I mean by that. The themes
of the exhibit are: life is infinitely complex and varied and related
within a seemingly infinitely complex system, our global ecosystem.
This system, this biodiversity, works and provides sustenance for
all living things, and provides the framework that enables us to exist.
It's all under threat as a result of human activity—pretty straightforward.
And you can do something about it, and things are being done about
it, to address the loss of biodiversity and the biodiversity crisis.
In a nutshell, that's what the exhibit is about.
I say there are seeming paradoxes because there were a number of intellectual
challenges that we had to face in this. For a long time, we wrestled
with titles that would encapsulate what this exhibit was about, and
for a while it was called "The Sixth Extinction." Life on this planet
has faced, and survived, five mass-extinction episodes during the
history and evolution of life. We, as I think most scientists will
agree, are in the midst of, or certainly on the threshold of, a sixth
mass-extinction episode. It's just that we're so close to it, we can't
directly see it happening. That is the fundamental problem. That's
why we have exhibits like this—to alert people to the urgency
to what is not yet readily apparent as an urgent crisis. So that's
one of the problems, one of the paradoxes. What do you mean we're
in the middle of an extinction episode? There's no comets coming out
of the sky. You know dinosaurs aren't dropping over dead. It's already
happened. We're O.K.
One of the other paradoxes is that there are more species now than
ever before. There's more diversity now than ever before. So what's
the problem? Well, the problem is that the extinction rate is moving
at a faster pace, as far as we can tell, and this rate is a damnably
difficult thing to measure, much more so than the rate for normal
background extinction. It is in the natural course of life that a
species comes into being and becomes extinct. So again, that seeming
paradox, or contradiction, is a tough thing to get across. Also because
the more we know, the less we know. Scientists estimate that there
are anywhere from 10 million to 100 million species of organisms on
the planet. We've identified some 1.5 million. Well, that kind of
a big gulf is hard to wrestle with. It's hard to believe things when
you've got that sort of variation. So, of course, the take-home message
is that we're destroying a planet that we don't even know, that we
haven't even identified yet.
What are the challenges here? How do you create an exhibit that is
about everything? From the outset, we knew we wanted to show that
life is beautiful. That life is spectacular. Niles, on many occasions
early on in the project, said, "When people walk into that hall, I
want their first reaction to be, 'Damn, this is worth saving!' This
wonderful complexity is so beautiful and so amazing that let's hold
onto it." Of course, along with that you also want to say that we're
all going to hell. That we're tearing this apart. So you've got that
duality. Then coupled with that—if you're saying we're all going
to hell and we're all doomed—I think the first and natural human
response is "Well, why bother?". And so, of course, you have to tell
the story—you're balancing the fearful with the hopeful. You
have to develop a strategy, then, that on the one hand alerts people
to the glory, the danger, and the peril, and on the other provides
a recipe for addressing these issues. Whether it's the Biodiversity
Hall or any sort of other issues-oriented exhibit, that's the format.
That's what you have to do. Because the ultimate thing you want to
do is to make visitors feel empowered.
And another thing about museum exhibits — and I think Ellen will
talk about this having read her evaluation of the hall — her
work and others have certainly supported the notion that people trust
museums. And I think that it is a sacred trust. People believe that
they're getting the truth here. And so, even though a museum exhibit
might not be the best way to educate masses of people, on the one
hand, it's kind of like church or temple or wherever else one may
go to seek truth and wisdom. It's a place you can rely on. So it's
very important that what we say is the truth and is in fact what we
believe, and where we don't know things, we need to say that very
clearly.
How do we go about doing this? The hall, as Joel was saying, is divided
into a few major areas. The first is what is biodiversity. It's described
from two perspectives: an evolutionary perspective, which is the Wall
of Life, essentially a cross-section of all of the major groups of
organisms on the plant, how they're related, how they got that way—hence,
its evolutionary perspective. And then there's also biodiversity from
an environmental perspective—you know, who lives here, and where
do they live? In talking about the environmental perspective, we went
through a lot of different concepts about how we should deal with
it. And it really kind of boiled down to two contradictory approaches,
or conflicting approaches. One I call "diverse multiple focus" and
the other is "creating an icon." And as you can tell from the large
slice of rain forest that sits in the middle of the hall, we went
with the icon. There was a lot of discussion-and you would not believe
how many, many anguished hours we went through, wrestling. How do
you talk about the many ways in which you find life, the incredibly
diverse environments in which you find life, the diverse biota? How
can you do that? There's too many. It's too diverse, and hence the
idea: Well, let's create a memorable experience, something that iconically
will function in much the same way that the big blue whale does in
the Hall of Ocean Life.
We did decide to go with that, but before that we were thinking: Well,
let's create half-a-dozen big immersive dioramas. And early on in
that version, we had planned on creating what became known as the
21st-century diorama and, lo and behold, here we are. And here in
the museum that created the first natural history dioramas in a museum
setting, it seemed a fitting thing to do at the turn of this century,
to create a diorama that employed a variety of media which to some
degree had not been used before. So even when we were thinking of
multiple locations, we were thinking of various forms of projection
so that we could animate the background; so that you could smell things
and see things moving. We explored a number of ways of reaching a
variety of senses. We made quite a few exploratory trips. One of which,
of course, was to the Dzangha Ndoki rain forest in the Central African
Republic. We went to the Olympic rain forest in Washington. We went
to the Okavango delta in Botswana. We went to New York City. New York
City was going to be one of the environments that we dealt with. And
I was delighted to see the treatment for this film, focusing in on
New York City as a biodiverse environment. So at any rate, we obviously
ended up by creating an icon, and this was only one among many icons
for a while. And-I'm not kidding-it was envisioned that we might have
a giant coffee cup sitting in the middle of the room. And you may
wonder: Why a giant coffee cup? Well, we got into this whole thing
about what is the actual environmental cost of getting a cup of coffee
to you. And, of course, it's exponential when you think of the shipping
and the rain forest, and you could go on and on and on and on, not
to mention the packaging and the inflated prices, etc. That concept
was actually contributed, I think, by the architect James Stuart Polshek,
who came to work with us on this project, and either he or one of
his associates, in looking at the various projects, said, "I know.
A giant coffee cup." So we had one for a while.
Then for a while we were going to have a giant container with living
butterflies. And given the difficulty of creating a living butterfly
environment, an extraordinary example of one exists here now. It's
a tough thing to do to have this kind of a simple box in the middle
of the space, so that went by the boards. At any rate, we ended up
with the rain forest.
The Wall of Life was kind of a given from the outset. We knew we wanted
a diverse cross section of all of the groups of living things. And
in a sense, that was kind of a no-brainer. We didn't know whether
there were actually going to be specimens or lots of photographs or
something, but we knew something like that needed to be there. And
indeed, we did do the scavenger hunt through the Museum, and it was
much tougher than you might imagine. Even though there are some 32
million specimens in the collections here, most of them are not appropriate
for exhibits and the ones that are already on exhibit. So it was actually
rather difficult to put that all together.
So for some of the other issues that we had to deal with—and
I think I'm probably exceeding my allotted time here—one, we
wanted to address the extinction issue. We knew we wanted a resource
center-that was there all along, since this is an issues-oriented
hall and we knew it would bring up a lot of topics that needed to
be dealt with in-depth because we felt that it should be an updateable,
ongoing resource. We created a resource center. We borrowed a page
that we had scripted first in the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution,
and later expanded in the Halls of Vertebrate Paleontology. It has
now expanded into what's called the Biobulletin and the Earth Bulletin
and, I think, the Astro Bulletin in the Rose Center. And there was
the issue of using interactive multimedia technology, which gave us
the option of updating—we thought easily—so we would be
able to have a rapid-response medium, so to speak, that would allow
us to bring current issues to the fore. And, of course, there's the
other half of that. You can buy the hardware, but the key to making
something like that work is to have a staff dedicated to keeping it
updated.
I'm going to break off here because I think, Ellen is next. Ellen
will be talking about the visitor response to this hall, and I'll
presage that a little bit. It's been positive. This is, as David has
said, a work in progress. I think that, to me, is the take-home message
here, and when I teach courses about exhibit design, the very first
thing I say to my students is "You're going to fail," which, of course,
gives them pause. And I say, "No, as a designer you're going to fail."
There is no such thing as a perfect design and I assure you there
is no such thing as a perfect movie, either. There are better and
worse effects that more and less succeed. The goal is in the doing,
and staying dynamic and holding to that idea of truth.
Thanks very much.
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