Digitising Dinosaurs

Abstract

This article reflects on the intersection of science, art and technology in the construction of the televisual dinosaur. In particular, it is concerned with the class of digital dinosaurs hatched in Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World (1997), powered by the latest digital technologies for the reinscription of the filmic and televisual image, and recently grafted to that most domestic of media genres, the animal documentary. Focusing on the BBC television series Walking with Dinosaurs (1999), the digital dinosaur is proposed as an object of mimetic desire in which narratives of intimacy and otherness, resurrection and loss, anthropomorphism and monstrosity are played out. In analysing exactly how the mimetic is achieved, an alternative balance between science and art is proposed, one that foregrounds the complexities and paradoxes of a television program that offers realistic depictions of things we know don't exist in the familiar guise of an animal documentary.