Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 56

52

Popular Culture Review

engineering, and construction of such life-sized models. Kokoro, a Japanese com
pany, utilizes John Horner as its scientific adviser, while Dinamation, based in
Irvine, California, depends on Robert Bakker for its scientific consultation. Both
companies build articulated, full color, life-sized robot dinosaurs, which are then
sold or leased to various businesses and educational institutions. Dinamation. for
example, provides moving, growling, and brightly painted dinosaurs for shopping
malls and scientific exhibits around the world. Although the guidance of paleon
tologist Bakker might lead to the assumption that all such robots are nothing less
than “pure” scientific objects or uncomplicated materializations of scientific knowl
edge, this conclusion would necessitate overlooking the pertinent audience or con
sumer issues involved, along with physical requirements and parameters of the
exhibit space, all of which go into the design phase of the robot. Elements as
prosaic as the size of the doorways opening onto a shopping mall can guide, shape,
or restrict the final morphology of the robot. Shopping mall corporate owners may
want a fearsome full-sized T. rex to help draw customers to their venue, but they
may receive a “sub-adult” sized robot due to the limits of store apertures or exhibit
floor space.**
Dinosaurs, in this reconstructed materialized positivity, incarnate the poten
tial iovnew conceptualizations of “scientific knowledge.” Their imagined-real forms
attenuate the a priori categorical distinction between science and art and simulta
neously trouble the given facticity or “thingness” of the scientific object. The re
constituted dinosaur I will henceforth refer to as “dinobot” resides in that nebulous
realm of pop and science, of aesthetic and fact. The brazen solidity of a mall
dwelling green and gold Velociraptor simultaneously embodies the most “realis
tic” and “lifelike” presentation of dinosaurs yet, while pointing to the artificiality
of that (re)presentation through its programmed choreography of clawings and
gnashings and its prerecorded loop of synthesized growls.
These dinobots enter a system of other popular signs—cartoon characters, TV
actors, rock stars, wrestlers—but signify because they are positioned in opposition
to these other objects: dinobots are “real” science, scientific objects whose scien
tific value “guarantees” their authenticity. This scientific cache sets them apart
from many other elements in popular culture, a distinction enabled by the purely
discursive operations conducted in order to construct a “positivity” for scientific
qualities— like scientific value—which are themselves perhaps best conceptual
ized as Baudrillardian “simulacra.”
The aesthetic production of these images haunts the representational spec
trum as a convenient element of guilt, only becoming an “issue” when the accu
racy of the image is under fire. Suddenly the collaborative production process of
the image is suppressed in favor of a clear schism between “proper” science and
mere artistic endeavor. Horner is careful to remind his reader that finally it is the