Not long ago, I saw the Dialog in the Dark and Bodies exhibits over at Atlantic Station. First let me say that if you go and justify it, plan and budget to see both and you can get the second exhibit for $6. They are normally $24 each I believe.

Bodies can be summarized pretty easily: Gray's Anatomy in living - or errr... dead - 3D. Regardless of how you think we as human beings got here, you can't help but walk out of Bodies with an immense appreciation for whatever process resulted in our being.

Dialog in the Dark (DD) was really illuminating. I have experienced total darkness maybe twice in my life and both times for very very limited intervals so this was bound to be something unique. When the experience gets underway you are grouped with seven others, given a white cane and ushered into a small room where everyone sits on an arrangement of lighted cubes that gradually lose luminescence until you are sitting in complete darkness. When I say complete, I mean total can't-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face-darkness. I had a very bad psychological reaction when the lights finally went off, an innate discomfort of having one of my senses taken away and the powerlessness that came from knowing I'd have to deal with this for an hour. It took me about 30 seconds to get my bearings.

While sitting in the dark, the usher instructs you to pull some objects out of a box and identify them. What I realized here was that my natural procedure to investigate what I had pulled out was simply to feel it. It turned out that it was impossible to fully identify everything by touch alone as the senses of smell and hearing were mandatory. After that, the tour guide is introduced (a different person walks you into the room initially meaning that you don't actually see your tour guide) and they guide you into another room where you try to discern your whereabouts.

The meat of the experience is going through these different locations and fleshing out your sense of the surroundings by feeling, listening, and sniffing (and stumbling, a LOT) around. It's very humbling to manifest how those without the sense of sight perceive and navigate the world. I won't reveal the locations, but I will say that they are varied and intriguing.

The guide does a great job of getting everyone around. So well that I thought he might have some sort of infrared camera helping him keep everything moving (there was mention of an infrared system deployed for safety and security reasons). As it turned out, we were the blind being led by the blind. Once revealed, it made perfect sense - why have a sighted person lead you with a camera when a blind person can do it without?

The tour ends with a conversation between the group and the guide which, in my group's case and I'd assume most cases, turned into a steady stream of questions about how the guide lives his every day life. Our guide came across as I'd imagine myself if I were blind. Nothing motivates me more than people doubting that I can do something or my failing miserably at something that I want to do, and this guy does mountain climbing, water skiing, and - I'm dead serious - web design / development. Not only that, but he commutes from Acworth - i.e. the sticks - to the city every day with his seeing eye dog.

He talked a lot about discrimination that he endures from jobs to restaurants to the inconveniences of accommodation such as the lack of sidewalks in his neighborhood that prevents him from being able to walk to the bus stop with his dog to start the intown commute (he has to bum a ride every day). That made me think. A few years ago I participated in a large renovation project at my job that consisted of us ripping out an entire floor of our office building and repurposing it. At numerous points of the project we kept running up against this annoying piece of legislation called the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that forced us to redo several parts of our designs - at no small cost - because they were deemed in violation. This created no small amount of chagrin toward the ADA with members of the project team constantly interjecting expletives between letters of the acronym but over the years I have developed an appreciation for it as I've realized the importance of broadening the reservoir from which we pull our talent and idea. Dialog in the Dark only reinforced that appreciation.

Tangentially Related Commentary

When in Hawaii, Rene - who fittingly accompanied me to DD - and I saw a film called Blindness about an infection that turns an entire city (and perhaps the world, I can't remember) blind. The result is pure chaos and we spend a large part of the movie in a prison where two factions of blinded people - one aided by a woman who could see - are engaged in a violent power struggle. This was kind of disappointing as the film had a promising premise but devolved into an unremarkable Lord of the Flies type action movie. That lost promise does start to shine through in the final act but it was too little too late in my view.

I bring up the film because there was a very strong reaction by a number of blind advocacy organizations:

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “The National Federation of the Blind condemns and deplores this film, which will do substantial harm to the blind of America and the world. Blind people in this film are portrayed as incompetent, filthy, vicious, and depraved.

Jeez, this guy has definitely proven that advocates for the blind are just as apt to hyperparse, get the wrong idea, and run it in the ground as any of our sacred cow special interest groups (e.g. race, gender, religion). What DD showed me is that the situation in Blindness is plausible, not because of any material shortcoming implicit with being blind, but in the fact that losing one of the primary ways that you interact with the world suddenly and without counsel could be extremely traumatic psychologically. When the darkness hit me, I had sharply negative gut check even though I was fully aware that it was only a temporary situation, I could only imagine how a widespread pandemic would go down.