Using our imagination

Sensory deprivation has, it would seem, become fashionable these days. As well as restaurants opening in Paris and London for seeing people to experience not seeing (dining in the dark), there is now a dating service where you meet your ‘blind’ date in the dark (supposedly avoiding image issues), and spas have created weekend packages where you can be blindfolded for 72 hours, and experience bumping into your fellow inmates on the way to the steam room — hopefully not in the nude.

Whether this new-found interest in the non-seeing world stems from a need to make sense of the mass of images inundating our daily lives, or whether it is just another way of making money, is hard to tell. But interest in the non-seeing community has now spilled over into the arts world, with Sounding Architecture at the Serpentine (7–12 August) and Tate Modern’s exhibition, Raised Awareness (until 30 September).