Dans le Noir? Eating in the dark: sensation and conviviality in a lightless place

Drawing on ethnographic interviews with customers, this paper looks at the experience of dining at Dans le Noir?, a restaurant in London where eating is carried out in complete darkness. As an exemplary gastro-tourist site within the expanding leisure economy at which sensory alterity is sought, we argue that the transformation of the usual unreflexive habits of sensing while dining offer opportunities to encounter difference and reflect upon our culturally located ways of sensing the world. In focusing upon the altered experience of apprehending space, eating and socialising in the absence of light, we contend that this dining experience offers broader suggestions about how we might reconsider the qualities and potentialities of darkness, a condition which has been historically feared and reviled in the west.

Dark Places Catalogue (First ed.)

Exhibition Catalogue of Dark Places. As one of four co-curators, I worked with John Hansard to produce the publication. The catalogue contains additional information on artists, the positioning of the work with a commissioned essay by Sally O'Reilly. In addition to a descriptive entry on the Dark Places database,as Director of Office of Experiments we also designed Research Tools for independent researchers wishing to undertake work in the field. This included an ID card, with observational notes that correspond to the taxonomy of the database and a researched guide to legal issues for documenting and photographing secret sites.