I have now been in a second tunnel
I have now been inside a second tunnel... a different tunnel from the tunnel I blogged about previously!!
I super can't say where this one is. The facilitators who got me into this tunnel were very concerned that we not reveal its location, or even the faces of the persons inside the tunnel. Here are some of my faceless photos:
I liked going in this tunnel! It was a treat, visually. I am not sure I enjoyed the event facilitation... but they were trying their best for sure. I'll just say that I'm not an urbex expert, but I don't do NO urbex, and I definitely have opinions about how you should behave when you take people into dangerous places, and they weren't always met here.
At one point I was invited to walk into a completely dark tunnel with all my lights turned off and no guidance but my hand on the wall. This was a very cool experience - it really was a moment I'll treasure, and it was the most "art" part of the experience for me, because I'll probably never have an opportunity to do it again. But I probably would not have done it if I'd known that there were literally zero facilitators ahead of me in the tunnel, and I was going to spend a considerable amount of time walking absolutely blind and guideless straight into a tunnel system that I had no maps of and no reliable guidance on how to navigate, and that there was no workable plan in place to catch up with the front of the group and apply that guidance. Lol and lmao. I believe the phrase "you'll know it when you see it" was said, but I didn't know it when I saw it, and I didn't receive consistent instructions from the people in charge.
However, as part of the overall experience, I did meet a tunnel wizard who has been in a lot of tunnels. I was particularly impressed by their tunnel knowledge. I am a tunnel baby compared to some!! It's very cool to meet tunnel experts! There's people out there who have done hundreds of miles of tunnel exploration. I've done only about ten total miles of tunnels!
I also really appreciated getting to see large calthemite deposits for the first time!
The more weird shit I do in LA, the more I see different cultures of risk and experimentation and exploration at work in different subcultures. Nighttime bike ride facilitators definitely seem to be among the best at communicating where they'd like the group to go, how they want them to move, and where they want them to stop. I assume this comes from bike group ride culture, where people call out hazards to one another, tell one another in advance whether the ride is drop/no drop, etc. When I go on a bike ride in an "illegal place," I usually know whether someone is leading it, whether someone is following up the rear, and whether I'm expected to be self-sufficient or not.
I think that if you're planning to run a weird experience for non-normies in your community... if you want to go out into the world and kind of break the law as an exercise in, let's say, self-exploration... then designing your experience so that it's "foolproof" is absolutely worth it. Bike rides are often "foolproof" because they are difficult enough that the participants end up being completely self-sufficient. Getting there arms them with the information they need to get home. The main tunnel I bike in is "all downhill," and you don't need to make any choices to get to the exit. This one wasn't like that!
I think videogame developers would be insanely good at designing weird experiences. I've actually been lucky enough to see some videogame designers try their hand at bizarre IRL experiences before. If you spend all day thinking through how people are going to figure out movement through a digital world - or a game process, or a menu flow, even - you'd probably be great at figuring out how to lead people through a forest, or under a freeway, or through a tunnel. You should try!!