This ‘public laboratory’ is testing whether people can understand each other’s differences

Clarinda Mac Low gets lost easily.
It’s mostly due to her lack of a strong sense of direction, but also because she’s a bit afraid of asking the people around her for directions.
This reporter understands — as a college senior in Philadelphia, navigating the city without Google Maps and an internet connection can be an intimidating task.
But how can Manhattan-based Mac Low help others, say people who know New York like the backs of their hands, understand what she goes through? That’s what her work with the Incredible Witness laboratory is trying to do.
Incredible Witness, which is not not a traditional laboratory, is more of a public “funhouse exercise” made up of interactive and participatory games and activities that challenge people’s sensory perception — direction, spatial awareness, color vision, etc. In this way, the games attempt to encourage participants understand how our most basic senses can sometimes differ widely.
The overall question this project asks then becomes, “How can people ever be ‘credible witnesses’ when even the most basic perceptions, such as color vision or spatial awareness, differ drastically from person to person?” It’s an experiment in empathy and seeing how, and if, people of different ideologies and lifestyles can understand one another.
For example, a game designed by Mac Low last year tasked players with traveling from one end of Greenpoint’s McGorlick Park to another as fast as possible using a deck of 30 cards with directions. Those directions gave the players options ranging from sitting on a bench for 90 seconds to taking the next 20 steps flapping their arms like a bird. These physical and psychological challenges helped to simulate the difficulty of someone like Mac Low who has trouble navigating a space.
Mac Low, who is the executive director of Culture Push, an experimental organization that combines art with civic engagement, said Incredible Witness was started in 2010 but didn’t become what it is today until collaborators like Lauren Bierly and Allison Parrish joined.
Bierly, an artist and manager of special exhibitions and projects for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Parrish, a computer programmer and game designer — both based in Brooklyn — will be joining Mac Low this Saturday, Dec. 10 at the AlterConf in New York City. AlterConf is a traveling conference series that provides safe spaces for marginalized people to talk about diversity and inclusion in the tech and gaming industries.
The three collaborators will be talking about the results of their experiments and what future activities they have in store for Incredible Witness. For now, Mac Low said, there are no laboratory sessions planned. But that could change soon — a surprising result of this project was seeing that people actually were able to grasp the lab’s mission of empathy and understanding sooner than she expected.
And that’s something she says will be more necessary than ever in the upcoming years.