We went on a little art tour today. The yela'kaja heard how I seemed to like Kesatan art, but Lazga art is entirely different. Kesatan art was all bright colors, mimicking their language -- but Lazga can't see color, or even light. Their art galleries are as dark as any other place in the tunnels, and rather than arranging their art where it would get the best light the way artists on Earth and Kesata do, I'm told that the art and the gallery itself are designed for very good acoustic properties, allowing a Tzállö to pick out individual pieces easily with minimal noise in the background.
The arrangement is actually good for me, too, since getting good echolocation acoustics also seems to involve putting stuff in big wide rooms with enough space that various sculptures and pedestals don't block each other, and with my light as good as it is, it lights up a decent portion of the room with almost none of the little exhibits in the shadows. And I don't know about up in ultrasonic, but it's very quiet in the range I can hear. I get a weird feeling sometimes when one of the Tzállö is nearby or if they "look" at me, which I'm told might be a reaction to their clicking that I can't actually hear but can still register somehow.
It's actually kind of interesting what's in the gallery. With my little lamp I see lots of sculptures and such, but also big canvasses with textures on them. You're allowed to touch just about everything in a Tzállö gallery, and they encourage me to do it. Everything has textures and different materials to it. Some of the statues use real hair or fur for a realistic feel, and some of these canvases use lots of different materials that are simply intended to be felt. I've been told that Tzállö fingers are a bit more sensitive than mine, and that I might not even be able to feel some of the subtle differences in the textures.
They have some other interesting things, too. Some places there are thousands of little pins that move to make a Tzállö face that begins giving a lecture in Fbeki about the pieces around it, and one little room where I saw five Tzállö wearing this big contraption on their noses and ears that distorts their echolocation patterns to show them virtual images (naturally, it was useless for me to try that one).
Anyway, we're going to a concert sometime on the itinerary. I figure that a race that has so much of its world defined by sound should have good music. I like the art too, but it's a lot harder to relate to the "visual" arts of a race that can't even see.
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You're very fortunate you couldn't hear the echolocation...I likely would, so it's probably for the best that you don't.
I have heard of attempts in our world to make visual art more accessible to the blind, and at least the tactile element of what you describe sounds somewhat like this. Here's an example--although in this world, if you want to touch originals, you have to have gloves, because of what the oil in your skin does to originals, plus the subtle abrasion.
http://www.metmuseum.org/events/ev_vis_dis.asp#4
Otherwise, you use replicas. How do the Tzállö get around the problem of degrading the artwork by touching it? Do their fingers just not secrete oil like ours do, or do they consider the evidence of others' touch part of the antique charm?
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