The artist began with a body suit containing thirteen actuators that were strapped to distributed points on the body. Funded by the MIT Council for the Arts, Cutaneous Grooves was a series of vibrotactile concerts that took place at the MIT Media Lab in September, 2001. Groups of ten people at a time, each with their own body suit, experienced immersive compositions of sound and vibration.
Touch of the Cathode Ray Tubes was an audiovisual installation. Visitors would walk up to an overturned television, put on a pair of headphones, and press their stomach against the bottom side of the television. A vibrotactile distillation of the visual scenery was felt whenever the moving image interacted with the bottom edge of the screen. The use of spatially coincident images and vibrations induced an eery sense of causality, creating a powerful sensory experience.
Searching for a practical means of showing this work, the artist turned to furniture as a vehicle for composed vibrations. Vibravibe VL-12 was a vibrotactile lounge chair with twelve channels of low-frequency vibration. Appropriating its form from a chaise lounge designed by Studio Architetti Associati in 1953, the Vibravibe represented a nonexistent vintage electronic device - the vibrotactile lounge chair - imaging what it might have looked like had it been born in the golden age of hi-fi audio.
