We touch our technologies but how often do they touch us back? ‘Full Body Smart Automatic Manipulator’ unveils a stage for exploring the intimacy between technologies and their humans, using tactility as a medium for interaction and exchange with a seemingly intelligent artificial entity.

The experience begins at the moment of impact between a massage chair and its human visitor, this set is the stage for several experiments always evolving from exploring artificial spoken sounds in combination with touch to fully interactive tactile and audio narratives.

Navigating through the disembodied networks of options, each interaction follows a unique path interwoven with uncanny experiences of meaning and senses or narratives exposing the friction between control, automated labour, commercialised AI and intimacy.

The fleshy body and augmented voice of the machine, enveloping its human counterpart, occupies an undefined intersect between organism and apparatus. Cognitively and corporeally it labours as every rotation of the massagers push against our assumptions of what it means to be artificially intelligent.
The medium truly is the massage.

Experience the Full Body Smart Automatic Manipulator through a choose your own adventure illustration here.

This work was initiated in Shanghai, China in the context of the Research Fellowship of Chronus Art Center Lab.