HUMAN BEHAVIOR July 1975
In Touch With Feeling
by Richard Register

Tactile dome on the museum floor

Let me lure you into a new realm, a place called touch where you have always been but seldom really noticed. Leave the muted red pilot lights and muffled whir and murmurings of the control-room vestibule behind. Part the black vinyl streamers and glide through the up and down tubes and chutes and chambers. Disappear into the void, absorbed like sunshine falling deep into black velvet folds. The Tactile Gallery draws your body in like the Mother Earth herself, pulling you back through evolutionary time and vague fears of death, opening an inner perspective, a magic theater pouring through the mind from places unknown. If you don't believe me, you've probably never been there, because this place is a powerful experience, a reality/imagination trip that leaves few people unshaken. But perhaps I exaggerate, since I'm talking about my own work. So let's look at what's there for sure in this new world of tactile art.