music<\/a> as its starting point and asks how some part of that personal perception might become visible to everyone else.<\/p>\n![\"prismbody](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/luminous-being-prismbody-garment-audrey-wright-geoff-robertson-stephanie-ann-boyd-designboom-01.jpg\")
image \u00a9 Claudia Bauer<\/p>\n
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luminous \u2018subtitles\u2019<\/p>\n
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designboom spoke with Robertson ahead of the performance, when he described the idea through a surprisingly familiar comparison. \u2018It\u2019s like subtitles along with audio on a screen,\u2019 he tells us. The lights are meant to communicate information paired with the music, drawing from Boyd\u2019s own associations between sound and color.<\/p>\n
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Speaking at the Met, he goes on: \u2018Audrey is the audio, and the garment has to be the color version of the subtitles.\u2018 What begins inside Boyd\u2019s perception passes through a violinist\u2019s body before arriving in front of an audience as light.<\/p>\n
image courtesy Audrey Wright, Geoff Robertson<\/p>\n
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the garment becomes an instrument<\/p>\n
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Robertson built the first Garment himself, teaching himself electrical engineering and programming along the way. Its 46 display panels sit across Wright\u2019s front and back, with more than 3,000 LEDs distributed across the wearable system.<\/p>\n
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The Garment carries 47 batteries and generates its own Wi-Fi network, allowing Robertson to connect through a tablet and trigger different visual programs during a performance. An onboard microphone also listens to Wright\u2019s playing and feeds audio values into some of those effects. The whole thing runs at roughly 30 frames per second.<\/p>\n
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Wright calls the wearable \u2018a sensory musical instrument itself,\u2019 and Robertson sees his own role in similar terms. \u2018There is a bit of that where I\u2019m actually playing the instrument, kind of in tandem with Audrey,\u2018 he tells us. His tablet sits at the edge of the performance, yet his timing becomes part of what the audience sees. Wright plays the violin while Robertson plays the visual system around her.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"prismbody](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/luminous-being-prismbody-garment-audrey-wright-geoff-robertson-stephanie-ann-boyd-designboom-03.jpg\")
image courtesy Audrey Wright, Geoff Robertson<\/p>\n
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from multisensory to multimodal<\/p>\n
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PRISMBODY begins with Boyd\u2019s synesthesia. During the Met presentation, the composer recalls realizing in graduate school that color had always been inseparable from the way she understood music. \u2018The color was there all the time, like omnipresent,\u2018 she says. \u2018I couldn\u2019t take them apart.\u2018<\/p>\n
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For the new work, she has begun turning those associations into a compositional structure, describing PRISMBODY as \u2018a codifying of my synesthesia.\u2019 Different passages move through color fields tied to her own perception, while Wright builds layers of violin through loop pedals.<\/p>\n
![\"prismbody](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/luminous-being-prismbody-garment-audrey-wright-geoff-robertson-stephanie-ann-boyd-designboom-04.jpg\")
image courtesy Audrey Wright, Geoff Robertson<\/p>\n
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For Robertson, this changes what the wearable needs to do. The original Garment has five fixed LED colors on each display panel, which leaves little room for the subtle hues Boyd associates with particular sounds. Garment 2.0 introduces RGB LEDs capable of producing a far broader range.<\/p>\n
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\u2018The garment transitions from something that is multisensory to something that is more multimodal,\u2018 Robertson explains at the Met. His subtitle analogy returns here. The goal is to communicate related information through sound and image at the same time, with enough chromatic precision for Boyd to recognize something of her own perception in what appears on Wright\u2019s body.<\/p>\n
![\"prismbody](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/luminous-being-prismbody-garment-audrey-wright-geoff-robertson-stephanie-ann-boyd-designboom-05.jpg\")
image courtesy Audrey Wright, Geoff Robertson<\/p>\n
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a screen that wraps around the body<\/p>\n
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The second Garment also expands physically. Robertson is developing transparent display panels that will wrap fully around Wright, replacing the clearer front-and-back orientation of the first version with a continuous visual surface. Each panel will contain individually controlled white LEDs alongside an RGB layer, while additional lights cast color inward across Wright as she plays. The external spotlights are evolving too, becoming sculptural extensions of the wearable display and moving the image farther into the room.<\/p>\n
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That 360-degree view has been on Robertson\u2019s mind since the first Garment. \u2018You have a 360 kind of viewing experience,\u2018 he tells us, recalling the project\u2019s beginnings during the COVID era, when he imagined performances taking place beyond conventional stages. PRISMBODY takes that idea further.<\/p>\n
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Boyd\u2019s color associations enter the score, then Wright and Robertson move that material into sound and light. The audience receives an interpretation shaped through each person along the way. At the Met, the work was still visibly in progress. That made its central question easier to see: how do you turn somebody else\u2019s way of perceiving music into an image a room full of people can experience?<\/p>\n
![\"synesthesia](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/luminous-being-prismbody-garment-audrey-wright-geoff-robertson-stephanie-ann-boyd-designboom-06.jpg\")
image courtesy Audrey Wright, Geoff Robertson<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"envisioned colors on display \u00a0 At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, violinist Audrey Wright wears a field of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":780583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,159854,19546,29423,254960,194505,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-780582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-fashion-design-phenomena","tag-light-installation-art","tag-musical-instruments","tag-spectator-and-spectacle","tag-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/780583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}