Enjoy a multi-sensory workout when you experience Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson’s interactive installations Gastarbyter and Polaria. Each contraption offers a unique and intense encounter, one person at a time. In a dark chamber, climb aboard the steel and rubber Gastarbyter chair - a soundtrack begins, flickery neon lights fizzle, and the chair quivers into life, reacting to the surround sound - sending tingles up your legs and a wonderful vibromassage across your back, until you inhabit the music.

Polaria is more tranquil - a self-illuminating machine which responds differently to each visitor’s physiology. Slip into hooded coat and bootees then sit in a glass box with your hands on conductive armrests. Responding to your skin resistance, the machine generates a range of shifting light levels (corresponding to light levels recorded in the Arctic during 24-hour daylight summertime) to bathe you in glorious bright luminescence. Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, 28-30 Fawcett Street, Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, until December 31. Tel: 0191 514 1235.

Dirty linen

Add your ideas of what the word “clean” means to the collection of reminiscences on the web at www.thewomenslibrary.ac.ukclean. Laundering tips, bath-time memories and confessions can be heard in an oral history installation at the Dirty Linen exhibition at the Women’s Library in east London (until December 21). The exhibition looks at how laundry has shaped women’s lives over two centuries and examines changing attitudes to cleanliness. Meanwhile, the library hosts a day of debate on November 23 with Jocasta Innes and Melissa Benn (details: 020 7320 2222); and at the Royal Institution on November 26 there is a related session, which asks if obsession with cleanliness is bad for your health (020 7409 2992; www.rigb.org).