In late 2008, a YouTube video began to circulate online of a bespectacled man with electrodes attached to his face, short bursts of electricity making his muscles twitch in time to a soundtrack of glitchy electronica. Titled "electric stimulus to face -test3", the clip would eventually rack up more than 1.7 million views. Its creator, Daito Manabe, has posted 150 such videos, charting his ongoing experiments to forge a tighter, happier relationship between man and machine — even if it requires some obvious discomfort on his part.

Anyone who caught J-pop trio Perfume on their European tour during the summer will have seen Manabe's work in action. The group performed their futuristic electro wearing elaborate white dresses that acted as a canvas for a constantly morphing kaleidoscope of digital graphics, which in turn interacted with the images being projected on screens behind them. Manabe may insist that he's "not doing anything complicated" with the stage show — a combination of motion capture, visual programming and projection mapping technology — but the effect is dazzling.

A man of multiple talents — programmer, composer, designer, DJ, VJ — Manabe had been bugging Perfume's people for three years before finally getting a chance to work with them. "I was a big fan," he says. "Eventually, [Perfume choreographer] Mikiko got in touch, saying that they wanted to do something interesting at their Tokyo Dome show, and asking if I'd be able to help them out." That was 2010, and Manabe has since become a pillar of the group's creative team, using his programming nous to transform their gigs into immersive tech fantasias.