WAI Toshio's start as a visual artist sprang from his work in experimental animation production after entering college. He first took an interest in pre-cinematic visual devices such as the flipbook, Phenakistiscope, and zoetrope. Giving movement to static pictures by showing them in a continuous series, these devices constitute the very basis of animation. IWAI arranges them in a contemporary fashion to create animation objet. What advanced his work yet further was his series <<Time Stratum>> (1985-), in which a group of small objects attached to the inner wall of a dome or revolving disk attain lively movement through the flashing light of a monitor.

<<Man-Machine-TV>>(1989) consists of eight television monitors equipped with interface devices such as revolving handles, joysticks, and switches. When the viewer manipulates these interfaces, the objects on the screen begin to move as though directly connected to the actual interface. This work was not simply an interface experiment; by experimenting with various links between people, sound, and image the work became a reflection on interactivity itself.

IWAI has also produced many music-related works such as <<Music Insects>>(1992), in which insects crawling on a screen make sounds and create music in accordance with pictures drawn by visitors. In <<Resonance of 4 >>(1994), groups of four visitors can use a mouse to make points of light that are then performed as musical score, creating a harmonic musical space.

At the "MultiMediale 4" (ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany) held in May 1995, IWAI equipped a grand piano with a MIDI interface to create <<Piano-as image media>>. By moving a trackball, visitors made the notes depicted on a screen run across the musical score to collide with the keyboard, producing a rhythmical sound, whereupon three-dimensional images would suddenly emerge from the keyboard. Fusing together the materiality of the piano as mechanism and the immateriality of computer graphics as light, the work gave people a glimpse of the new relations between sound and image through the mediation of interactivity. Based on this work, a collaborative performance with SAKAMOTO Ryuichi was held in December 1996.

Recently, IWAI has also produced work in which he uses a video camera to take images of visitors to his installations and then presents these images as sequential photographs.

Pursuing, in his words, "visual media that becomes part of one's body and can be controlled at will as an extension of the bodily functions," IWAI makes deliberate use of interfaces where reality and visual media intersect in order to blur the boundary between material and virtual realities, and develops devices for performing music through the mediation of interactive visual media. In the process, IWAI continues to create visual media devices that he hopes will "raise people's consciousness, sensibilities, and creativity to ever higher levels."