Interactive works are incomplete until the audience experiences them. The audience is to a greater or lesser degree, a co-creator with the artist. To translate the work, you must find a way of supporting the interactive mechanism. The character of the relationship between the audience and the work is often of prime importance to the work. The tangible material of the work may even be somewhat arbitrary... chosen for its appropriateness to the relationship that the artist intended to portray. On one hand, translation of interactive works is made potentially easier because the core of the work is usually in software, and internally the software is handling data in a completely modality-free way. The output of the software is at least theoretically ready for translation into other modes than the originally intended one.
In my work Very Nervous System, previously described, the particular sound of the work is not really important. The sound articulates the relationship that the work sets up between one's body and the system. That the articulation is made up of sound, is, however, not incidental, because the piece relies on the subconscious physical responses of the human body to sound as part of its functional mechanism. The sound is intended to be muscular. Secondarily, I specifically decided not to have anything for the interactor to look at. If there is a visual representation of the person in the installation, the person tends to focus on the image, rather than on their body movement and proprioceptive sense. In this work, a tactile translation or perhaps one using subsonic sound and vibration might be more appropriate than a visual one.