Rain Room
Installed inside an expansive, empty room is the playfully interactive Rain Room by Random International. A black, grated floor covers 100 square meters of the room, close to filling the space, but the piece ensures there is still room to walk around it if so desired. Directly above the grate, close to the ceiling, sits a circular patterned black lattice, inside which water valves are hidden. From these valves, water rains down onto the grate below, covering the entire 100 square meters with steadily falling water, the intensity and consistency of which mimics actual rain.
Since the lattice and the grate do not encompass the entire room, onlookers can observe the falling rain from the side, as the sound and smell of the water fills the entire space around it. The thousands of liters of water used for this installation also creates a palpable amount of moisture in the air, the thick humidity can be felt in the area immediately surrounding the piece. Installed along with the rain simulation are a few large lights, angled to shine their beams perpendicular to the falling water. This effect highlights each falling drop, enabling viewers to watch the water fall from the lattice, and follow it all the way down to the grate below. If the audience wishes to get a closer look at the rain, they can step into the falling area of water, and activate the interactive part of the piece.
Rain Room is equipped with 3D motion sensors that track movement underneath the water valves. When it senses a person walking inside the piece, the sensors turn off the water valves for the area around that person. This effectively creates a circle with no rainfall centered on that person, which follows them as they move around the piece. So people can be completely surrounded by rain, and not get wet. This waterless interaction works with multiple people at once, so this experience can be shared with others as they get to see rain from a new perspective.
Random International has been creating active participation art installations since 2005. Founded by Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass, Random International today has grown beyond the two Germans, and they now work with large groups of other artists in Berlin and London. Adding artists into the group only strengthened Random International’s goal, which they describe as,
“explore[ing] the human condition in an increasingly mechanised world through emotional yet physically intense experiences.”
Creating Rain Room was one of the group’s biggest and most ambitious projects, it took almost three years to complete. But the work paid off as it is still installed at various sites today.
Up until 2012, Random International’s projects have been on a more intimate scale, each piece meant for only a personal experience. But with Rain Room, they were granted access to the large public space The Curve at the Barbican, whose curators showed no hesitation about the proposed thousands of liters of water needed for the project. With this creative freedom, Random International got the chance to do something different. While many of their pieces have extracted interesting reactions from audiences, this was one of the first times these reactions could occur alongside others experiencing the work at the same time. This shared connection would feed off of other’s energy and create an experience wholly different than previous pieces. In this case, that shared feeling facilitated the message Random International was trying to portray.
Rain Room shows the relationship between humans standing in the rain, and yet staying dry, urging participants to examine how their senses relate to the environment around them. Random International pushes the boundary of how machinery impacts the world around us, going so far as to give the illusion of controlling rain. LACMA describes the Rain Room experience as it
“presents a respite from everyday life and an opportunity for sensory reflection within a responsive relationship.”
Viewers experience nature in a way they never have, and never will again, which pushes the very idea of what their normal relationship to the world is, and what it could be. When nature and machines are involved, Random International pushes audiences to question where humans fit in the world around them.
Random International has made other projects that question human connection to the world, by throwing viewers into new and unfamiliar situations. One such project is titled Turnstiles, created in 2018. This installation consists of multiple stainless steel turnstiles all arranged together, but are mechanized so that when one is pushed, the rest return to a pre-set position. As viewers move through the piece, it becomes like a maze, as each turnstile does something that is unexpected. This process also takes the original function away from the machines. Instead of being a barrier, they are arranged to encourage people to walk through them, explore the area, and experience the maze. This piece pushes viewers to think about what new connections they can form with something as mundane as turnstiles, and ponder why there is only one relationship with these objects in the first place.
Random International are not the only ones asking these kinds of questions, teamLab is another group of artists pursuing the relationship between the self and the world. In 2015, teamLab created Floating Flower Garden, an immersive installation where over 2300 flowers float in space, that are lifted into the air as viewers walk around. Creating a hemisphere of empty space around the audience, participants exist in the space surrounded by life, without coming into contact with it. Seeing plants from this new perspective, as all plants are alive and growing, teamLab hopes to have people really stop and see the flowers, maybe for the first time.
Rain Room’s version of questioning where people belong in a space dominated by nature and machines was incredibly well-received, creating some of the most unprecedented long lines and sold-out tickets for many of the sites where it was installed. Audiences could not help but be floored by the scope and shock of walking into rain and yet not feeling a drop. There is something incredibly impactful about taking something everyone has experienced many times, like rain, and making it feel foreign, making people question what they are feeling. The dramatic look of lights being cast across the rain, the thundering sound of the water hitting the ground, it all is very effective in making audiences ponder what their senses are telling them, and why that is. Rain Room has brought in a large audience to participate in interactive art, and the result was to pave a way for more large-scale installations both by Random International, and other artists who want to make their impact.
Links:
gizmodo.com/inside-the-rain-room-walking-through-a-downpour-withou-504516482
www.dezeen.com/2012/10/04/rain-room-by-random-international-at-the-barbican/
gulfnews.com/uae/rain-room-brings-fun-intrigue-to-sharjah-1.2215470
www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/rain-room
www.sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/projects/rain-room
www.random-international.com/rain-room-2012
www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/instagram-art-wonder-renwick-rain-room/463173/
