A Dry Hollow in the Rain: Random International's Rain Room and Signage Without a Screen

Inside a dark room, it is raining. Water falls without pause from an array of nozzles in the ceiling, the floor sounds with it, and the air fills with damp. When one person steps in, the rain stops — overhead and around that person alone. A dry void of roughly 1.8 metres in radius follows the body's movement, lagging slightly behind it. Two people entering make two voids; six people, six. No one carries an umbrella, and no one gets wet. Through the sound of water, people walk with a dry hole in tow.

This is Random International's Rain Room. It premiered at London's Barbican Centre in 2012 and crossed the following year to MoMA in New York. At MoMA a black temporary structure was raised on the vacant lot beside the main building, and the queue for entry ran to five or eight hours a day. Beyoncé and Jay-Z were reported to have entered through a private slot, and derision and praise flew about at once around the line that "the queue itself is part of the work." Nothing happens unless people gather — more precisely, even when people gather, only six to ten can enter at a time and the rest stand in a long line. It is this thoroughgoing structure of the gathering, kai (会), that made Rain Room an emblematic installation of the twenty-first century.

Before the Rain, There Was the Swarm

Random International has its origins in 2002, when Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass began collaborating as students at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. It started in earnest as a company in 2005. Initially it ran as a trio including a third founder, and has since moved to the two-person structure of Koch and Ortkrass. Neither an anonymous collective of several hundred in the manner of teamLab nor a solo artist, it takes the form typical of European media art: a mid-sized studio founded by two.

What ran through Random International before Rain Room was not rain but the swarm. Audience (2008) is a flock of sixty-four robots, each carrying a mirror about the size of a head; when a person approaches, the individual units all turn their faces towards that person at once. The Swarm Study series, begun in 2010, turns the collective intelligence of flocking birds and schooling fish into an algorithm and translates it into the flickering of light sources. Points of light respond in waves to human movement, sound and proximity. In 2011, on a commission from the Victoria and Albert Museum, they produced Swarm Study / III, a cubic cluster of light points hung from the ceiling that detects visitors and flickers in reply.

What matters here is that their works consistently have no screen. No LCD, no LED, no projection surface. In their place, non-screen media — points of light, mirror images, flying drones, water droplets — detect the presence of the viewer and respond. The apparatus is a swarm of sensors ceaselessly reading the visitor's body, and its response is what brings the image of the work into focus. If the light points of Swarm Study are "a screen of moving points," then Rain Room applies the same logic to water: regard the falling droplets as countless pixels, and the presence of a person works as a signal that partly erases those pixels. The screen does not switch an image on; the body switches the rain off. Display and erasure are inverted — a negative screen.

One Work Takes the Measure of Four Museums

The physical specification of Rain Room was held almost constant across four venues. 2,500 litres of recirculated, filtered water fall from an array of ceiling nozzles, and 3D tracking cameras arranged in the ceiling detect the visitor's body and halt the corresponding group of nozzles. The dry radius is roughly 1.8 metres. The rain field covers some 100 square metres. Six to ten people enter at a time, staying five to fifteen minutes.

Because the same work travelled through different institutions, Rain Room also became a device that reflected each museum's logic of programming. At the Barbican in 2012 it ran for five months in The Curve, the temporary exhibition space, and turned Random International into a global name overnight. The Barbican's head of galleries at the time appraised the work as follows.

audacious and compelling … surpasses all our expectations

— Barbican Centresource

At MoMA in 2013, Restoration Hardware (the high-end furniture retailer) and Volkswagen of America came on as sponsors, drawing "the boundary between commercial capital and the museum" into the focus of criticism. At LACMA from 2015 to 2016 it was installed as the first project of a joint programme between Hyundai Motor and LACMA, and was permanently acquired once the run had ended — the world's first instance of converting a time-limited immersive experience into an institution's permanent collection. Then in 2018 the Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE) put up a dedicated new building, and the world's first permanent installation was realised. The climatic and political statement of experiencing rain in an arid land was discussed repeatedly in criticism on the ground.

The artists themselves have consistently avoided speaking of the work as a romanticism of rain. On the occasion of the permanent installation in Sharjah, Koch stated the essence of the piece with blunt finality.

It's not about rain, it's about robots

— The Art Newspapersource

Not art that handles rain, but art that handles robotics. This self-definition shows clearly their refusal to abandon the dialogue with criticism. And in fact Rain Room has drawn strong criticism as well. The art critic Felicity Scott, writing in Artforum in 2013, discussed MoMA's Rain Room as an apparatus of "cybernetic control" that monitors and tracks visitor behaviour and turns the desire to master nature into an interface, and pointed out that it stands, if anything, far from institutional critique. The charges of being a "selfie machine" and of "offering experience while demanding no thought" were also repeated, above all around the LACMA period. Random International did not deflect these criticisms but took them on, changing how the theme is handled in the works that followed — a resilience under criticism that has been consistent across their history.

What Remains When the Screen Is Erased

TENKEI has followed, up to now, cases of signage × art that rise up in the scenery of the city. The great majority of them presuppose a "screen," whether LED or projection surface. What makes Rain Room interesting is the way it shows, in an extreme form, what remains once that screen is subtracted.

The counterpart that comes to mind is Carsten Nicolai's chroma actor, which stood for eleven years in Seibu Shibuya. That work received the unconscious presence of passers-by as environmental data and converted it into LED colour. Those passing through do not notice that they are the ones moving the colour. If chroma actor is a conversion from "environmental data → colour," then Rain Room is a conversion from "the presence of a body → the absence of rain." One dissolves the LED screen thinly into the architecture; the other strips away the screen itself and puts a field of water droplets in its place. The directions are opposite, yet both hold together outside the twentieth-century definition of signage as "transmission through a screen, a set of pixels." Signage is not one-way transmission through a screen but a response to the audience mediated by environmental matter — that is how both works can be read to speak.

Seen from this vantage, the visitor's experience of Rain Room is not well caught by the word "immersion." It is not a matter of throwing the body in as a generative factor of the work in the manner of teamLab, nor of looking up at a large moving image and photographing it. Standing within the field of rain, the visitor observes, as if from outside, that their own presence is rewriting the image of the rain. To be inside the work and yet regard one's relation to it from without: a self-reflexive posture is there. The gathering of people is indispensable, and yet each person is inside their own dry solitude. It is a kai, a gathering, and yet it is quiet.

Ma and Tenkei

Viewed through the paired concepts of ma, the interval, and tenkei, the point of scenery, the structure of Rain Room becomes astonishingly lucid.

The rain that goes on falling is a continuum filling space without a gap. When a person enters, a dry void opens around the body. This is nothing other than the phenomenon of a human presence opening a ma in space. Just as ma in ink-wash painting opens space as blankness, in Rain Room the body carves a physical blank out of the rain. And standing alone in the place thus opened is the person in question — that is, the tenkei. A small presence that appears within the landscape of the rain, moves for a while, and departs again. The structure is the same as that of the boat or the traveller in an ink-wash painting, the point of scenery that gives direction and life to a vast expanse of mountains and water. Not the protagonist of the landscape, but a small mark placed there in order to bring the landscape to life.

What Rain Room inverts and shows is that this relation can also be told from the side of the "screen." Regard the countless droplets as falling pixels, and the human body behaves as a signal that locally switches that field of pixels off. Where ordinary signage "draws an image by switching on," Rain Room "draws an image by switching off." The image appears not as light but as absence — and, moreover, as the contour of the visitor themselves. Exactly inverse to the advertising surfaces of the city, which switch content on to seize attention, this work switches the rain off and lets the visitor rise up as a tenkei in the landscape.

To place this screenless work, deliberately, within the lineage of signage: that is also a work of relighting the question of what signage is, from outside the screen. If the countless screens standing in the city are, at the same time as devices that transmit content, places where people gather, stop, and kindle a tenkei in the landscape — then the dry void of Rain Room, as the purest model of that, goes on making rain fall to this day, underground in Sharjah.

Sources

1. fig.001Rain Room | MoMA (2013)(2013-05)
2. fig.002Swarm Study / I, 2010 — Random International(2010)
3. fig.003Rain Room, 2012 — Random International(2012)
4. [4]Random International — About
5. [5]Rain Room — Random International (Barbican, 2012)(2012-10)
6. [6]Rain Room | Sharjah Art Foundation (2018–, permanent installation)(2018-05)
7. [7]Rain Room — LACMA (2015–16, permanently acquired)(2015-11)
8. [8]"It's not about rain, it's about robots" — The Art Newspaper(2018-05)
9. [9]Felicity Scott, "Limits of Control: Rain Room and Immersive Environments" — Artforum(2013-09)
10. [10]Random International — Wikipedia
11. [11]Rain Room — Wikipedia

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Random International (Hannes Koch, Florian Ortkrass); permanently housed by Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE)

LOCATION

Sharjah

MODEL

Museum commission — Hosted by museums including the Barbican, MoMA and LACMA; the market handled by Pace Gallery and Carpenters Workshop Gallery

ARTIST PAY

Sustained by gallery sales of editions and kinetic works, plus permanent acquisitions by LACMA (2015) and Sharjah (2018)

CADENCE

Premiered at the Barbican in 2012, made permanent in Sharjah in 2018; up to 6–10 visitors at once, five to fifteen minutes per session

SPEC

A rain field of c. 100 m² using 2,500 litres of recirculated filtered water; ceiling 3D-tracking cameras halt the nozzles within roughly a 1.8 m radius of each visitor

SINCE

2012-10

STATUS

Active

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