LACMA – Rain Room
About This Project
November 1, 2015 – April 24, 2016
Los Angeles, USA
Details
Random International’s Rain Room (2012) is an immersive environment of perpetually falling water that pauses wherever a human body is detected. The installation offers visitors an opportunity to experience what is seemingly impossible: the ability to control rain. Rain Room presents a respite from everyday life and an opportunity for sensory reflection within a responsive relationship.
Founded in 2005, Random International is a London-based studio for contemporary art practice that encompasses sculpture, performance, and installation. Harnessing state-of-the-art technology, its projects examine the human condition in the current digital era, while inviting personal explorations of social behavior and natural phenomena. Since its inception, Random International has taken inspiration from LACMA’s Art and Technology program, which ran from 1967 to 1971 and paired artists with scientific or otherwise innovative corporations in an effort to expand the field of production. In a similar vein, the studio prioritizes experimentation through collaboration. Fittingly, Rain Room is presented under the auspices of LACMA’s most recent Art and Technology initiative.
“Everything is taken away and you are only with you. You’re very much focused on yourself, on your perception of sound and smell and light and the space around you. It’s a fairly singular experience. It feels like it’s going out into infinity, so you don’t see anything on the periphery. There is only rain with the emergence of very digital surroundings and very ultimate surroundings, we experience life through a screen, more or less, through Facebook, through bits and bytes and ones and zeros. Its’s very important to us to bring people back into their body and into physical experience. We do that by, I think, reaching out to some instictive component in the visitors.”
Hannes Koch (Co-Founder of Random International)
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