ART CITIES: Sanghai -Rain Room

Rain Room is an interactive instillation created by the Hannes Koch, Stuart Wood and Florian Ortkrass as Random international. The instillation transforms the indoors into the outdoors through the creation of a digitalized simulation of the sounds, humidity and visual experience of rainfall.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Yuz Museum Archive

Through the space, viewers are able to navigate themselves along a self-created path and experience the phenomenon of heavy downpour without getting wet. The experience of “Rain Room” is that the viewer feels the sense of the rain through the moisture in the air and the sounds of falling rain before actually being confronted with the rainfall that is respondent to the viewers movements and presence. The instillation is heavily focused on human reaction and action, as the mechanisms in place are reliant on audience participation and interaction for it’s display. Random international describes their instillation as a social experiment designed to extract personality types. The interaction based instillation becomes a people-watching space in which the viewer’s reaction performance differs from day to day. The Yuz Museum in Shanghai, presents the first showing in Asia of “Rain Room”. The vast space of the Museum offered a chance for the artists to install a 50% bigger version than previous ones. The indoor installation features a 150 square meter field dropping 1,800 liters of water (recycled from the museum’s mains) per minute in what looks just like a downpour , within a matte black tent that blocks out all light except that coming from an enormous spotlight at one end of the room. The effect as it shines through the light transforms visitors in the rain into ghostly silhouettes. The installation has an intricate bank of 3D cameras and motion sensors that constantly track the audience’s movements and stop the water directly overhead when they sense a body in the space. Rain continues in front of and behind the person, creating an experience that is at once playful, unnerving and surreal. The first “Rain Room” debuted at London’s Barbican Centre before it was recreated in a temporary tent erected next door to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Info: Yuz Museum, 35 Fenggu Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai, Duration: 1/9-31/12/15, Days & Hours: Mon-Sun 10:00-22:00, www.yuzmshanghai.org