Random International. Rain Room.

A rain that knows where we are

Rain Room is an installation Random International made in 2012. It is a field of artificial rain of about 100 square metres, falling without pause from the ceiling onto a grated floor.

Visitors walk into the rain. And the rain stops exactly where they stand. When they move, the dry space moves with them, like an invisible umbrella. Behind them the rain falls again.

To do this the studio uses 3D tracking cameras overhead that register each person's position and movement. Custom software controls solenoid valves, opening and closing the flow through injection moulded tiles fixed to steel beams. A water management system collects what falls through the grated floor to use again.

All of this is hidden. Visitors see only rain, a single light shining from far away, and themselves standing dry inside the water.

The Curve, London

The work premiered in The Curve, the long curving gallery of the Barbican Centre in London, from 3 October 2012 to 4 March 2013. The exhibition was supported by the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art and Arts Council England.

After London, Rain Room travelled widely: MoMA in New York, LACMA in Los Angeles, the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, the Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Busan, Melbourne, and the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art in Michigan.

Each time it is rebuilt to fit the space, but the principle stays: a rain that always makes way for people.

Control, or being watched

Random International describes the work plainly: human presence stops the rain from falling, and through this the work looks at how our relationships with one another and with nature are increasingly mediated by technology.

From outside, Rain Room looks like magic. Visitors feel they are commanding the rain. In fact the machine is watching them, every step, every gesture. The invisible umbrella exists only because the cameras never take their eyes off the person beneath it.

Walk slowly and you stay dry. Run and you get wet, because the system needs time to respond. The work teaches visitors to move at the machine's pace without their noticing. That may be the most interesting part: the freedom in Rain Room is a calculated freedom.

Why that rain remains

Rain Room became one of the most talked about installations of the 2010s. It arrived just as phone cameras improved and social media began to shape how people visit museums. A person standing dry in the rain is a picture everyone wants to take.

Strip that layer away and what remains is still worth noticing. The work takes something very familiar, rain, and changes one rule: the rain does not touch us. That one change is enough to make visitors see rain as if for the first time.

It belongs with Olafur Eliasson's artificial sun at Tate Modern, also in London, also bringing weather indoors. Eliasson lets people lie beneath something they cannot reach. Random International lets people walk through something that will not reach them.

Stepping outside, it may really be raining in London. That rain makes way for no one. And visitors, for the first time in a while, let it fall on them.