<img src="https://img.lemde.fr/2023/07/11/0/0/5760/3840/664/0/75/0/0b15916_1689081713478-20130510-rh-rr-moma-us-stu-s-photos-12.jpg" srcset=" https://img.lemde.fr/2023/07/11/0/0/5760/3840/556/0/75/0/0b15916_1689081713478-20130510-rh-rr-moma-us-stu-s-photos-12.jpg 556w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/07/11/0/0/5760/3840/600/0/75/0/0b15916_1689081713478-20130510-rh-rr-moma-us-stu-s-photos-12.jpg 600w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/07/11/0/0/5760/3840/664/0/75/0/0b15916_1689081713478-20130510-rh-rr-moma-us-stu-s-photos-12.jpg 664w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/07/11/0/0/5760/3840/700/0/75/0/0b15916_1689081713478-20130510-rh-rr-moma-us-stu-s-photos-12.jpg 700w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/07/11/0/0/5760/3840/800/0/75/0/0b15916_1689081713478-20130510-rh-rr-moma-us-stu-s-photos-12.jpg 800w" sizes="(min-width: 1024px) 556px, 100vw" alt="The " rain="" room"="" by="" random="" international."="" width="100%" height="auto">
Stopping the rain as if by magic, slaloming through the drops without ever getting wet, the sorcerer's apprentices at Random International have made this miracle happen. Between the four walls of their Rain Room, first exhibited in 2012 at London's Barbican Centre, visitors pass through curtains of water that spread apart in their path, as if by magic.
The experience is stunning and has become a global success. In 10 years, more than 2 million visitors have been won over in New York, Los Angeles and Shanghai. The price of this popularity has been a deluge of counterfeits all over the world, including a dozen in China alone! "Crappy copies," said Hannes Koch, one of the founders of Random International, along with Florian Ortkrass and Stuart Wood.
For these former students of London's Royal College of Art, with a passion for cognitive science and algorithms, the idea of simulating rainfall arose in 2008. Seduced by this Promethean challenge, the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation (Michigan) agreed to fund their research. It would last a good four years. The first tests were inconclusive: The guinea pigs were hosed down, the walls were too white and the lighting was dim. It would take no less than 100 prototypes to fine-tune the system: 3D cameras equipped with sensors detect the position of visitors and activate the 52,000 water nozzles fixed to the ceiling.
The ballet is perfectly tuned, except for one detail: If visitors walk too fast, they get soaked, as the sensors cannot detect sudden movements. To fully appreciate the Rain Room, you need to slow down your pace, let go and avoid asking yourself too many questions. "People who see rain expect to smell wet earth, damp grass, but here, there's nothing to smell; we're not creating a virtual reality," said Koch. "There's nothing to read, nothing to understand," added Ortkrass. "It speaks to everyone."
Well, almost. Researcher Felicity Scott, who sees it as a reflection of a surveillance society, where every move is tracked, expressed her unease in a long essay published in 2013 in Artforum. "Should we have fun?" she asked. "Learn from it? Or try to escape control by jamming the machinery." The "wow" effect did not work on New York Times journalist Ken Johnson either. "The Rain Room, for all its entertaining ingenuity, seems little more than a fanciful diversion," he wrote the same year.
Still, others wonder whether it makes sense to pour 2,000 liters of recycled water for a non-vital activity when (real) rainfall is scarce, water tables are drying up and the basin war is raging. "We use as much water as we do to make a hamburger, if you take into account feeding cows and growing tomatoes and lettuce," said Koch, well-versed in criticism. He added: "The environmental issue was obvious to us from the beginning."
You have 16.53% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.