It’s not too often that whatever MoMA-inspired freak-outs occurring in New York reverberate out to the West Coast. Recently, New Yorkers and Californians alike displayed the kind of commotion around procuring Kraftwerk tickets that a child normally reserves for their first trip to Disneyland. Rain Room and its hype, which had its moment at MoMA, has now also found its way to the West Coast, where it is currently on view at LACMA.
(left) Random International. Rain Room, 2015; installation view, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy of the Artist and LACMA. (right) Le Corbusier. Ville Radieuse (Radiant City), 1925. Courtesy of Foundation Le Corbusier.
The hype is only a forewarning. The real concern for alarm is that not a single curator at LACMA has attached their name to the installation and its associated Art + Technology initiative—and for good reason. The whiz-bang Rain Room has all the uncomplicated, vanilla pizzazz of an airport-terminal public art installation. And yet it holds a larger, sadder significance, paralleling much of the economic changes and atomization occurring within California and the U.S.
The installation consists of a large, darkened room with a high-tech drop-down ceiling that pours water onto the grated floor twenty feet below. Using cameras, algorithms turn off only those valves directly above each viewer, creating a dry halo that follows them, as torrents of “rain” come down everywhere else. (Did someone forget to mention there’s a drought in California?) A single white floodlight inundates the space like an oncoming headlight, creating silhouettes of everyone in the room.
Random International. Rain Room, 2015; installation view, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy of the Artist and LACMA. Photo: Calder Yates.
This is the root of Rain Room’s hype: This single perspective of silhouettes provides its viewers with cute, saccharine, Instagram-perfect pictures of each other walking in the rain. Visitors, corona-kissed, become witnesses to the illusion of each other’s magnificent solitude. In this way, the installation conveniently fits into the larger digital ecosystem of self-promotion conveniently giving LACMA oodles of free publicity. But upon turning around and taking the opposing perspective, every person in the room is cast in a garish blaze of bright light, blind to their surroundings and oblivious to each other.
Random International. Rain Room, 2015; installation view, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy of the Artist and LACMA. Photo: Calder Yates.
Rain Room literally parts the waters in front of us, making biblical miracles the stuff of banal convenience. Indeed, LACMA states that Rain Room offers its visitors the “seemingly impossible: the ability to control rain.” Through the surveillance of cameras and the magic of algorithms, the installation provides its visitor with the satisfaction of experiencing rain without the aggravation of getting wet. How convenient! Like the symmetrical towers of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, Rain Room offers its visitors a 21st-century version of an ideal architectural environment.
Rain Room is part of this fraught lineage of modernity: the affirmation of the power of individuals to inevitably create social and scientific progress through technology. This lineage has had very mixed results, to say the least. For example, Le Corbusier’s towers, adopted as a form of public housing, eventually led to housing projects and their notorious history of perpetuating poverty and inequality, partly because they had no relation to their particular site.
Le Corbusier. Ville Radieuse (Radiant City), 1925. Courtesy of Foundation Le Corbusier.
Le Corbusier represents only a sliver of this lineage, which continues into the present day. The experience of Rain Room (and Radiant City) mirrors the kinds of bizarre services that seemingly every tech startup in California now offers: making the world more convenient for (certain) individuals through technology. Rain Room is the Amazon delivery drone of thunderstorms: purchases delivered without the hassle of walking down the street. It’s the Soylent drink of weather: have your food without the bother of shopping or cooking, or chewing for that matter.
This technology—the world made convenient—is disturbingly detached from any concept of meaningful living. And Rain Room symbolizes it, showing a sinister, Le Corbusier-like disregard for its location (again, drought in California). Through the aesthetics of convenience, a neo-Radiant City of apps and algorithms “disrupt” the environment and, like Rain Room, render their users docile and oblivious to each other and their surroundings. As Jane Jacobs points out about Radiant City, “Nobody, presumably, was going to have to be his brother’s keeper any more. Nobody was going to have to struggle with plans of his own. Nobody was going to be tied down.”
Le Corbusier. Ville Radieuse (Radiant City), 1925. Courtesy of Foundation Le Corbusier.
Do we want to live in this world of convenience? Where we live easy, siloed lives, always self-promoting yet oblivious to each other; where we don’t “have to be [our] brother’s keeper”? (Do I even have to ask the question?) Rather than allowing visitors to emulate a moment from the Book of Exodus, perhaps Rain Room’s creators should enact a different passage from the Bible, the one Jane Jacobs uses as a critique of Radiant City: “Here are men who alter their neighbor’s landmark … shoulder the poor aside, conspire to oppress the friendless, leave others to make their living as best they may … Reap they the field that is none of theirs, strip they the vineyard wrongfully seized from its owner … A cry goes up from the city streets, where wounded men lie groaning…”
But who would hear those groans when, in our glorious solitude, it seems no one wants to go outside anymore?
Random International: Rain Room is on view at LACMA through March 6, 2016.