Reinterpretations of cold digital design
It’s been suggested by Random that their work isn’t about typical programmable environmental installations that are inherently “unfeeling” and cold, but rather interactively human[e].
In years of exploring design in the context of place, and places made for humans that oftentimes design is all about the sheer hipness of the coolness of the technology, but less about the emotional or environmentally profound experience.
It might be said that rain, like sunlight and the gloom, are meteorological expressions that come with buckets of emotional context. Rain might be spring, uplift, refreshment. Sunlight — the burst of new hope, the new dawning, the next day, the aftermath of journey. Mist and gloom might be the quieting solitude of what lies behind, beneath, the unseen beyond, the quiet mystery [or threat] of the unseen and unknown. Each, simply, is a holistic rendering of moment, time, light and sensation. Each, simply, reveals and reflects a scaffolding of emotional stories and constructs.
Being in the Northwest, on the inside track of Pacific Ocean’s rain-bearing clouds, we — the denizens of the Pacific Northwest — know well the conduction of rain and its impact on light, visibility, growth, atmospheric conditions and molecular character. We smell, taste, touch, hear and see the impacts of wet drizzle and all manners of Light. A name to some of that sensation in perception of light: oyster light.
It is the luminous overcast character — a bright sun, obscured by cloud cover. A luminous white, like the internal light-ness of an oyster shell.
But to emotionality of play, in rain — and Random International’s design at MOMA, I went there, exploring with Dawn, that installation.
The ceiling sensors comprehend the moving stances and strides of visitors and peel back the rain, just there, where they are. Perhaps the most interesting is a large spotlight, at the far end of the designed space, where long shadows, made scintillant by the ever-sweeping sheathes of rain, scratch lines in light. Given Turrell’s study of Light at the Guggenheim, it’s a NYC theme — both installations ravishingly popular.
The story of light, cast in the calligraphy of rain, is an interactive meditation.
People play, photograph themselves, dancing and posing in the rain.
Like that idea — play.
Play in light, luminously scribbled by the strokes of rain.
Play more, that journey.
TIM | NYC at 53rd Street
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G I R V I N | N E W WOWNESS
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