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Inhabiting a Neoliberal Climate: The Mediated Ecology of Random International's Rain Room

Thu, November 9, 10:00 to 11:45am, Hyatt Regency Chicago, San Francisco, Ballroom Level West Tower

Abstract

This paper reads Random International's "Rain Room"--experienced by the author at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)--as an embodied experience of environmental alienation and critical reorientation in the age of the Anthropocene. Funded by Hyundai and advertised as "an immersive environment of perpetually falling water that pauses wherever a human body is detected," Rain Room promises the very sort of ecological control that climate change reminds us is a narcissistic and dangerous fiction. In the individualist vein of neoliberalism, it offers less a collective experience of the rain--despite groups of ten or more entering at the same time--than a silhouetted photo-op in which social media users can take and upload selfies for private consumption. But if the exhibit intends to mediate the weather so as to make it manageable, even friendly, it fundamentally fails as a result of wear and tear that makes leaky spouts drip even when human bodies are detected. By not working, that is, the work of art performs technology's inability to rescue humanity from unpredictable climates and reorients its participants to the collective perils and pleasures of getting wet. In the media ecology that is Rain Room, I argue, users encounter both a safe space of environmental exploration and a potent reminder that no ecological zone is safe for long.

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