Random International’s Rain Room at the Barbican
Random International’s Rain Room at the Barbican
By
Jennifer Raingold
In October 2012, Random International's largest and most ambitious installation - Rain Room - opened in the Barbican's Curve gallery. A 100 square metre field of falling water, Rain Room came alive through audience interaction with the thousands of falling droplets responding to audience presence and movement. This case study describes the planning, processes and outcomes of Barbican's marketing campaign, which focused on encouraging visitors to upload their own content onto social media channels.
Outcome(s)
- The exhibition received the highest ever visitor numbers to the Curve
- It proved a valuable learning experience across all departments in the organisation. The knowledge we gained was particularly useful for our next installation, Dalston House
- Online activity from audiences was high throughout: 32,563 images were shared on Flickr,4,021 on Instagram, 158 videos were uploaded onto Vimeo and YouTube, the use of #rainroom was high throughout although we didn’t track numbers.
- There were many positive stories from the press and the public including: a visitor proposed to his girlfriend in the Rain Room, a group of visitors who met in the queue performed and filmed the popular dance craze ‘Harlem Shake’ which has received 3,904 hits on YouTube - The official trailer received 158,400 hits and has since been picked up by the New York Times.
