Text Rain, 1999



Text Rain, is one of Utterback’s most earlier works. It is an interactive installation which allows viewers to use their body to interact and experience something that is seemingly out of this world – lifting and playing with non-existing falling texts and letters extracted from a poem that is projected onto a screen.

In this installation, participants will be able to see themselves projected black and white on a screen with falling texts and letters of a combination of different colours. Participants will then notice that the falling texts and letters will land on their body like snow and rain would, thus allowing them to ‘grab’ an entire word, or phrase.

A certain threshold were set to allow falling texts and letters to ‘land’ on something darker than that; and ‘fall’ when that object is removed.

The concept behind this installation artwork is “ Utterback's art encourages collaboration among viewers to participate together, in part to figure out the "rules" of the artwork and how it responds differently to different movements and to a different number of people.”

Utterback’s other work, Word Play(2008) and Text Rain, for Phæno (2005) are both based on Text Rain.



References

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edward-lee/camille-utterback-and-the_b_775070.html

http://camilleutterback.com/projects/text-rain/

http://vimeo.com/13141591