Do It Yourself, Rain! Dabbling Drops, Splashes, and Waves: Experiments in Art and Science

What does rain look like? Why are visual artists interested in experimental natural sciences? My project Touch of Rain [1] exhibits “signatures” of rain in the form of imprints, sculptures, and music. When drops of rain fall on flour, paper, or a piece of smoked glass, splash patterns are generated. The work draws inspiration from early-twentieth-century rain research, conducted at a time when the natural sciences set out to explore precipitation in different parts of the world to understand how water circulates in the atmosphere. Scientists used the marks and patterns left by droplets to investigate fleeting phenomena [2]. In adapting these early experiments and in turning them into a “natural art,” I created installations that celebrate the autographic impressions that emerge from an artist’s collaboration with rain (see Color Plate L, Figs 1 and 2). Autographs are visual records that result from processes where a naturally occurring phenomenon is allowed to inscribe itself on a material substrate to leave a permanent mark of itself [3]. In this article, I elaborate on the traces as a form of indexical, asemiotic writing that visually mediates the behavior of a phenomenon.

Falling on dry, pigment-sensitized paper, raindrops generate patterns that remain visible even after the water has evaporated. Conceived by scientists, the filter paper method is extremely sensitive to atmospheric humidity; the absorbent material allows a fine drizzle or even fog to appear as tiny dots on the round pieces of paper. The colored spot is always larger than the diameter of the raindrop. I found these circles dotted by raindrops reminiscent of bacterial cultures in petri dishes. In the exhibition Touch of Rain (2011), I brought the filter papers together to form a laboratory of “rain culture” (see Color Plate L, Fig. 1). Color Plate L, Fig. 2 shows the installations Rain Forest and Path of Rain, both created by exposing pigment-sensitized paper to rainfall.

Watching the stains on paper reveals that the depictions render individual drops distinctly and plain to see, unlike observing rainfall with the naked eye. The filter paper accurately displays the size and spacing of raindrops, details that normally escape us. The traces show that, while seemingly uniform, rain is in fact variable, sometimes consisting of big, widely dispersed drops, at other times dense and finely granulated. Thus, the autographs allow us to learn more about the phenomenon.

The scientists devised the filter paper method to answer questions concerning the origin of rain. The stains were measured, and their diameter was compared to the traces left by drops of known size dropped from a laboratory pipette. The imprints produced new information about precipitation. The experiments showed that the size of raindrops varies from 0.2 to 6 mm in diameter [4]. Later, the rain researchers gathered the data from the drop samples to establish a numeric model that enabled the discovery of universal laws that govern the behavior of rainfall. The simple filter paper method gave rise to the scientists’ theory that raindrops grow by merging with other drops on their way down from clouds to earth. This in turn evolved into a branch of meteorology known as cloud physics, which explained the complex process from evaporation to precipitation and finally even succeeded in producing rain by seeding clouds with salt molecules such as silver iodide [5]. These “seeds of rain” are tiny particles circulating in the clouds; they work as saturation nuclei that allow the invisible water vapor to condense and to build liquid droplets that again freeze into ice crystals. In the low temperatures and pressure of the upper atmosphere, the crystals grow heavier and start falling to earth as snowflakes. As they travel through the warmer layers, the crystals melt and create raindrops. Rain is in fact snow that has lost its solid form [6].

In 1904 Wilson Bentley, an amateur scientist and wellknown photographer of snow crystals, invented a method for making replicas of raindrops using wheat flour. He let rain fall on a shallow frying pan filled with dry flour. Rain resulted in small flour pellets, equal to the water volume of the actual raindrops [7]. Color Plate L, Fig. 3 shows details of my artwork Baked Rain (2011). It revisits the procedure with flour and expands Bentley’s experiment into a sculptural installation.

The name of telefax paper is derived from the Latin fac simile (or factus simile), meaning “made to be similar.” Not so long ago, a facsimile copy was one of the fastest and cheapest methods for transmitting information, yet today it is hopelessly outdated. For my purposes, however, the obsolete technology was perfect. It refers to the early days of the moving image and reminds of the optical wonders associated with the cinematic effect.

In my work Animated Rain (see Color Plate M, Fig. 4), raindrops leave traces on a roll of fax paper, which darkens when heated. The paper was first exposed to rain and then dried with a hot air blower. Raindrops protected the surface and prevented the water-covered areas from darkening when heated. The drops resulted in white smudges against a dark background. The fax roll with the heat-developed rain stills constituted a “reel of film,” which I animated digitally. When the roll is rotated, the drop marks begin to move, and the records come to life as raindrops start fluttering, not unlike the snow of television static. The white globules seem to shift either up or down, depending on the viewer. The illusion of motion is created by the speed with which the images change.

In the viewer’s eyes, the stop motion images transform into seething rain. Yet, the artificial rain does not make us wet, nor can we hear its patter. All we see is synthetic motion. The rain is present, but only visually. Who or what is the author of this virtual rain—is it the rain that left the traces on the paper, the fax paper on which the image of the rain was impressed, or perhaps the viewer, whose brain causes the illusion of motion?

Experimental devices may function as pictorial interfaces between nature and culture. How are material, temporal, and three-dimensional events transformed into flat images? My installations set out to explore autographic techniques by exhibiting the DIY instruments and materials implicated in the process of pictorial becoming along with the visual outcomes.

In creating the Drop Tracer (see Color Plate M, Fig. 5) I drew from a scientific method coined by the meteorologist Vincent J. Schaefer in 1940s. When a drop of water hits a soot-coated glass surface, air trapped under the droplet lifts tiny particles of soot, which scatter and result in splash patterns [8]. In addition to adapting Schaefer’s method for the artwork, I placed a contact microphone under the glass to catch the sound of the collision. The slides with the splash patterns were scanned and enlarged into black-and-white pigment prints.

The drumming of rain was further explored using an air microphone stuck in tin cans of different sizes. I noticed that the pitch of the patter was dependent on the diameter of the tin: A small tomato can produces higher resonances compared to the lower tones of a large tin of cucumber pickle. In Canned Rain (Color Plate M, Fig. 6), we hear the orchestra of four tin cans play a rain concerto in unisono.

The Touch of Rain series provides rain with new, artistic means of manifesting itself. The branches of painting, sculpture, music, photography, cinema, and literature all provide creative media for the rain to “express itself ” in works of “natural art.” Rain leaves its own scrawl across soot or telefax, and dapples pigmented stains on paper. Flour dusted across an oven dish clumps together to form three-dimensional rain sculptures. Tin cans perform a rain concerto. The temporal nature of rain is captured in photographs and videos or on paper.

Stage by stage, the works expose the indexical operations that condition the analogue techniques of imaging. The sociologist of science Bruno Latour analyzes similar chains of representation characteristic of the scientific practice. In a detailed study on fieldwork conducted in Amazonia, Latour discusses the empirical method whereby evidence gathered from soil and vegetation is turned into visual records, numeric data, and text. None of these representations alone can capture the real world, yet the chain of interlinked evidence ultimately constitutes the rainforest as an object of study. By analyzing the scientific cultures, Latour demonstrates how the “facts” extracted from nature are in fact “fabricated” (sic) by the researchers. Latour argues that we have no direct access to knowledge. It is only through a chain of representations and the parsing of that chain in both directions that natural phenomena are identified and understood [9].

In highlighting the embodied and processual aspects of knowledge production, Latour targets the epistemic core of scientific practices. With emphasis on the interaction between the researchers and their subject matter, Latour challenges the deeply ingrained duality that posits the scientist as a knowing subject confronting a preestablished object of knowledge—that is, nature. For Latour, the intermediate stages of the scientific process—such as the gathering and processing of data—are integral and ontologically constitutive phases of the exploration. Knowing is not a one-way process but arises from reciprocity. Thus, the agency of “nature,” which formerly was regarded as a passive object of scientific research, is now assigned an active role in the construction of information.

Experimental methods such as the sampling of raindrops revealed previously unknown aspects of precipitation and water cycles. Drop patterns gave rise to an exploration that extended the scale and scope of meteorology to the point that it finally enabled scientists to play God and modify weather by tampering with the atmosphere. The study of rain reached a turning point in 1947, when a research program called Project Cirrus was launched in the United States. Its purpose was to develop existing technologies into a practical method for seeding clouds to make rain, thus allowing weather to be controlled on a large scale. The study was based on laboratory experiments conducted by Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut in which silver iodide or dry ice was used to induce freezing nucleation [10]. Project Cirrus marked the climax of scientific rain; with artificial rain, God the Creator was superseded and humanity, unshackled, was finally able to produce rain. Scientists succeeded in assuming control over the climate by turning the innocent depictions of raindrops into a powerful tool for making it rain. Visualizations do not merely describe the external appearance of the phenomena. The autographs of rain show that images are both innovative and essentially worldmaking; through shaping our worldview they impact the reality we live in.

I believe that the concurrent co-conditioning of the observer and the observed proposed by Latour applies for visual practices as well. My works originate in experimental setups where a naturally occurring phenomenon is allowed to create an autographic record of itself. Offering insights into the behavior of the phenomena, the inscriptions also allow the manipulation of the nonhuman agencies at stake. My project Clapotis (2009) involves DIY techniques that enable the waves of the sea to create pictures of lapping water. I created a Wave Tracer (see Color Plate N, Fig. 7a), which transferred underwater pressure waves onto a rubber membrane while an attached stylus recorded the changes in pressure on a graph. In Wave Screen (see Color Plate N, Fig. 7b), the surface of the sea was mobilized to serve as convex and concave lenses, which projected caustic wave patterns on the picture plane of a black box equipped with a translucent screen [11].

Wave Screen draws from the camera obscura, a metaphor of knowledge and an optical model of the eye. Jonathan Crary remarks that in the eighteenth century the camera obscura was used to model human visual perception in explicating the knowing subject’s relationship to the external world. As the instrument rendered real-world objects into hovering two-dimensional illusions, it also dissolved the physical corporeality of the looking subject by turning perception to immersive virtual experience. Inside the camera obscura, vision was detached from the body [12].

The Wave Screen installation includes a video, presented as a wall projection in a darkened room [13]. When the camera zooms inside the box, the viewer dives into a constantly shifting network of caustic wave patterns. The surrounding walls of the instrument disappear, and the entire screen is filled with glittering footage. After dwelling among the patterns for a while, the camera zooms back and returns to its original position. The video finishes with a large wave drenching the screen and shattering the illusion (see Color Plate N, Fig. 7b). The wet surface reveals the materiality of the picture plane: The moving image turns out to be a mere sheet of thin plastic. The waves end up destroying their own reflections.

Both Wave Screen and Touch of Rain play with the opticchemical foundations of photography. In Wave Screen, water provides a lens for sunlight to refract, whereas contact prints such as the Rain Paintings are produced by exposing materials to water instead of light. Rain is rendered one drop at a time, not unlike the projective dot-by-dot correspondence with reality characteristic to geometric optics. How does nature assume a creative role? This question emerges in an intriguing way from discourses concerning the agency of light and the affordances inherent to photographic technologies.

The contact printing technique employed in my works Wavescapes and Pluviograms (see Color Plate N, Fig. 8) are both reminiscent of the early experiments conducted by William Henry Fox Talbot with light-sensitized materials. The debates among nineteenth-century proto-photographers were dominated by questions regarding the authorship of the images. Was photographing a picture painted by the Sun (or nature) of itself? If so, what was the role of the photographer and the mechanical apparatus operated? According to Geoffrey Batchen, the uncertainty or downright unwillingness to draw a clear line between nature and culture culminated in the problem of naming the new technology. For Nicéphore Nièpce, it was heliography (“sun writing” or “sun drawing”); for Daguerre, it was “the spontaneous reproduction of the images of nature received in the camera obscura”; and for Talbot, “Photogenic Drawing or Nature Painted by Herself” [14].

Nature demonstrates its creative capacity by producing “portraits” of itself. Writing about my works, I find myself in the same predicament as the early photographers. In my installations, nature is simultaneously passive/created (imprinted) and active/creative (paints itself). It seems to behave like an artist, with all the human characteristics that entails. The sea records its own pulse in Wave Tracer, while rain creates action paintings, challenging Jackson Pollock to compete for the championship in drip painting. According to Batchen, the proto-photographers were driven by a “desire to photograph,” which “exhibit[s] that disruptive play within and between nature and culture, real and representation, fixity and transience, observing subject and observed object” [15]. As a visual artist, I am possessed by that desire—the oscillation between romanticism and rationalism, between natura naturans and naturata. According to the general theory of imitation, the artist imitates the creativity of nature (or God as the creator). Thus, the creative subject “reproduces” not the external appearance but rather the productivity, the operation, of nature. In my works, the configuration changes yet again: Creativity is lent back to nonhuman agencies. Up to a point, the artwork produces itself, since the autographic techniques allow the phenomena to do just that. Nature is set up to play itself.

My visual practice studies the relationship between images and the natural world. While depicting rain or waves, the installations explore the techniques, tools, and equipment implicated in the making of the representations. Rain bursts forth from its own source and materializes right before the viewer’s eyes, while also being decomposed into its constituent parts. Watching the stains on paper does not leave us wet, nor does it risk soaking the viewer. Despite the moist subject matter, my exploration of water is bone dry. Unlike the showers induced by Project Cirrus, the rain in my artworks is purely artificial, realized and mediated through audiovisual techniques. My research interest resides in the shifts and translations that showcase the natural event—(re)produced by devices, images, and experimental methods—from the generation of the traces to their playback in the exhibition.