Appearing Rooms

Jeppe Hein’s Appearing Rooms
Royal Festival Hall terrace
27 July 2006 – 25 September 2006
Open daily 10am – 11pm

http://www.rfh.org.uk/main/series/332.html

Appearing rooms is a water sculpture by Jeppe Hein on the South Bank. This sculpture consists of a 10m² space divided into four squares. Each wall of the space consists of a stream of water jets that rise and fall. The premise is that the viewer interacts with the sculpture responding to the rise and fall of the walls of water. The viewer can avoid getting wet by responding to the patterns of the rising and falling water.

I think this is an interesting idea for a water sculpture, but for me falls down due to its lack of pressure. Th e piece should be more dynamic. It should divide the space into further smaller rooms. There should be wet rooms where if the user stays in it for too long they will get wet unless they succesfully move to a dry room in time. The interactivity could be further enhanced by the use of lights to signal to the viewer which rooms are dry and which ones will get wet. The sculpture could also detect the number of people in each room and use this to determine which rooms it designates as wet or dry.

My confusion with sculptures like this is where the line is drawn between art and entertainment piece. Do the proposals I suggested to alter Hein’s sculpture stop it from being art? I don’t know.