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The letters falling down stop at the contours of your silhouette, forming words captured by the speech recognition system built into the browser.
The work refers to the Text Rain installation by Romy Achituv and Camille Utterback, but instead of a pre-written poem, it uses the user’s language – words spoken here and now.
Rain turns language into sensual contact – words fall on the body like drops, often disappearing before they can be read.
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The second part of Triptych on the Weight of Words, Rain, references Romy Achituva and Camille Utterback’s 1999 interactive installation Text Rain. In Achituva and Utterback’s installation, falling letters come to rest on the edges of the bodies of those present in the monitored space, forming the words of Evan Zimroth’s poem Talk, You and, in a sense, embodying the reading process.
However, Rain, like the first part of Triptych, does not use a pre-written text, relying instead on AI and a speech recognition system built into browsers that tracks the utterances of people using the miniature. The rudimentary body contour detection system used in the original installation (based on a simple mechanism assuming that everything in the space monitored by the camera that is darker than the brightly lit wall in the background is an obstacle stopping the letters from falling) has also been replaced by AI and a basic image segmentation mechanism that extracts body contours from the background, but does not require special arrangement and lighting of the space, or careful selection of the background.