Random International is a London and Berlin-based art collective founded in 2005 by Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass, working across kinetic sculpture, light and interactive installation.Koch and Ortkrass met as undergraduates in the UK, began collaborating as Random in 2002, and set up the studio after completing master's degrees at the Royal College of Art.
Their early projects, Pixelroller and Pixeltape, explored the border between analogue and digital reproduction. The studio later added a kinetic dimension with works such as Audience (2008), in which a crowd of anthropomorphic mirrors turns to face a passing viewer. Audience entered LACMA's collection in 2015.Rain Room, an indoor rainstorm that uses motion sensors so visitors can walk through it without getting wet, opened at the Barbican in London in 2012 after four years of research and development.,Visitors in London queued for up to twelve hours to experience it.Rain Room later traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, LACMA in Los Angeles,and Shanghai,recycling its water within a self-contained system at each stop.
After Rain Room, the collective spent two years in a research residency at Harvard's Le Laboratoire, working with the university's biomimetic robotics division. The residency led to 150 Milliseconds, a kinetic sculpture of 15 points of light that resolve into a recognizable human form within 150 milliseconds, shown at Le Laboratoire in 2016.The collective has collaborated with the choreographer Wayne McGregor on more than one occasion, providing the set for his 2011 dance work FARand, a decade later, creating the dance work No One is an Island with him.In 2018, during Art Night, a free contemporary art festival in London, Random International unveiled its first permanent public outdoor work in the United Kingdom, Self and Other (for the Albert Embankment), which turns a passing viewer's full-length reflection into moving light held within layers of glass.,
In 2023, Nxt Museum in the Netherlands presented its first solo exhibition, “Life in a Different Resolution” by Random International, curated by Bogomir Doringer. The show included Living Room (2023).In 2021, the collective's work was included in a curated genesis drop of NFTs on the platform SuperRare, certified by Verisart alongside artists including Shepard Fairey and Quayola.
