Rain is an interactive installation involving your smartphone and a large-scale LED array.  Visitors text ‘rain’ to a cell phone number to receive a series of questions about energy.  If a user guesses the right answer, the user receives a success message and the LED array displays an animation in response, if they guess wrong a different animation is displayed depending on how close the answer was to the correct answer, and the user gets a text notification and another chance to try.  After 3 tries, the user is texted the right answer and receives the next question. 

 Rain was designed and created by the UNM Social Media Workgroup (SMW) directed by Andrea Polli as part of the Sustainable Energy Pathways in Engineering and Technology (SEPTET) project, PI Olga Lavrova

SMW Team:

Andrea Polli, SMW Director, Associate Professor, Art & Ecology (Fine Arts and Engineering)
Mesa Del Sol Endowed Chair of Digital Media

Students:
Russell Bauer, installation and electronics
Eric Geusz, programming and electronics
Kevin Bott, programming and electronics
Staci Page, installation
Jared Rendon-Trompak, video

About the artist: Principal artist Andrea Polli is an artist and scholar working at the intersection of art, science and technology whose practice includes public media performance and installation, interventions, curating, directing and writing. She is an Associate Professor in Art & Ecology with a joint appointment between Fine Arts and Engineering, holds the Mesa Del Sol Endowed Chair of Digital Media, and is the Director of the Social Media Workgroup at The University of New Mexico. She earned a doctorate in practice-led art from the University of Plymouth in the UK and a Master of Fine Arts in Time Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 Polli has been creating media and technology artworks related to environmental science issues since 1999, when she first began collaborating with atmospheric scientists on sound and data sonification projects.Among other organizations, she has worked with the NASA/Goddard Institute Climate Research Group and the National Center for Atmospheric Research and her artwork and research has been funded by The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), The National Science Foundation (NSF) and Fulbright including two over $1.5 million projects: the NEA-supported ISEA2012: Machine Wilderness throughout New Mexico and the Southwest and the 5-year NSF-funded SEPTET project