When the London art studio Random International installed Rain Room next to New York’s Museum of Modern Art this spring, it was a phenomenon. Getting inside required waits of up to 13 hours. Such was the demand for the mindblowing experience: a dry walk in the middle of a deluge. It’s a feat achieved via motion sensors that control 25,600 nozzles in the room’s ceiling, creating a waterless pocket around visitors as they promenade through the space.

“These days, intense experiences are what it takes to get through to people,” says Hannes Koch, who founded Random International with Florian Ortkrass and Stuart Wood in 2005. “You need to be really in-your-face.”

Random International certainly has a habit of commanding attention. The group’s 2011 creation Swarm Study / III, permanently installed at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, consists of four eye-catching chandeliers whose points of light react like startled birds in response to foot traffic. And at Germany’s Ruhrtriennale festival, the studio erected another striking room, this one made out of sheets of water so pressurized that they look like glass. (It’s on view now.)

In 2014, the gallery RH Contemporary Art will host a survey of the group’s work, almost all of which utilizes custom-designed hardware and software. But focusing on the gadgetry, Koch insists, would be missing the point. “The emotional impact that environments can have on people—that’s what we find really interesting.” random-internationalom