MIXED MEDIA ART INSTALLATIONS CLOUDBUSTER PROJECTS

CLOUDBUSTER PROJECT Christoph Keller NY 2003

The reenactments of Cloudbuster experiments took place on the roof of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City and on the top of the Clock Tower in lower Manhattan, New York. These actions were based on the invention of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian born psychologist and early scholar of Freud who developed a political theory of sexuality in the 1920s. Reich began initial experimentation with making changes to the atmosphere in 1952, shortly after the ORANURexperiments, which focus on the reaction of Orgone with nuclear energy. The reenactments had the aim of making rain over New York in the spring and summer of 2003. Out of the roof of the Clock Tower, the empty space of the missing World Trade Center Towers makes a distinct visual gap. The vacancy of these buildings dominated the general atmosphere in New York and had some influence on the Cloudbuster reenactments as well. It rained through the entire period of Cloudbuster operations in New York. The Cloudbuster has an uncomplicated mechanical structure, consisting of few rows of conductive metal pipes that are connected with hoses to a source of flowing water. A spacer made of organic material insulates each one of these metal conductors. According to Orgone theory, flowing water has a positive Orgone charge that can be channeled with the Cloudbuster into the sky. With activation, the apparatus attracts the Orgone present in the atmosphere, from zones of higher or lower Orgone potential. The pipes then function in channeling the relatively small attracting force of the water streaming through the base of the Cloudbuster, and direct it to a small area in the sky where it can be effective in initiating rain by conflating the unstable Orgone-potentials of negative or positive Orgone charge.