Christoph Keller
Heaven & Sky, 2003

Installation view: Cloudbuster Project, Galerie Schipper & Krome, Berlin, Germany, 2003
© Bildrecht, Vienna, 2020
Photo: Howard Sheronas

Photo: Courtesy the artist | Bildrecht, Vienna, 2020

Collection

Christoph Keller

Installation consisting of Cloudbuster and Observatory; Satellite bowl, cloud buster, video camera, projector, water pump, control panel, water
Overall dimensions variable

Christoph KellerÂ´s Heaven & Sky emerges from the reenactments of his Cloudbuster Project which took place in 2003 on the roof of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City and on the top of the Clocktower in Lower Manhattan, New York. These actions were based on the invention of Wilhelm Reich, 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 ORANUR-experiments, 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 Clocktower, 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. The Cloudbusting reenactments were designed to follow rule number 9 in "Rules for Cloud Engineering: Never drill a hole into the sky unless you aim for long drawn rain." The daily Cloudbuster operations resumed whenever the rain would get lighter, or stop for an hour or two. It rained through the entire duration of the reenactments, setting a hundred year rainfall record for the season.
(Sharon Ben-Joseph and Christoph Keller)

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