The Los Angeles Department of Weather Modification (LADWM) is a civic ensemble, a performing group that invites people to get together to aggressively address the weather, weather modification, and the idea of the arid western city. The LADWM has organized perceptual experiments for the public at large: a series of rituals, concerts, gatherings, observances, experiments, meditations on the emergent potential of fog, lamentations of the years of drought, celebrations of weather modification folklore. The project has been hosted by a variety of public and private venues in California as a collaborative work featuring over 25 artists, designers, and musicians of all kinds. The project came about when I was invited to create something in a park positioned between City Hall and the Department of Water and Power.
– Chris Kallmyer, Field Director

Exhibition History:
Downtown Field Office: Machine Project at Grand Park 6.2014
Desert Outpost: Palm Springs Museum of Art 12.2014
Northern Bureau: Southern Exposure 2.2015

A Word on Weather Modification in the West
Weather modification points to the way we understand our western cities, the way we change our common landscape and how we make a new California. No places have modified the weather so aggressively as China with their 37,000 person Beijing Weather Modification Office, Russia with their surface to air missiles laced with rain making solutions, or the Western United States. In the west, we have modified the weather since 1946, when Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut (Kurt’s brother) invented modern day Cloud Seeding (the application of silver iodide into rain clouds to increase precipitation). Subsequently the first weather modification companies were born in this post-war era: Companies like the North American Weather Consultants (founded in Los Angeles in 1950), Weather Modification Inc, and Just Clouds in West Texas. These groups are hired by state and local governments like the LA Department of Water and Power and the Northern California Water District to seed clouds to fill reservoirs and increase snowpack.

Weather modification might seem sinister, but it is common in the west. Aside from vast environmental changes that can be traced to inadvertent forms of weather modification, the companies that practice cloud seeding struggle to succeed or even prove that it works. The clouds have more power, the environment in its size and position, has the upper hand. The west will stay arid.

PDF SCHEDULE OF LADWM OPERATIONS
Design by LADWM Graphics Bureau: Tiffanie Tran.