Making Music With the Moscow Clouds Above

Since time immemorial, artists have turned to the heavens — rivaled only by landscapes, religion, and prostitutes — for solace and inspiration. Canadian physicist Nicholas Reeves, however, may well be the first to incorporate them into an artwork.
His “Cloud Harp,” on display for the next three months in the courtyard outside Art & Science Space Laboratory, is an electronic musical instrument played by clouds. A man-sized stack of wooden boxes, it takes readings of atmospheric phenomena and translates them into calm, though slightly eerie electronic drones reminiscent of Theremin music from 1950s sci-fi films. Its musical genealogy, however, is closer to the Aeolian harp, an ancient musical instrument popular during the Romantic period with strings that produce sound according to changes in the wind.
Reeves accordingly sees himself as more of a composer than a musician and claims that any musician could learn to write for his cloud harp in about an hour. “The atmosphere is like a gigantic musical score,” he explained. “When the clouds change altitude, the instrument changes. And within a certain range of altitude, the movement of the clouds creates a melody.”
Director and head curator Daria Parkhomenko has provided Reeves’ harp with atmosphere-themed support. The courtyard walls are given over to Arkady Nasonov’s “Cloud Commission” — an ongoing project made up drawings of squeezed udders and surfaces of lungs scrawled over pages of an atlas of clouds.
Clouds are not the passive background they may seem, Reeves says. “You may not know that clouds tell stories. The cloud that goes over the desert captures stories about the desert; the cloud that goes over the mountain and the forest brings you a story about them. And you don’t even have to travel — the cloud brings the story to you. There are many ways to listen to the stories of the clouds, and the way I chose was to translate them into music.”
In amongst these, graffiti artist Taras Ovyagin has sprayed in the enchanting “Nephomania [the medical term for ‘cloud dependency’] vs. Acrophobia,” depicting figures cloud-spotting with telescopes from the tops of buildings. Inside are works by the Yekaterinburg group Where Dogs Run To exploring the stormier side of atmospheric effects, including a small Van De Graff generator, magnetic liquid and digital readings from a “water pyramid.”
There’s a strong chance that it all goes over most people’s heads. But strange as it is, this is entirely par for the course in the Laboratory’s charmingly mad program, which in the past has featured artists using scientific techniques, artists collaborating with chemistry professors, and artists with mad scientist-like personae such as Pavel Pepperstein and Leonid Tishkov. Reeves for his part believes that boundaries between science and art are thinner than the layman might think.
“An artist can perfectly decide at some point to play with science, to create with it, and to pervert the initial intention of any scientific or technological ideal to the profit of art,” he said. “The first thing is to have a vision or an idea in your mind. And if this vision requires that you use science or art, you go and get it.”
Perhaps unexpectedly for something whose function is ultimately artistic, Reeves’ instrument has also made contributions to science. When developing his first harp in 1996, he collaborated with five science and technology labs in Canada and Europe. Findings gathered from its production found their way into lectures and papers in scientific journals.
Ultimately, however, the genesis of the harp is as purely and classically artistic as a cloud painting by anyone from John Constable to Erik Bulatov. Reeves drew the analogy between scientist and artists thus: “Science and art are two different ways to look at the world, but they are complimentary. There is some point where you suddenly realize how it works and everything seems so much simpler. This machine reads the clouds — it’s very complicated to explain how, but the way it does it is extremely simple.”

Cloud Harp is on at the Art & Science Space Laboratory thru Oct. 20. 3 Pereulok Obukha in the NIFKhI Karpova, entrance from the right. Metro Kurskaya. Newlaboratoria.ru