Project Gewitterzelle

A Gewitterzelle (German for thunderstorm cell) is an event emerging from a situation shared by at least two people. There is no way to perform a Gewitterzelle on your own, as tension is needed to create an interesting dynamic. In addition, at least one of the participants has to have already attended another Gewitterzelle before. This is how a link is established between all events and the idea of the project is passed on. These are the only rules.

The initial Gewitterzelle took place on April 14th 2018 in Graz and was performed by Gerhard Eckel and Andreas Prichner.

This online space offers a basic environment for keeping track of what happened during and after Gewitterzelle meetings, to the extent desired by the participants. Each Gewitterzelle gets a consecutive number and an entry (called a topic) in a discussion forum (named Cells). Each entry records at least date, place, and the participants of the event and allows for further messages to be exchanged. The forum is only accessible to people who have ever participated in a Gewitterzelle.

In Gewitterzelle events, the phenomenon of the thunderstorm functions as a seed for the exchange among the participants. Almost anybody will be able to relate to this ubiquitous natural phenomenon, which may be the source of intense or even sublime experiences, making them particularly memorable. Despite its ubiquity (on our planet alone lightning strikes about 50 times every second), many questions about the processes involved in a thunderstorm are still unanswered. When looking at the thunderstorm from scientific, artistic, economic, or historic perspectives, it quickly becomes clear that the phenomenon cuts across all domains of human culture. It may even have contributed to the emergence of life on our planet in the first place, which the Miller–Urey experiment tries to test. This makes it an excellent pretext to get to talk about things that matter.

THUNDER IS THE ARCHETYPE OF ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC