If You Don’t Like the Weather, Change It is a film about the weather and how humans try to control the uncontrollable. Bigert & Bergström follow the historical trail from ancient rituals to modern scientific methods to alter the climate. The film is presented as a four-channel video installation projected on to parabolic discs.

The film also documents the artists’ attempt to create a hole in a cloud using the technique of seeding with dry ice in order to generate precipitation (developed in the 1960s by Vincent Schaefer and Irving Langmuir). The creation of a hole—the production of nothing—by releasing concentrated carbon dioxide into the atmosphere might be compared to putting out a fire with gasoline; the performance smacks of megalomaniacal experimentation. Adding to the time line of large-scale Land art projects, this piece inverts the tradition of altering the landscape, using the dry ice to create an immaterial work of art on the canvas of the sky that evaporates into thin air.

"If You Don't Like the Weather, Change It," 2007 
Four-channel video projection, parabolic discs, 
HD video, 22 min, 420 x 140 cm