Public Archive

"You might find me with some tims on, rockin fascinators and clutches / marchin' through these streets my face on double decker buses / London's been all love, from the dancehall to the pub / when we play the O2, or back when subterranea was the club / real Fugees lovers / big up you know them, all my sisters and my brothers!!" spoke Lauryn Hill, reading a poem she had written in the twenty four hours before her performance at the O2 Arena last night. T and I were in seats so far away, on the opposite side of the stadium, that the sound seemed to bounce and refract in odd echoes. But that didn't matter- squeezed into tiny steep seats, all 20,000 people were dancing the whole night. I looked over my shoulder to see several grey-haired ladies singing all the words, while below our row, a group of teenagers managed to dance and livestream at the same time. This morning the energy stayed with me as I got ready for the day, another grey and cold one in London. The park was full of dogs, including an incredibly fast whippet named Ziggy. In several places, the gilled cap of a small mushroom pushed through the blades of damp, freshly mowed grass.

As I ride the 35 south from Liverpool Street the sun begins to pierce through the matted, slightly hazy sky. A current of ‘Arctic Air’ has flowed across the U.K. this weekend and lowered temperatures at least six degrees. At a performance yesterday afternoon in a roofless Anglican Church in Nunhead Cemetary, the cold entered deep into my lungs and bones. After an evening at the pub, T and I ran to the overground station and realised we had fifteen minutes to wait for the train - it felt like an interminable time in that level of cold. As we entered Tesco to warm up before the train, an older man sitting on the pavement near the streetcorner lost his paper cup in the wind and it spun into the traffic. After I retrieved it for him, he asked if I could buy him a chocolate milkshake. He drank the cold drink in big gulps as me and T ran back to the station for our train.

Of a day like today, Derek Jarman might write, "Crystalline sunlight, all the dark humours blown away by the wind" (1991, 235). As my partner opens the curtains in the morning, the blue of the sky pierces through the growing gaps in tree branches, blue against yellow and light brown. Before lunch I set the automatic ground station up in my flat, leaving the turnstile antenna resting against the open windowsill in the kitchen, and I head out to the park wtih my tape measure Yagi-Uda antenna. Later I enjoy comparing the images: not surprisingly, the automatic station has captured a swathe of the satellite pass to the south (as our kitchen window is south-facing) and lines of interference from the building pulse through it. Out in the park, I receive a good signal for most of the 86 degree pass, enjoying the 'crystalline' sun and the momentary break from the 'dark humours' of recent grey and rainy days.

On London Bridge, loosely knit groups of people wander by. I notice two families in which the Dad is pointing across the Thames to skyscrapers and offering some words of information or wisdom to his children. They don’t look interested. It’s the kids instead who are interested in me, asking ‘but what is she doing ??’ in voices that implore an answer. A tall man passes very close to my left shoulder and says in passing ‘watch out with that thing’ even though I am standing well to the edge of the bridge and there is tons of empty space to walk. The pass is a bit staticy at times but I have come to expect this from most of London’s bridges - too much happening by land, river and air.

Today we put on the heating in our flat for the first time this autumn. The air temperature has dropped significantly over the last week, and there is an 'edge' or 'bite' to the weather outside. At dinner on Friday night with a very good friend, we all agreed to change our duvets to the heavier 'winter' version. This collective decision made me think of squirrels and other forest creatures adding leaves and twigs to their nests for warmth. I tested a new antenna in the frosty park this morning - a copper, weatherised V-dipole made by a radio amateur supplier in Florida. I used a PVC pipe given to me by Martin Collett (for another tape measure Yagi) to elevate the antenna above ground level, as if on a small mast. A woman walking two chihuahuas smiled at me. A small cyclone of clouds emerged, swirling over the UK, but hopefully leaving some space for bursts of sun over the rest of the day.

A rolling family of storms passed over Hackney today - one body after the next. Alternating floods of sunlight and dark shadows passed through the flat, a changing scenography to breakfast, PhD student supervisions and emails. As it was pouring when I planned to head to the park with my Yagi, I instead tried fitting the antenna out of the bedroom window - more difficult than the compact V-dipole or tunstile antennas I've used inside before. It worked somewhat- both detecting the 'flood' of Meteor MN 2-3 before picking up NOAA-18 - though I think it also proved sensitive to lots of interference coming from flats and the building itself. By the end of the pass the sun was shining and an orb-like cloud receded into the distance.

After another colder, misty and rainy day yesterday, and intermittent dark and gloomy clouds this week, it is a relief once again to feel some sun. The air is relatively calm, and a high altitude cirrus or haze makes the light a bit silvery. The ground is still moist in places, though elsewhere the grass has dried and turned a light beige. As I walked down the steps of my and T's house, a man on a bike, whose name I later learned is Duane, did a double take, then stopped and said he had seen me many times in Hackney Downs, and wanted to know about my Yagi antenna. We chatted briefly and, though he had to go toward Clapton, he said the next time he saw me in the Downs, he would come over and see what I was doing. We shook hands twice before parting. As I was leaving the Downs after the pass about twenty minutes later, an older man called out to me. He said he lived close to Hackney Downs and had seen me many times with the antenna, and now wanted an explanation. I showed the satellite image I had just live-decoded and he mentioned his own work as an artist. As his hands were trembling, he asked me to type in the open-weather website to the Notes on his phone.

We woke up to dark skies again, but the air remained warm, humid. On my way to Southwark Bridge for a morning appointment it began to drizzle-rain and city-workers clutched their goose-bumped arms. Hours later I unfurled my antenna on the 'Tide River Walk' in North Greenwich, and almost immediately began to hear and receive an air traffic control downlink on a frequency overlapping with that of NOAA-18. A young man agreed to take some photos, and then went back to leaning on the railing, meditating on the water. Charli XCX's 'Brat' bounces through my headphones for most of the afternoon as I ride the overground and express mail some open-weather kit to Berlin. "When you're in the party b-b-bumpin' that beat / 666 with a princess streak..."

It is very windy today - the kind of surprising wind that gusts and blows in corridors. It was a struggle with my Yagi antenna, as it catches the air so easily, and at several points almost took me sideways with it. The tape measure joints swung at odd angles from the wood stick. An older woman and a small, white, curly haired dog were meandering nearby and I waved to say hi. We ended up speaking for most of the satellite pass. After considering my antenna for a few minutes she said: "the satisfaction... it gives satisfaction" and then "it's contact". I completely agreed.

I wake up having had a nightmare, but it is really a memory of a real event that was playing out in my dreams. In the memory, I am seeing one of my PhD students get publicly attacked by a senior professor (who is also someone I respect and in some ways depend on). I run through all the ways I could have acted differently in that moment. I visualise myself standing up in front of the room and hitting back. It plays and plays, until I manage to have breakfast. By lunchtime, though, I am lost in the flow of an article I'm trying to finish before holiday. As a visual contribution to the article, after lunch I experiment with making a satellite image (one that features a current of 'Saharan Dust' moving northward over the Mediterranean) into a 'thaumatrope': an analog, double sided, spinning device that creates an optical 'illusion' of blurred borders, animated shadows, and miscible surfaces. It feels good playing with a satellite image not on a digital screen (as I overwhelmingly do in open-weather) and rather in tactile, DIY form, using a tool that is reminiscent of children's games. For me, the thaumatrope creates a kind of optical 'irritation' of moving forms, nebulous shapes and shadows, and disappearing or fading-out land and sea edges. It also seems to 'agitate' the cartographic orientation devices that we use when we see the coastline of North Africa and the 'boot' of Italy. Writing of images of the monsoon, Harshavardhan Bhat writes, "Satellite images empowered by spectroradiometer science and international coalitions begin to not just inform the science of the state but the imaginary that the monsoon unifies the entity called South Asia as part of a planetary system... This is a gift to political theory as the monsoon then becomes this technology through which the planetary infrastructure of surveillance and governance slowly unfold, silencing the complex work of the air of the monsoon" (2022: 240). Does the thaumatrope help to destabilise the 'unified entity' of the Scirocco or Jugo wind that brings 'Saharan Dust' to Europe? Does seeing a satellite image flicker and blur between channels demonstrate something about the 'slippages' of materials and elements in satellite imagery, inviting us to see beyond the 'optical ontology of pixels'? In contrast to a regional 'event', can we recognise something about the 'complex work of the air'?

It was too hot to be in the sun so I perched on the edge of a pool of shade made by a plane tree. A man in a track suit who is a kind of local figure in the neighbourhood - often seen balancing on post boxes, tall gates and bus benches doing dance moves that resemble Tai Chi, always in a full track suit - walked by, waved and said 'So I expect you're listening to the Gods??' 'Yes sort of!' I replied, hoping he would understand I was joking. 'Nice one!' he replied, and then followed with "I like your glasses!!!'. 'Thanks!' I said, and remembered how I had gotten my sunglasses at the 'Accessorize' shop in Kings Cross station while waiting for a train a few summers ago. Another man in a neat vest, jeans and glasses approached me a few minutes later and quietly asked what I was tracking. After I replied, he exclaimed 'And I thought I had an interesting job!!' 'What's your job?' I asked. He said 'Oh I park cars... BMWs... train driver too'. He went on his way.

I've spent all day writing, and my thoughts are swirling around ideas of memory, wind, history, and the way wind makes 'traces' and 'marks' in satellite imagery. The article I'm editing feels to have its own weather too, one of 'rabid gales', blue vanishings, wind-blown dust, 'pigments and mist' and vast differentials in temperature and pressure, pulling air into all sorts of space and corners.

In the field that has been turned in to a parking lot for university graduation services, I link up my v-dipole, dongle and android. A maintenance man or security guard sitting in a blue van looks on with a bemused expression, but mostly he ignores me and talks on the phone. The air is warm for the first time in weeks and it is such a relief from the cold, rainy, at times torrential rain we have had in the U.K. Later in the afternoon I show my satellite image to SB, a physical geographer who specialises in studying past climates through tephra (volcanic ash). He points to the wavy line of the increasingly wobbly jet stream and explains how, with the poles warming faster than the equator, the difference in temperature and pressure that stabilises weather and holds the jet stream north is decreasing, causing the jet stream to curve and bend south more and more, bringing moisture laden air from the Atlantic to Northern Europe - this describes our recent weather experiences. Now that I’ve seen the curve of the jet stream with SB’s help I want to look back to all of the past imagery and try to spot it. Meanwhile, he says, ‘anywhere below 40 degrees (latitude) is burning’. Soph is just back from holiday and describes a level of heat in Croatia over the last week that was at the limit of their physical health. It doesn’t take much for heat to stress London- on my tube journey home, the air is so stifling that people are visibly haggard, some using makeshift fans and others flushed read and eyes closed, waiting for their train.

It poured last night, the kind of rain that quickly overwhelmed London's drainage system and caused pond-sized puddles on street corners and walkways. Somewhat fittingly, T and I were drenched in it while cycling home from a 'psychoanalysis and climate disaster' seminar at a pub in Finsbury Park. The conversation had been circuitous, and the speaker, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, had shared her research about the shift toward spiritual activism and intentional communities in Portugal testing different forms of spirit-informed collectivity. She kept saying that this research, or the research materials themselves, were 'embarrassing'. This was raised in the discussion- what is the root of our embarrassment when we talk about somatic practices or dance forms that give us more awareness of each other, or spiritual practices that give us room for wonder? Someone raised a theory from a source I can't remember that the earth has created beings with fully self-conscious brains - capacities to be embarrassed - in order to self-destruct on a planetary level. No reference was made to the many forms of human awareness and community that have not self-destructed, that are still trying to prevent destruction. I felt uncomfortable raising this point in the midst of so many unfamiliar, intimidating people, and because who am I, a white academic, to be the one to say 'aren't we forgetting indigenous lifeways and laws' when we theorise self-conscious self-destruction? I was reflecting on this during my satellite pass today. In the middle of it, two tall men in black t-shirts and knee-length shorts walked across the field staring at me so I smiled and waved. They came over and started asking questions. I was sitting on the grass holding my antenna upright and listening to the sound of the satellite on my Android phone. They approached very near but stayed standing, so I had to look vertically upward to see their faces. Their tall, looming shapes were outlined against the bright, cloudy sky. As I explained the tape measure Yagi and the passing satellite, one said, 'So are you an artist?' I keep wondering what sparks this question, as I have received it repeatedly over the last six months. Is it the fact that I use the word 'DIY'? Is it that I don't look like the type of person who is doing research or science?

Low-hanging, medium-grey cloud with a light drizzle that grew into light rain as I knelt on the grass. The sound of a car-sized grass mower in the distance. Damp ground. Despite the un-summerlike conditions, the park was full of primary school children running races and exercising. As soon as one group saw me and came over to ask what I was doing, I became a magnet for others. One girl asked if I was 'traveling the world... with that thing [pointing to the antenna]?' I said in some ways, I was, but also, I was just listening to the world. Another small girl simply picked up my antenna and raised it to the sky, winking slyly at her friends, while the accompanying adult said 'you should ask first!'. But I appreciated their forwardness. As they huddled around, I showed them the growing satellite image and pointed to different countries so they could try identifying them. The answer was 'I don't know... ' until it turned out they did know. Among the parents or chaperones, several asked further questions and wanted to know how to follow the project. I had to hurry to pack up in between two waves of visitors to avoid disappointing anyone.

In 1989, Derek Jarman wrote of a day in July: "Lazy high summer. The drowsy bees fall over each other in the scarlet poppies, which shed their petals by noon. Meadow browns and gatekeepers flutter wearily across the shell-pink brambles disputing the nectar with a fast bright tortoiseshell. The bees clamber hungrily up the sour green woodsage. Drifts of mauve rosebay and deep yellow ragwort studded with orange and black burnt caterpillars" (Jarman, 1991: 107). This morning I read an article in the Guardian about the rate and long-term advancement of mass insect death. Based on research on the number of insects killed on the number plates of cars, the study says we have 90% fewer insects in the UK today than we did 100 years ago. During the satellite pass at midday, I note how the recently cut grass of the park has given way to a low layer of clover and dandelions, and how bees fly between the clover, only a couple centimetres above the grass, sometimes bumping into each other and weaving between the higher leaves of grass. Other than the random lazy fly, I don't see any other pollinators. Butterfly populations are especially affected this year, apparently, in part due to the very wet spring-summer that has washed out many of their homes. Derek was already aware of the changing climate in 1989, as he sometimes mentions the warming air and the 'hole in the ozone layer'. I wonder if he knew about mass insect death, though from his descriptions of the cottage garden in Dungeness, he was seemingly at home with a kaleidoscope of insect companions.

Grey, clouded, though lighter than yesterday. I noticed a thin, middle-aged man sat on a bench was watching me with my Yagi antenna. When I set my antenna down at the end of the pass, he walked over. He started with 'Just checking... you were tracking UFOs with that thing?'. I smiled and waved my hand in a 'sort of' gesture. As he turned to walk away I said 'I'm happy to show you what I've got?' and he veered back and sat on the grass near my laptop. We looked at the satellite image together. I pointed at the outlines of France, Spain and North Africa. He exclaimed 'Oh yeah, you're into weather!!' and he added 'I'm into weather too, always have been!'. 'How come?' I asked. He replied 'You can spell Rain, Cloud and Sun with my name... also Oak, Acorn... all the elements!' 'What's your name?' I asked. He replied 'Frances S ...' and a last name that I don't recall that begins with a 'K'. 'All the elements, then!' we laughed. He said 'Well keep lookin out for those UFOs' and I replied 'If I listen to any, I'll let you know!' And off he went, walking fast, south into the park. As I packed up I heard him yell to a man on a bike 'EH!! you have a GOOD DAY!!' As I walked home I thought about which elements I could spell with my name. By counting my middle name (Hildegard) I came up with 'shade', 'shine' 'hail' and 'snail'...

Low-pressing grey again. A feeling of melancholy. I'm missing Soph's presence on zoom calls and text channels. I go searching for the funfair in the northwest corner of the park. It has not yet been activated, but I can see people walking around inside, checking and testing things. I capture a satellite image with my Yagi antenna and Android phone, kneeling in the yellow grass. After the pass, I circle the perimeter of the fair, and notice that there is a line of trailer vans and mobile homes on the far side, facing the overground train tracks. Laundry is flung on the metal fence that divides the funfair from the park, or on small drying racks set up outside semi-ajar car doors. I hear a man speaking at an elevated volume on the phone. He says something like 'I thought I had 2 points! where are my points!' I realise, then, that the funfair is an entirely mobile operation: all the big machines are transported on two very large, glossy red trucks, but the real 'infrastructure' are the staff who likely follow in their vans and mobile homes. I wonder how many places they go. As I walk back to Downs Road I pass a couple walking their greyhound. As I pass I can hear the woman say to her partner 'Oh yes that's the lady with the...'

As we lift the blinds in the morning, T says 'what does it mean if the sky is blue!? I don't remember...' and we laugh at the fact that we have not seen a sliver of blue for what seems like weeks in the middle of the UK summer. A funfair is being constructed in Hackney Downs: the rides, swings and other contraptions make silhouettes against the blue on one side of the park. A man comes over to speak to me during the satellite pass, and comments 'you know I see people doing all kinds of things in the park - sitting, walking, like them [motions in the distance] but I never seen this!'. Later in the day, as we are cycling home from a pub on Columbia Road, the black outlines of the funfair machines, resting silently in the park, remind us of a horror film.

It is a grey, energy-less, dark-clouded day. My thoughts, however, are with the pale blue skies, swift winds and coastal swamplands of Buenos Aires as I re-read my field notes written during the month of fieldwork I carried out there last spring. As I make my way through my fast cursive handwriting, sometimes having to puzzle at words, I remember how breathlessly I wrote these notes, trying to record and remember everything. It mostly works. As I close-read, I am transported visually and sensually to Villa Inflamable, the community close to the centre of Buenos Aires that is the site of the research I am doing with a team of collaborators in Argentina. My colleague / friend Joaquin had taken me to VI after a morning spent on the rooftop of my other collaborator, Debora, eating pancakes and experimenting with radio antennas. There was not a speck or glimmer of cloud in the sky- and it was a wide open horizon. It took Joaquin and I only 12 minutes to drive from Debora's house to VI. My field notes read: "We arrived in the midst of heavy vehicle traffic - large tank trucks, mostly with Shell on them, entering and leaving the petrochemical facility. We passed to the right of a large sand dune - a sand production facility- there were thick clouds of dust in the air". From the open clarity of Debora's rooftop, it was a different experience being on the ground in VI. We walked around the neighbourhood with Claudio Espinola, a long-term activist and organiser in the community who also helps to ration water to families (the 'running' water is undrinkable, so families get a number of bottles of water per week). VI, like much of Buenos Aires, is on marshland, and we passed many pools of water and algae-covered ponds. The streets had been recently paved, but this had caused water-runoff problems and a man in a car told us he would prefer the dirt road if the sewage would not flood the streets. Later, as Joaquin and I left Claudia and made our way to an air quality monitoring station not far from the community, "We passed a plant that Joaquin suspects is where they began burning medical waste during the pandemic. It looked very old and dilapidated. Joaquin suspects that environmental regulations were relaxed during the pandemic to enable the repurposing of these kinds of incinerators. We also passed a smaller river - maybe 20m wide - that looked like slow-moving cement. There was on oil slick on top. Claudia had compared the river to cement too". I thought about who made the decision to start burning medical waste in an out-of-order incinerator in an already impoverished and environmentally stressed community like VI. I thought about what it takes to turn a river into cement. I also thought about the divergences in the experiences of people in this community and those only a few blocks away, somewhat sheltered from the 'weather' of the petrochemical facility. I thought about the 'weather' of Villa Inflamable, the weather of flammable. In a recent article on perceptions of air in Mumbai, two scholars write: "For the state, flammability is the result of the residents themselves. It is them, and their forms of work, that create fire risks, and so it is they who need to be removed. Residents, on the other hand, attribute causality to the gases that the garbage ecology itself produces. They are acutely aware of how the state has aligned blame in an opportunistic way with them rather than the material hazards of place, poverty and labor" (Tripathy and McFarlane, 2022: 12). From my fieldnotes alone (and without any experience of living in VI) the causality of the environmental toxicity in the neighbourhood is shockingly clear, yet my colleague Debora has written extensively of the 'labour of confusion' produced when residents of VI are told their environment isn't so toxic, or that nothing can be done about it. This is about perception indeed, and it is about whose perceptions are taken to mean 'truth' or 'causality' and whose are seen to trouble the order of things. I spend most of the day co-writing a draft chapter with Debora, returning in my memory to VI, trying to articulate in words the causalities and breathing relations at work there.

The gloomy weather in London persists. Yesterday, upon return home from the Isle of Wight, T and I joked that it felt like the summer was already over- our holiday had lasted two days, and now it is October again. It feels surreal to think that we still have some time in the Adriatic planned for later in the summer. It feels surreal to think of a 'normal' summer at all, at this point. I spend the morning organising open-weather finances in the university finance system called, fittingly, 'Agresso'. I manage to extricate myself from Agresso to go outside for a satellite pass- finding a slow, languid drizzle. Under a tree in the east-side of the park, my Yagi struggles to pick up the signal in the beginning of the pass, as if even the radio spectrum is sluggish, radio waves moving slower than the speed of light through this water-logged air.

We made the 12:45 ferry to Portsmouth with one minute to spare, and opted for the 'sun deck' despite the total absence of sunlight. The deck felt more inviting than the humid, dark interior of the boat with airplane-like seats and sullen-looking people. We ate cheese and pickle sandwiches that neither of us liked very much. A NOAA-19 pass began just three minutes after the boat's departure. Though the maximum elevation was only 18 degrees to the west, I decided to try anyway, having never received a satellite image while moving in water! It worked far better than anticipated- I curled the legs of the V dipole antenna tripod around the metal railing, and a few minutes later the signal was ringing-in clearly. I wondered how my trajectory on the boat was affecting the image reception, if at all. A young man who had also come up to the deck asked if he could take a photo of me with his analogue film camera. He had travelled to the Isle of Wight for the weekend to 'see the stars'. Yet he also admitted to being 'very out of it' and having had 'little sleep'. He lamented the rise of Starlink and the other ways we are 'ruining the planet', and didn't say much more. When we approached the port, the clearly audible signal of NOAA-19 cut out sharply for a few seconds, so much so that I briefly wondered whether the satellite had stopped transmitting or glitched for these seconds. My experience of noise is normally a little 'softer', more like a gradient than a cut.

Crawww crawwww the crows spoke as they lifted and tumbled off their roosts along the cliff edge and fell into the strong westerly wind as if it was a blanket, finding shape as a flock seconds later. T and I were several hours in to a hike along the coastal path of the Isle of Wight and the silvery sea was shadowed by elaborate fast moving clouds. The weather forecast had predicted rain and yet we were in the sun most of the day. Our shoes and hands were speckled with the chalk that is characteristic of the island, and our legs happily tired. We learned about the local footpaths and the 'right to roam' across farmland. We also learned about the nettle and bracken that tower several metres high at points along the coastal edge, and send spikes into our ears and our shoes. We learned about some of the locals, too. Earlier in the afternoon, as we paused along the edge of a road to discuss our route, an older man tending a garden asked where we were from and if we needed help. We said we were from London. He said 'no your not!' so we had to explain further. The previous day, in the toilets of a seaside cafe, a bride-to-be looked at T and cried out very loudly and mockingly - 'are you a BOY or a GIRL??!' T found it funny. I ran through angry retaliations in my head for several minutes, then let it go. Back at the cliff, we lay in the tall grass as the crows swirled around us and T did some deep listening. I told T that I felt like falling off the cliff, it felt so tempting to follow the crows.

Last night on BBC weather, the presenter kept comparing current temperatures in the UK to what they 'should be' this time of year. The general trend was toward colder, wetter weather across England, Wales and Scotland. London's average in the first week of July is normally somewhere around 24 degrees C apparently, and it is currently rainy and dark, with a high of 18. As he reported this, the presenter even seemed a bit embarrassed, as if it was an awkward secret he was revealing. I met Muffin Man and a new miniature-Pomeranian rescue, Moonpie, out on the downs in the morning. When I went back out in the early afternoon, a very large, triangular rain cloud approached my ground station from the southwest side of the park, and fat drops began to fall on my antenna. They seemed unusually pendulous. I wondered whether warmer temperatures and the current humid conditions mean that drops grow larger before they fall.

Finally the grey has passed and a crisp wind has blown away most of the low-hanging, misty clouds. The air has a sharp chill, but one that will fade soon, I suspect. I am reminded of Derek Jarman's weather note on June 4th 1989 (from his diaristic book Modern Nature) which, though clearly of another time, place and month, describes today's weather perfectly: "The billowing white flowers along the shore are gone; but the mountainous white clouds in the blue sky and the horses breaking across a silvery sea cheer their memory to the echo. Today wind and sunlight fill the landscape with laughter. An old window opened in the wind and sent the cobwebs flying. The grasses are clapping - even the seagulls loop the loop".

It is another grey, misty and cold-ish day in London. I spend the morning working and take a brief break to capture a satellite image. A curly haired black dog tackles me and rolls around on my laptop as I am mid-pass. His owner looks mortified but as soon as I say it's not a big deal he becomes interested in my antenna, and it turns out he used to be an engineer, working with Radar. We don't speak long. Later in the afternoon, I see the weather from the seventieth floor of the Shard (a sneaky birthday-week adventure with T, who has wanted to go to the top of the Shard for years but is always too anxious of the elevators). We rise sixty floors in what feels like five seconds, our ears popping. At the top, T and I carefully approach the knife-edge, holding on to the metal beams for reassurance. After a few minutes, though, we have our foreheads pressed against the glass gazing in every direction. A stranger offers to take photos of us. Though the view might be more stunning on a sunny day, the changeable clouds and shifting rain are spectacular, and we try to time how long a rainy cloud takes to pass over London. It sort of dissolves rather than making it the whole way. There are only a few other people, and so plenty of space to circle all edges and study all perspectives. Descending, we go on a hunt for an ivy-coloured wall on an old building at Kings College that we could see hidden a few blocks away from St Thomas' street. Once we find the wall, we spend a few minutes admiring the density of the ivy, its even spread and growth over red brick, nearly engulfing the entire building.

The day starts cold, gray and misty. During the satellite pass, I feel chilly in my Mom's flannel-lined denim jacket, jeans and boots. How is this the second of July, I think. In the slow-loading satellite image, the sun glints tantalisingly, catching its own reflection over the Mediterranean. I am wondering where Soph is at the moment, as they left for a two-week holiday on Sunday. I think somewhere in Croatia, soaking up sunrays and salty air. Thinking about it makes my heart hurt, both with happiness that Soph is there on holiday, but also with a feeling of deeply missing the Adriatic and especially the small bay called Zaraca, near the village Gdinj where my Baba grew up on a remote part of the island of Hvar. Is it possible to miss an atmosphere, or a weather pattern? Is it possible to be nostalgic for places, less through their material surfaces and more through their elements? Having spent so many long summers in Zaraca as a child, having climbed the windy road that goes from the bay to the sparsely populated village Gdinj, with its fig trees and olive groves, with its tunnel spiders catching impossible flecks of dew in the dry landscape and epic cumulonimbus clouds dancing over the Karst rock of the mainland, and wtih its slantwise sunlight that remains until the last drop (since the road climbs on a south-facing slope) I feel so entwined with this weather. It is perhaps easy to say on a day like this in London, as I shiver through my trousers in the first week of July. Yet I think there is something beyond the beauty of Hvar and the Adriatic Sea that I am missing so much. Maybe it's a direction I will always turn.

Bees, flies, ladybugs and other insects buzzed around my ground station, located near to the Biological Sciences bee apiary in a meadow on the campus of Royal Holloway. One long-winged fly, looking like a cross between a grasshopper and a moth, landed on my keyboard. Purple-pink cornflowers and daisies bloomed abundantly in the uncut grass. I remembered Jaime Sebastians' story that he had recorded the sound of a NOAA satellite together with the chirping of crickets or cicadas, and he could 'see' the chirrups in the resulting image. I resolved to return to the apiary one day and attempt a recording of both an orbiting satellite and honeybees.

'So humid' proclaims T as we walk to Hackney Central to catch the overground to Stratford on a rare trip to the Westfield Mall. The air is misty with a light rain, though it is just as warm as it has been under bright sun for the last week or so. On the overground, two Moms are taking a large group of young boys paintballing. We arrive at the Mall hoping to be early enough to evade most crowds, but we find we are not the only people waiting for the Adidas store to open at noon. As soon as the metal gates have been pulled back, throngs of people enter, and it is almost impossible to locate and calmly try on shoes. We persevere in JD, Footlocker and Office before both me and T begin to feel physically unwell from the press of the crowds, the 'hall of mirrors' that is every sports apparel store, the stress of finding our way around, and the ultra loud grime tracks that are booming from every corner (though some lyrics have clearly been redacted for children's ears). We flee after no more than 45 minutes and head home, shoeless.

Dalila and I were relaxing on the grass of the garden around the corner from the Stoke Newington Farmer's Market (while I held up my V-Dipole antenna to casually capture a NOAA 18 pass) when a tall man suddenly interrupted us, asking what I was tracking. Within seconds he had laid himself down on the grass between me and D, head towards my laptop, and was asking a flurry of questions. I appreciated his curiosity, but the way he had just placed his body in the middle of our private conversation was annoying. It transpired that he was an academic in the sciences, though I can't remember the exact field, employed by Queen Mary University. When I mentioned later in the conversation that I work at Royal Holloway, he immediately asked "And you live in East London? Why don't you work at Queen Mary?!". I said I would love to have the option of a job at Queen Mary, things weren't that simple! Another tall man came over a few minutes later and asked similar questions, while the first one loaded the open-weather website on his smartphone. Yet as soon as he read the blurb, he exclaimed to his friend "Oh this is not for us... it's a 'feminist experiment'....". I replied actually, it was exactly for them. "I'll have to tie my hair back" said the first man. The second seemed to understand what I had said and backed me up. But at this point my feeling in speaking to them had completely changed- they had now separated me and D, and taken up a long stretch of time, while making remarks like the above. I decided to close my laptop.

Last night I finished 'The Well of Loneliness' by Radclyffe Hall, first published (and then banned because of its lesbian content) in the UK in 1928. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, a woman from a rich family who, in the words of the time, demonstrates "sexual inversion" from an early age. Her life story moves from the rejection of her mother and expulsion from her home in the English Countryside, to driving an ambulance in World War II, to moving to Paris where she can live a little more openly with her partner Mary. To find places where they can be and dance in public, Stephen and Mary visit 'the bars' in Paris where queer people can go without fear of prosecution, yet these places are also full of despair, substance abuse and sadness. At the end of the book, and though it breaks her heart, Stephen pushes Mary away from her, as she sees that Mary could have the possibility of a 'normal' life with a man called Martin. In the last few lines of the book, Stephen, in anguish, pleads to God: "give us also the right to our existence!". I think of how much has changed in the 100 years since the publication of The Well. I can live together with T, I can live an openly queer life, and I can freely access and read this book. Yet the 'pull' of 'normal' has not lost its strength. Society's 'straightening devices' work in new and different ways today, but they still work. Living obliquely or 'slantwise' requires unusual and surprising effort at times. And in an even odder development, queer identities and politics are now being used to 'pinkwash' the actions of corporations or governments committing acts of violence. In many ways, and in Ahmed's terms, society today might be oriented 'to' different things on the surface, but in many ways it is still oriented 'around' the same 'straightening' logic.

I awoke this morning not having slept because of the heat. T and I had left the bedroom and living room windows open but there was little breeze. In the middle of the night, the bedroom blinds started knocking against the window and I dreamed someone was trying to get in. Foxes screamed (or intensely rejoiced?) at 3am in the garden. In Waterloo station at 7:30am, an old, bearded, probably homeless man stood still with his eyes closed in the middle of the river of city commuters emerging from the tube and walking to the train platforms. I had to cross the current by hopping a few feet at a time through moving bodies in order to speak to him. He had an American accent but I shied away from asking about his origins. He didn't open his eyes when he spoke. By the time I bought him a coffee, he had got another one from someone else. We joked about the double coffee situation before I re-entered the commuter river. When I left he had opened his eyes, gazing straight ahead.

It's a hot, hot, hot day in London. People are bravely tanning on the grass in the park, though I imagine some might be roasting. The moment T and I wake up, we open all the windows in our second floor flat. T says, 'we need a storm'. I had brought out my turnstile antenna because, based on yesterday's image, I wondered if there might be more dust over the Mediterranean, and as the NOAA-18 pass was relatively low elevation (35 degrees to the East) I guessed I would see 'farther' than with my DIY yagi. Was Soph already 'seeing the dust', I wondered? As the pass got started, Nutmeg appeared suddenly, circling my ground station, and I turned around to see Bill and a woman walking toward me. Katherine had been briefed by Bill on my satellite ground station and open-weather, and complemented the project. We agreed that, 'you meet all sorts in this park' and 'you learn so much from chatting to people'. I mentioned my interest in seeing the dust, and Bill asked how many tons of dust actually travel in the air? Millions or trillions of tons? He spoke about an analysis he had seen about how long it takes mountains to erode into the rivers and the sea, and explained how scientists had measured weathering down the Colorado River by stringing a kind of line across it and taking many disparate measurements over time (I think). The takeaway was that it will take many millions of years for the mountains to return to the sea, but it will happen eventually! Bill asked whether my laptop was overheating, and I knelt down to hear the internal fan whirring at a high rate.They stayed a few more minutes before Bill said he needed to take Nutmeg to the shade. Later, remembering Bill's questions about dust, I read that "The Sahara is the largest source of aeolian dust in the world, with annual production rates of about 400-700 x 10^6 tons/year, which is almost half of all aeolian desert inputs to the ocean" (Wikipedia). That's 400,000,000 tons of dust per year. I wonder how much is airborne in any given 'dust' event. Or, phrase differently, how much air suspends the dust?

Today has been sunny and bright, but I've been fighting a sharp headache: taking pain killers, taking breaks and moving slowly, but nothing has worked. The one thing that might 'work' is to stop working. Hence why my weather note ends here.

Hackney Downs was golden and glowing this evening, as the city held on to its heat. My arms and shins throbbed slightly from a fast cycle ride from Bloomsbury. I thought about my meeting with J earlier today. We had sat in Russell Square on an uncomfortable metal table, discussing place-based weather knowledges, hierarchies in academia, performance journals and practitioners, and a possible open-weather automatic ground station in Western Australia. J mentioned many collaborators, institutions and places who I imagined with fictional appearances and atmospheres. As I recorded the satellite pass, reflecting on the possible station in Australia, two people came over to speak to me. They appreciated the measuring tape. Their names were Alex and Tamsin, and Alex kindly took the attached photo (thanks Alex!).

On my way to meet H at Leytonstone Library to see Graeme Miller's radio-borne sound work about the M11 link road, I stopped for a satellite pass at St Patrick's Catholic Cemetary. I had wanted to visit this cemetary for a long time, as it is situated on the prime meridian, 0.000 Longitude. Signs ringed the cemetary suggesting activities were heavily regulated - 'No Exercising or Picnics' 'Cemetary Open For Viewing Graves Only' and one sign that said the cemetary was regularly spraid with toxic chemicals for weeds, and people should wash hands after visiting. I initially put off the thought of collecting a satellite image until I had walked into the cemetary and found a quiet place to sit and reflect. I carefully unfurled my radio antenna. I thought of what I would say if someone asked me what I was doing- 'I'm doing a kind of ritual' or 'I'm just listening' or 'I'm performing a seance, I do this at cemetaries '. Though I am not religious, I said a small prayer to request access to the radio spectrum from the cemetary's residents. An hour later, walking a twisting route along the M11 road and holding radio receivers to the sky, the voices of people whose houses had been demolished to make way for the road emerged and disappeared in radio static. H and I learned the story of a woman who loved a five hundred year old Mulberry Tree that was still standing today, though instead of a communal garden, it is now in a Tesco car park. We heard other stories of older people who had to move out of their houses of forty years, and didn't know where they could go. 'Lonely' was repeated by several voices. The M11 road made a constant background hum, an incessant current of noise alongside our attempt to listen.

At the Restore Nature Now march in London today, signs read, 'To Bee or Not to Bee', 'Hey Kier OR Rishi! Bee Radical for Nature!', 'UK Arms Sales Destroy Life and Environment', 'Protect Essex Badgers!' 'I Just Really Like Bugs', 'SOIL not OIL', and 'No Justice, No Peas' (accompanied by a drawing of wailing peas). As the march wound South toward Piccadilly Circus, a burst of cheering led my partner and I to cross to the other side of the current of marching bodies, where we found a 'Dyke March' going in the opposite direction on the other side of the road. Their signs read 'Choose Butch. Choose Femme. Choose a Big Fucking Lesbian', 'Lesbianism is not a choice, it is a Blessing!', 'Dykes Against Occupation', 'Whose got a Wand and a Rabbit?', and 'Dykes For Trans Rights!'. Our allegiance to the XR march was seriously challenged! T said 'OMG, there's Stav B!', (legendary artist and performer who used to host underground nights for queer womxn in east London). We barely resisted jumping the street barrier and carried on in the Restore Nature Now crowd. An couple hours later, after meeting one of my old College friends in a pub near the Thames, we found ourselves on the southside of the river at Southbank Centre, where we stumbled upon a stage where people were gathering for a set of acts on the theme 'Queer C*ntry', part of Chaka Khan's curation of Meltdown Festival. There were just as many cowboy hats as dolly parton wigs. Two older men, dressed in matching pinstripe shirts and blue jeans, out-danced many of the gays. A day like this, of so many frequencies, actions, and parallel mobilisations, felt like a kind of litmus test of London, like pulling three colours out of a paintbox. On a day like this, we give our gratitude to this city.

Walking through Hackney Downs at lunchtime today, in peak park-hour, my Yagi antenna was especially conspicuous. Yet I was excited to set up my ground station in the wildflower meadow which had recently begun to blossom with poppies, daisies, and many other beautiful flowers. As I didn't want to block the small paths that are cut into the meadow, I set up on an area just inside a path, where either a dog or a human or both had trampled the flowers, forming a thick mat of grass and aromatic vegetation. What I didn't properly think through was how this would look to other people coming to the meadow at lunch hour. From the path, it looked like me and my ground station were responsible for the squashed flowers. Also, me being off the path probably suggested I authorised or agreed with such flower-destroying activity. As I couldn't easily move when the pass had started, and I couldn't hide my tall Yagi antennna, I found myself exposed to all possible onlookers, park landscapers, dog walkers, mothers, and faraway judgers. Though I couldn't always see them, I heard people muttering under their breath and to each other about 'people' coming to trample the flowers. I stopped the recording early even though the pass was very high elevation and my yagi was performing great. I debated whether to post any photos at all but then decided not to hide what I did! I hope the ten minutes I spent in the off-path area of the meadow can be forgiven by humans and flowers alike.

As I left the flat with my measuring-tape Yagi for the third time this week, Soph sent me a satellite image captured from Vienna this morning in which a large dust plume is clearly visible over the Mediterranean and Italy. I wondered if my DIY Yagi can pick up the dust so far away from the UK. Looking at the antenna lying on the semi-parched grass of the park, it seemed highly unlikely (how could something made of scrap materials pick up the traces of tiny particles in the atmosphere hundreds of kilometres away?). Yet despite the very weak signal received yesterday, my experience testing the antenna on Tuesday suggested it might be possible. And only thirty seconds after the satellite pass officially started, the signal from NOAA was clearly audible and visible, and only grew in strength over the next one or two minutes, so that by the time I began to angle West the signal sounded crisp. Unlike yesterday, tracking the satellite was easy, or perhaps the signal was strong enough that I didn't need to be so precise. Still, while talking to Bill who came over during the pass and kindly took both documentation photos (thanks Bill!), I did slightly dip the Yagi and noticed a drop in the signal. To my great surprise, I recorded almost fifteen minutes worth of audio, so long that WXtoImg automatically stopped recording when the satellite crested the Southern horizon. The image captures a long stretch of Atlantic weather featuring two mini-cyclones (one north of Iceland, one hovering over the north of France) and only a small part of Western Europe and Africa. The dust is out of the frame, to the East. Yet I wonder if my and Soph's images were georeferenced and composited together, might some swirls of dust be visible across both of our images? A fugitive 'weather between us' in the refractions and reflections of quasi-invisible traveling particles.

This is day two of measuring tape Yagi antenna experiments. I missed all of the 'good' passes in the morning, so I tried for a NOAA-15 pass in the early evening that peaked in elevation at 17 degrees to the East. In contrast to my experience yesterday, where the Yagi effortlessly picked up the signal of NOAA-18 at a max elevation of 45 degrees to the East, this lower elevation pass turned out to be a struggle for the Yagi. I felt either I was not being precise enough with my aiming, or the pass just wasn't high enough for a signal to be well received by the measuring tape components. As I tracked the satellite, I became uncomfortably conscious that I was pointing this conspicuously large antenna almost horizontally over an open field where some young boys were playing football. I hoped I wouldn't be noticed by an anxious parent or onlooker.

My first pass with a homemade, 'tape measure' Yagi antenna! I followed a design described in a YouTube video by India Rocket Girl, though I cross referenced India Rocket Girl's design with other sources for tape measure antennas and DIY dipoles. I also watched around seven YouTube video tutorials on how to solder wires to each other and to metal surfaces as my soldering skills are incredibly rusty. I lacked many of the components that India Rocket Girl uses, but made do with zip ties and metal brackets that I found at the local hardware store. Instead of PVC pipe, I used a long piece of wood that was intended for house moulding. The tape measure was an old heavy duty one that I had in my electronics box. Last night after dinner I started testing a few things, and before I knew it I was knew deep, spread all over the flat (T was away in Italy). I didn't think I had gotten it right, and I was convinced I would need to re-solder, but when I set up this morning, connected the antenna to my dongle and lifted the giant Yagi off the ground, pointing north, the signal was immediately strong! I tracked the satellite to a maximum elevation of 45 degrees to the East and then down to the Southern horizon. Toward the end of the pass a couple approached me from behind and were almost as excited as I was about the tape measure design and the image of the Mediterranean forming on my screen. Shortly after they left, Martin rode over on his bike and kindly took the photos of me shared here, very grateful for documentation of this DIY moment! More testing to follow soon...

After what has seemed like weeks of rain, cold and relative darkness, today was a dramatic shift into sun and warmth. As I set up my ground station on Hackney Downs, a little grey dog around thirty metres away came sprinting over and jumped into my body, making contact with my face! One of its teeth even slightly knocked one of mine. It was a blur of curly fur for around thirty seconds during which I could hardly see my hands or antenna, and then it ran off again. I saw it go back to its owner, and then spot a sunbather on the grass that it could love-attack. Later, as I was packing up, a gorgeous Romanian sheepdog came over and sat down next to my laptop. This meant the woman accompanying him came over, and we ended up speaking for around ten minutes about satellites, data modes and encrypted / unencrypted data. I asked for some photos of 'Wookie' and she happily obliged and consented for the photos to be uploaded to the open-weather archive, on Wookie's behalf. As I left the field, more people had arrived and were cautiously undressing into swimsuits, checking the sky to see if it was really worth it. I went to the grocery store and bought portobellos, salad, cucumber, sweet potato and mochi.

Camped out at a long table at a corner cafe, and feeling quite sleepy after a late night, five of us spoke for hours about our former lives, the legacy of communism in Bulgaria and the Balkans, developments in AI, and the politics of queer spaces. I set up my ground station at a cafe table on the streetcorner and was soon the subject of many looks and glances, though people were more hesitant to approach than the evening before. When Sofie arrived and began expressing enthusiasm about what I was doing and laughing at the situation, a small throng suddenly materialised around the ground station, including a man and a young boy, and an older man who gave me a small paper card that advertised 'La Constructorium Maya': "vise à construire une pyramide astronomique, un centre de démonstration des sciences et techniques, Précolombiennes à San Marcos (Lac Atitlan) au Guatamala". The man also insisted on showing us a photo of the Lake Atitlan, which was a pearl blue surrounded by deep green hills. Yet when I search for the website on the card I find what appears to be a french organisation that researches in the materials of building construction. Ten minutes through the pass, though we were still receiving a surprising signal given the five story surrounding buildings, rain began to cover my laptop and we went back inside. I placed my open laptop upside down on the brunch table so it could dry itself out. The following hours of the afternoon was a grey, dark, rainy mist until the sky suddenly cleared and sun poured out as Sofie and I left a bookshop where we had gone to a beautiful reading of a novel featuring vampires, a gay couple, a theatre festival and a skateboarding evangelist.

Sofie ran toward me in hall of the Gare du Midi in Brussels, and as soon as our bodies met we realised we were wearing almost the same thing: double denim, white trainers, a simple t-shirt. The next few minutes were a complete blur of overwhelming emotions, extreme happiness and my cheeks hurting from smiling too much. A group of us who had met at the Schloss Solitude art residency in Stuttgart, Germany during the Covid-19 pandemic had staged a reunion in Brussels, where Sofie lives. We spent the rest of the day talking at each other at hyper speed, visiting the exhibition of Belgian architect and feminist Simone Guillissen-Hoa, eating Congolese food in Ixelles, during which most of us ordered whole-fishes and plantain, speaking about life and loss in l'Athénée, and helping each other remember the many stories and moments we shared in the residency. Our experience of Schloss Solitude - a 17th century castle near a baroque forest - was particularly unusual as it happened during the second and third 'waves' of the Covid pandemic. We found ourselves - 35 artists from around the world - stranded in a castle on the top of a hill, affected by a rigorous German curfew and travel ban on movement between regions, let alone countries. Yet our 'castle of crossed destinies' ended up being some of the most memorable months of our lives, with experiments in collective living, workshops and teach-ins, dance classes, countless forest walks and excursions, mushrooms trips, meals and the making of what is now a family. When I went outside of l'Athénée to capture an image from NOAA-18, the night was late but there was still a thin light, and Sofie, Olivia and George came out with me. I spoke to a group of strangers who were immediatley interested in the radio antenna and satellite image, and we laughed in a semi photo shoot with the four of us. I wondered if the radio-borne satellite image, however noisy due to the tall surrounding buildings and angles of the city, registered the frequencies of our joy.

As sudden rains wash through London today, I share the cover of a Plane tree with a Deliveroo driver, an older man with a cane, and a couple of young people playing hookie from school. We form an unlikely bunch, me crouching over my laptop to protect it from stray drops and angling my antenna to the East, and the others either on their phones or sneaking glances at me and at the sky to assess when the rain will stop. We don't speak. In the relative silence, my thoughts continue to be jarred by news of events in Argentina, received in part through Democracy Now, and in part through intermittent texts and updates from two of my close collaborators (on a community air-sensing project) in Buenos Aires. The news media (specifically the Guardian) reports in characteristic language that "Argentina’s Senate narrowly voted to approve the first set of harsh austerity measures proposed by President Javier Miliei... Police used pepper spray, water cannon and teargas against the huge crowds while demonstrators set two overturned cars ablaze and threw molotov cocktails". I think about the generic-ness of this reporting, how little it actually says about the events occurring. Or, conversely, how much it says about how often similar events are occurring. A think tank in Oslo has just released a report that states that there were more armed conflicts in 2023 than in any year since World War II. From Buenos Aires, J writes a text explaining Milei's proposed legislation, that follows months of violent executive orders: "They're changing the retirement age for women and getting rid of a retirement pensions moratorium, making it impossible for informal workers to retire. Plus, they're giving foreign extractive companies the right to litigate in foreign tribunals. These companies get access to natural resources over everyone else, even the indigenous people of Argentina, who have lived in harmony with nature long before the nation state existed. It's really tough, especially in the middle of a years-long recession and economic crisis, with poverty rising to a staggering 55%". D shares that some students from her university have been unfairly imprisoned last night, not far from her house. She tells of an audio message from the mother of one of the students who has been allowed to visit the prison, and it reveals that seven women are on the floor [of the cell] since yesterday, including the students'. 'A form of torture' D adds. All of this as Milei prepares to travel to the G7 summit, a guest of Giorgia Meloni. All of this as 50,000 new fires have been reported in Argentina the past several days, despite the winter season. I spend the rest of my day thinking about Aya Nassar's question: "we hold our breath. Where do we go from here?" (2024: 3).

On the train to the university campus this morning, I think: what might it mean to ‘queer’ air, and our relations to it? Several scholars I read and admire have recently gestured to air’s queerness. Nerea Calvillo writes about queering as a practice that is useful when we consider airborne things like pollen. Nerea writes, “Because if air is commonly pictured as an inanimate (and often toxic) gaseous entity, queering it brings to the fore the whole world of animate and invisible entities that are part of it” (2023: 240). Queering air “brings desire, multispecies reproduction and interactions, excess, and ambiguity” to the fore (2023: 241). Nerea thus figures queering air as a tactic of honouring air’s multiplicity and deviancy. Talkign about multiplicity: later in the day I am standing on tiptoes attaching an antenna to a football post while an airplane approaches Heathrow airport, flying very low over the university campus, and appearing in the corner of one of the documentation images. Minutes later, I am listening to the Russian satellite Meteor MN2-3 drown-out the weaker signal of NOAA-18. The electromagnetic trace of the Russian satellite is clearly visible in the gradations of static in the Southern portion of the image I capture from NOAA. Even later, I am “close reading close breathing” the work of poet Julianna Spahr, cited in the writing of queer theorist Lauren Berlant (2022: 101). An excerpt from Spahr’s poem ‘This connection of everyone with lungs’ goes as follows: as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space of the neighbourhoods nearby and the space of the cities in and out Earlier this week I cited Stephen Connor’s writing on the ‘spaces of observation’ created by scientists to treat air as an object, as a volume that could be controlled. Spahr’s poem offers a very different diagram of air to space, and I would argue this is a queer one. The word ‘air’ is never mentioned in the poem, yet ‘breathes the space’ arises several times. Air is an anterior, a semi-nothingness that nevertheless infrastructures lungs and spaces. Though the poem intersects scales from the space around the hand to the space of neighbourhoods and cities nearby, it doesn’t do so by ‘nesting’ scales in the way we often see in popular media and culture, where the ‘body’ is placed in the ‘local’ and this sits inside the ‘urban’. Instead, reading the poem (that spans several pages) is an interstitial experience where breath is hinged to space and space is in turn hinged to different and plural scales, from the intimate to the planetary. This is an "affective scene [that] focuses on receiving and metabolizing the world while unraveling its presumed solidity" (Berlant, 2022: 97). This is perhaps a "queer reboot of the common" (Berlant, 2022: 99) that comes about through the queering of air.

Watching the satellite image load on my screen around lunchtime, it is hard for me to identify bodies of land, the characteristic sharp edge of France or the icy fingers of Norway. I am not sure if I can make out the fingerprint that is Iceland in the North Atlantic, normally so disinguishable. With my 'orientation devices' missing, I am lost to dis/orientation in the swirls of water vapour, the speckles of reflective cloud-light and the nondescript grey pressing down on me from above. Later in the day, I am reading Mel Chen's piece 'Feminisms in the Air' and in the very last sentence Chen introduces a term I have not heard before, 'melancholic pragmatism'. They write, “Out of the desperation and melancholic pragmatism of this moment, at stake are a series of questions about the “about” of feminisms whose imaginations promise something in the end” (2020: 29). I follow the footnote to read more about 'melancholic pragmatism', and find the following: ““Melancholic pragmatism” is a phrase that emerged in my conversation with philosopher and activist Alisa Bierria on October 17, 2020, about melancholies that do not end in what can be a strangely idealistic form of lossful nihilism, or that are perpetually delayed or denied, but are permitted to exist, registering layers of complexity and acceptance of inevitable complicity and incompletion” (2020: 29). I can relate to this definition of melancholic pragmatism, as it feels like the affective texture of what remains in many of my friends and family members after experiencing the winter of 2024 and the collective witnessing of war crimes in Palestine, Sudan and elsewhere. I imagine that Chen, writing in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, might have been feeling a slightly different melancholy, with different layers of 'complicity and incompletion' but nevertheless I think there are similarities, not least of which is the sense that neither nihilism or denial are workable options. Instead, we permit our ethical and moral melancholies to exist, we permit the impenetrable grey skies to press down, and we permit the understanding of a year of climate catastrophe that is only beginning to show how much of an anomaly it truly is. As my workday draws to a close around 7pm I fantastise about writing Chen an email to ask: what is your melancholy layering now? what are you permitting?

Today I am reflecting on volumes of air. In the book 'The matter of air: science and art of the ethereal', Stephen Connor recounts some of the seventeenth century scientific experiments that sought to examine air. He writes: "To study an object, one must pick it out from its surroundings, and concentrate it in one place. How was one to make of the air such an object? How was the air to be picked out of its surroundings, when air was ambience itself? How was the air to be brought before one, when it was of necessity and at all times about?" (Connor, 2010: 17). To 'pick something out' from its surroundings, to 'concentrate it' and to bring it 'before one' is to orient toward it. Yet this act of orientation proves tricky when the thing one seeks to 'pick out' is 'at all times about'. Connor continues: "What if, rather than trying to roll the air up into a ball that one could look at from the outside, one were to produce a space of observation - an air-lock - within the very space of the air?" (2010: 17). Thus, in lieu of condensing air, one might work to enclose it, to create a space in which air is 'locked'. I think of all of the times I have seen air get 'locked' and I think of Robert Boyle and his Enlightenment contemporaries, trying ceaselessly to get air into glass spheres, the better to isolate, contain and observe it. I think of all the 'holds' (Sharpe, 2016) in which humans were locked in ever-dwindling air, yet whose stories are rarely considered in narratives of Enlightenment science or scholarly histories of architecture, space and volume. Could Boyle have conceived of the consequences of volumetric air? Could he have examined the vacuums he created in so many glass spheres as caught up with, rather than removed from, vacuums of airelessness for vast numbers of humans in his time and hundreds of years beyond it? As 'volumetric thinking' is put to work in Gaza every day through the use of aerial weapons from white phosphorous to CS-gas, I wonder, with Aya Nassar: "What if we linger in the gaps between fragments and shards? Is there anything there? Not in the wreckage and debris - we know that well, too well - but in the space of making dust when it is not yet the aftermath?" (2024: 3).

The sunlight comes sideways today. There are low-hanging, grey and dark blue clouds circling above, and I leave the flat for the park a few moments after rain has stopped, feeling daring with my uncovered laptop. A flash of sun comes from the horizon as a gap in the sky opens for a few seconds and closes again. I can tell the moment when the sun has come out for just long enough to lure a whole hoard of dog owners and dogs outside, yet as soon as they reach the field the darkness falls again. I am in the park just long enough to see Martin who rides over on his bike, and we briefly speak about his plans to build a satellite ground station. As I work at my desk for the rest of the day, I am surprised by the slantwise light, searching through the corners of our kitchen and living room, making the whole place seem a little off-kilter, making my admin tasks feel a little surreal. I find myself turning on and off the desk lamp and living room light, unable to find optimal emailing conditions. One clap of thunder booms across the city just after lunchtime, answered by a far away siren.

Pockets of deep cerulean blue shown through grey and white cloud this Sunday morning. I stole a few minutes to capture the satellite image before heading out to a local pub for a roast with my partner and one of her ex-partners who is staying with us for the weekend. As the pass was ending, a man named Paul rode over to me on his bike, and asked what I was tracking. He was suprised that the answer was satellites, as he had expected wildlife. After I asked Paul to take a photo of me (two of which are attached, thanks Paul!) he said he could show me a photo of him. The photo was of Paul next to a train with the lettering Dr Paul Stephenson on the side. 'In my dreams!' joked Paul. Later in the day I looked up the train, and found out that Dr Paul Stephenson is a well known civil rights campaigner in the UK who organised the 1960s Bristol bus boycott which overturned a ban on people from ethnic minorities working on buses in the city. Dr Stephenson's campaigns were instrumental in paving the way for the first Race Relations Act in 1965, and in 1992, he also helped set up the Bristol Black Archives Partnership, which protects and promotes the history of African-Caribbean people. Great Western Rail apparently has a programme called the 'Great Westerners' where people can be nominated to have trains named after them, as a mark of respect to contributions to UK society. I had not heard of this practice of dedicating trains, and this made me wonder whether airplanes or satellites are ever dedicated in this way. Soph and I had recently wrote a short text that includes a vignette of a woman who asks to have her name attached to a powerful storm, and it becomes Storm Babette. I had assumed that 'In my dreams' referred to the 'Dr' part of the name, but I realised maybe it was about having your name on infrastructure, or being recognised as a 'great westerner'...

The air is warm but skies are grey, which has been a regular theme these last few weeks in London. A man named Rowan walked barefoot across the grassy field and introduced himself by saying "I think you can guess the question I'm going to ask you". We spoke for almost the duration of the pass, and he kindly took the attached photo of me. As I was explaining NOAA-18's Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer and how it scans Earth's surface in six spectral bands, but only two of these six are represented in the APT image appearing on my screen, I remembered an article sent to me and Soph by Bill Liles (NQ6Z) that tells the story of Virginia Norwood, sometimes called the 'Mother of Landsat', who designed the Multispectral Scanner (MSS) on board the first Landsat satellite (Landsat-1) launched in 1972. Virginia famously worked with a team to invent a scanning instrument that used a mirror moving between two 'bumpers' at a rate that allowed precise scanning of Earth's surface. According to the article in the MIT technology review, Virginia worked hard to convince NASA and other scientists of the precision of the scanner, and many were sceptical of what they called the 'banging mirror' and how it would work in space. Learning of this history, and specifically the working of the MSS, made me wonder about the relationships between the MSS scanner and the AVHRR of the NOAA fleet. My guess is that early scanning instrument knowledge of the 60s and 70s was shared across NASA and NOAA teams, since these organisations are so entangled with each other and with defense operations. I do also know from previous research that the Automatic Picture Transmission common to most NOAA satellites was first tested in 1963 on TIROS-8, almost a decade before the MSS instrument was launched on the first Landsat satellite. The experimental APT transmissions from TIROS-8 used data from 'a five-channel scanning radiometer', but TIROS-8 also carried two TV cameras (images from these cameras were either transmitted directly to US ground stations when the satellite was in range, or stored on a tape recorder until transmission). A key difference between NOAA and Landsat programmes was purpose- since its formation in 1970, NOAA operated a fleet of TIROS-type weather satellites that were intended for meteorological uses, and so were relatively low resolution. According to NASA, the innovation of Landsat was to produce higher resolution terrestrial images of earth that could be useful to understand crop distribution or even geology, and would supplement the very high resolution of land captured from airplanes. Yet Landsat has further historical relations to NOAA. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Landsat Programme, "In 1979, President of the United States Jimmy Carter's Presidential Directive 54 transferred Landsat operations from NASA to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)". Under NOAA's tenure of the Landsat programme, prices for Landsat data soared, as NOAA sought to recover costs from users. This unfortunately led to a massive decrease in Landsat data, except for very powerful and resourceful companies like those in the fossil fuel industry (though we also know that the US government gave special access to satellite imagery for fossil fuel corporations at different points in history). Much like the three still-active NOAA satellites have recently been contracted to Parsons Corporation, the Landsat programme was also temporarily privatised. "This occurred in 1985 when the Earth Observation Satellite Company (EOSAT), a partnership of Hughes Aircraft Company and RCA, was selected by NOAA to operate the Landsat system with a ten-year contract" (Wikipedia). The transition to private maintenance was not smooth, and funds were very short, so in 1989 NOAA directed the shutdown of Landsat 4 and 5. The shutdown was averted by the US Congress, which shifted policy and found emergency funding for the Landsat programme, bringing it back under the control of the government and opening Landsat data once again for widespread use. This was a well timed rescue, since Landsat 6 failed during launch and crashed in the Indian Ocean. Like NOAA-15, 18 and 19, satellites that have remained active long passed their intended lifespans, there are similar stories in Landsat. According to a 2012 article by NASA, "Despite all of the ups and downs, Landsat 5 and 7 operated far beyond their designed lives. The Thematic Mapper (TM) on Landsat 5 only recently gave out after 27 years of imaging; around the same time as TM shut down, operators managed to turn the Multispectral Scanner System (MSS) back on after years of dormancy. Landsat 7 continues its work as well, 13 years after launch". Across NOAA and Landsat, then, there are some common stories of instrumentation, orbital patterns, attempts at privatisation and the longevity of the satellites themselves. As we prepare for the decomissioning of the three still-active analogue NOAA satellites, I'd like to go deeper into the interconnected histories of satellite programmes, scanning-instrument types and the different sorts of 'publics' they were intended to serve.

The sun was rising when I rode my bike through Hackney Downs this morning, coming back home from a club in Dalston. My limbs felt both heavy and light in the very pleasing way that limbs feel when you have been dancing for hours. People were already in the park, or maybe they had been there the whole night. I could see the faint spark of a cigarette in a huddle of bodies between the hedges. I thought about getting my radio antenna and catching a pass at dawn, but sleep was too tempting. Later, at almost 2pm, I re-emerged from my flat and went back to the park. In contrast to the soft, orange-pink glow of the early morning, the early afternoon was warm, hot and dry. As I started the pass, a man in a group of men that normally always stand around a bench at the north-east corner of the park, around thirty-forty metres away from me, yelled "Is that for free internet?!". I could only think to yell back, "No!". As I couldn't explain at such distance, I used my free arm to point to the northern horizon and traced an arc through the sky from North to South. That seemed to help. He yelled again "What are you tracking!!?" and I replied "A satellite!! An image!!". As no members of the group looked like they were going to come any nearer, I walked over to them after the pass was done, and showed them the live-decoded image. They huddled around my computer. I wondered what they might say about the weather, given that the five to six of them are always here at this bench, all day, every day, rain or shine. Instead, they asked me what the weather was going to be like. I said I was not a meteorologist, but the image was showing different patterns of clouds over the Atlantic, maybe coming to the UK. They seemed to like this. One of them said 'nice one mate' and shook my hand in the way men do when they put out their arms, bent at the elbow, with the hand close to the chest. When you close hands you end up getting pulled together in a show of comraderie.

Over these last couple weeks, I sometimes observe the darkness of the landforms in the satellite images, especially in the Infrared Channel, usually on the right side. Though I have not studied infrared radiation scientifically, I know that, in the Infrared channel, the darker the pixels suggest that something is 'warmer' while the lighter pixels suggest 'cooler'. In today's image, even the northernmost part of Norway appears to be relatively dark, emanating and radiating heat against the neutral gray of the Barents Sea. The coastline and interior of the African continent also stands out in the InfraRed channel. Yesterday, a colleague who works in Cambodia studying the lives and labour of brick kiln workers told me about how the workers measure time and seasons by how fast it takes a large ball of clay to dry outside. In some seasons it takes five days, while in other seasons it only takes five hours. Their work rhythms are intimately related to the drying of the clay, and so also the heat and movement of air. In a meeting this morning I was reminded of Michael Taussig's writing on heat. He says, "Heat is a force like color, that sets aside the understanding in place of something less conscious and more overflowing, radiance instead of line, immanence instead of the famous bird's eye view" (Taussig, 2004: 31). As I pored over the 'satellite-eye's view' of today, I wondered about where heat as a 'force' shows up. Does it only show up in the clay ball that tells about heat by how fast it dries? Or does the force somehow also 'show up' in the satellite image, in the darkness and contrast of pixels? Thinking of the ball of clay makes me feel more connected to the idea of heat as 'force', but I keep wondering whether there are ways to use colour ('something less conscious and more overflowing') to demonstrate or express more of heat in the satellite image. In contrast to 'heat maps' where red and dark purple often signify the intensity of heat, how else could colour map heat, how else might it suggest 'immanence' or 'radiance' instead of line?

Today has been about rhythms. I organised and choreographed so many rhythms for myself and others, but the most intense was chairing a meeting with Soph and two Croatian scientists with whom I have been in email contact for months, and whose work I have studied extensively in order to include in a recent article on 'wind's animacies' and dust over the Mediterranean and Adriatic Sea. After so many protracted email exchanges and engaging slowly and carefully with their scientific work these last months, meeting them online was an experience of personality-encounter, joy, Croatian-language exchanges and rapid firing of questions (though I didn't manage to ask all the questions on my list). Later, during a research group seminar on ‘research rhythms’, we read aloud and discussed fragments of writing that suggested different rhythms, whether poetic, scholarly, scalar, material, or musical. The notion of ‘rhythming’ in research and a general tuning to the ‘science of the word’ is examined in an essay called "Rhythm, or On Sylvia Wynter's Science of the Word" by Katherine McKittrick, Frances H. O'Shaughnessy and Kendall Witaszek (2018). Starting from the work of poet and philosopher Aime Césaire, the authors write: “Césaire’s observation—that a creative science reckons with how poetic knowledge “is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge”—calls on the harmonious structures of collaborative thought in order to reconceptualize what it means to be human”. In other words, a 'creative science' suggests that there are ways to speak and enunciate research (including science) that are more truly collaborative and so rhythmic. I was immediately reminded of the interdisciplinary collaboration of the Croatian scientists and their willingness to be in dialogue with me and Soph on the call. McKittrick et al (2018) continue: “Like Césaire, Wynter does not turn away from scientific knowledge and privilege poetic knowledge, but rather shows that science of the word is an articulation of science and poetics together. This provides a “fulfilling knowledge,” one that understands the human in its most actualized form through the “climate of emotion and imagination.”” I love the idea of ‘science of the word’, that through a sensitivity to the craft of writing and ‘making’ words we are enacting a science that can perhaps see through the ‘silences’ of normative Science, which as the authors outline, has been responsible for articulating a version of nature that makes it possible to imagine and enact culture as separate to nature. We can ‘think science and poetics together’ in ‘fulfilling’, actualised and emotional ways. This is where I hope the collaboration and conversation with the scientists is going, though I know it is unfair to presume or predict outcomes. In the mean time, I want to return to their articles with an attention for 'science of the word' and 'narrative devices'.

This Monday was full of grey light and low hanging cloud, and after a morning of open-weather meetings, I found myself sitting in the middle of Hackney Downs, happy to be listening to the sound of a satellite but craving some colour. On my way back from the park, a bright burst of lichen caught my eye. I identified the species (or 'collaboration' between species) as within the family of Teloschistaceae which really refers to a large group of mostly lichen-forming fungi that have a 'cosmopolitan distribution' (meaning that they can be found in most places around the world, much like the pigeon and the orca). Most members of Teloschistaceae are lichens that either live on rock or on bark, but about 40 species are 'lichenicolous' – meaning they are non-lichenised fungi that live on other lichens. Apparently, in Spain, a member of this family of lichen-forming fungi has been included in wine-based decoctions for menstrual issues, and infused in water as a remedy for kidney and tooth ailments. Later in the day, I bought raspberries and blueberries entirely because of how they glowed bright-red and blue-purple in the fruit section of the local market.

My arms and legs are scraped from nettles and bracken after an afternoon at Richmond Park, but I feel so happy to have these reminders of a day among the oaks, elms and white-tailed deer. After I captured a hurried satellite image from the middle of Hackney Downs, my partner and I took a long overground train from Dalson Kingsland to Richmond station, and once in the park, we followed several trails away from the central lake and 'acid grassland' where most people congregate. The park was golden and shimmering in sunlight, and the greenness of everything was 'overwhelming' as my partner put it. Lying on a log in the sun, I opened my eyes to see a hawk making circles overhead, barefly moving a wing-feather. I heard a sound like a sneeze, and looked to the right, spotting a doe with two fawns. Lime green parrots talked excitedly in the branches and zipped from gnarly twig to tree trunk. A spider with a large bulbous abdomen scrambled over my leg.

As I begin the satellite pass, a young group of friends pass by, and one asks whether I am responsible for the pile of soccer balls a few metres away. This is a little funny, as there is an active young boy's soccer game on the field where we are standing, and I doubt I look much like a soccer player with my radio antenna. A young woman in the group yells to ask what I am doing, and after my one-sentence answer, they turn away and proceed to set up their picnic toward the south edge of the field. As I am packing up ten minutes later, though, the woman runs over and asks to see the image. She is joined by another friend. As I show them the enhancements of the image data, she remarks on the jagged coastline of the northern part of Norway, and the western edge of Scotland, wondering aloud whether the coasts are so complex because they receive the wind of the North Atlantic, whereas the east coasts are 'smoother' because they are more sheltered. As she speaks I admire her sparkly turqoise eyeliner and try not to stare. They are especially impressed by the colour infrared image of the highest cloud tops. They joke about how many times I must have explained this to other people in the park, and it's true, I say, I've met more people in the neighbourhood by waving an antenna at the sky than I might have by going to town hall. Half an hour later, I actually do join a Palestine march to Hackney Town Hall, following the echoes of protest chants through grey skies and an unusually cold wind.

Today I am striking in solidarity with Palestine together with other UK-based practitioners and organisations. The strike is organised by Mosaic Rooms and Migrants in Culture, specifically calling for groups and individuals engaged in cultural work to withold labour today, May 31st. My academic work as a cultural geographer is part of the cultural milieu in the UK, as I publish open access articles related to artworks, artistic collaborations and networks. Though open-weather is a fragmentary, precariously funded cultural project, it does participate in the cultural sphere. In lieu of a long-winded 'weather note' or working on a new academic article, I am spending the day doing the following: - Building an open access resource library on Palestine Geographies - Emailing my union on moving forward a public statement on Palestine - Engaging with and applying resources on university action by University and College Workers for Palestine

Wind is the subject of a half-day symposium at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton where I am presenting on behalf of open-weather. I am looking forward to the constellation of academics, scholar-artists, and members of the public who are going to share new work and join the conversation. A scientist called Richard Cornes from the National Oceanography Centre talks about histories of weather observation gleaned from the diaries of French and English scientists who kept careful records of temperature and pressure. An artist named Abelardo Gil-Fournier who has just co-written a book with Jussi Parrika presents his sculptures and experiments in the cinematography of wind. Scholars Maximilian Hepach and Bergit Schneider examine the diaries of John Muir, the drawings of Da Vinci and the paintings of Van Gogh to 'read one elemental media ecology against another', for example reading air through a description of ice in Muir's semi-spiritual field notes. JR Carpenter and Jules Rawlinson perform a sonic, poetry and visual piece called An Island of Sound featuring fossils, nautical charts, wind roses, walruses and other characters. We all stay out late at a local pub chatting and catching up, and I am filled with the nourishment of ideas, new reading recommendations, academic gossip, the sharing of intellectual projects and agendas, and generally feeling like we are all participating in an intellectual project around air, weather and wind. As I am rarely in a room with so many fellow air and wind scholars there is something momentous about this, and I am reminded of the ways that scholars used to travel for days, over hundreds of miles on land, to attend conferences together, to feel like they were taking part in a common project. I am by no means naive to the eliteness and exclusivity of this history, but I remind myself that it is also OK for today to be about the joy of shared and generous participation in overlapping academic work.

I have been thinking a lot about how scholars, artists and others investigating air try to 'substantiate' it in their work. In a chapter on 'Air's substantiations', anthropologist Tim Choy makes an analogy between a scholar/artist/practitioner studying air, and a PM sensor on the roof of a building. He writes, "enclosed machines on rooftops and streets ingest millions of mouthfuls of wind a day, calming it so that the particles it holds can be collected to count, to accumulate enough of the particular for it to register as weight, as substance worth talking about" (2011: 146). Choy continues, "miming this method, I collect the details in a diffuse set of contexts" to "turn the diffuse into something substantive" (2011: 146). This comes after a discussion of the ways in which air invites us to trouble binaries of the particular and the universal in cultural theory, both of which end up reifying solidity and 'ground'. 'Miming' the PM sensor, though, aren't we, as scholars and other practitioners, largely falling into the trap of 'particularising' air, counting particles so that our analyses add up to something worthy of empirical and conceptual attention? As I read across social science and humanities writing on air, I notice how often the 'particle' comes up, even when people are exploring the meso-scales of topics like breath and policy brutality. Is there something also about the outpouring of scholarly and artistic work on the citizen science of air quality that makes us feel we can and should be counting particles, even when that's not what we are doing? What if, in efforts to 'substantiate' air, we paid more attention to the fullness of air's aesthetics, its movements, gradients, vacuums, and porosities... the emptiness in between loosely tethered molecules? Rather than 'mouthfuls' of particles we might be substantiating something closer to texture, impressions, traces.

My senses are dulled and my body aches in a dull, persistent way that reminds me eerily of Covid. For most of the day I struggle with clouded focus and a heaviness in all of my limbs. Two lateral flow tests come back negative. I get worked up in an online committee meeting and sweat through my shirt as I wait for my 'raised hand' to be summoned. Soph wonders if I am fighting a (non-Covid) virus, and I remember the way my colleague was coughing in the office when we met on Friday. Yet what I am feeling is nothing like a 'common' cold or flu. On the way to the local health food store, we happen upon a baby fox hiding among sand bags next to a construction site. Passing me, my partner, and the fox, a man says this particular fox had been 'dropped' into his back garden by fox-parents some weeks ago and the fox's family would bring food until the little one was strong enough to jump out. What had it done, I wonder, to deserve such gentle entrapment? It peers up to us, seeming both mildly frightened and defiant. At the health food store, 'East of Eden', I browse a wall of herbal remedies, powders and cures. They have names like 'organic dog blood', 'raw moon' and 'bread nut'. I am surprised not to read 'fox tail'. I don't know what to choose and I end up with dark chocolate and bananas. I wait for my body to give me more signs - a sore throat? a fever? The full-body ache is both everywhere and nowhere, showing no signs of sharpening or waning.