Weather Between Us – open-weather

2024-04-15 12:58:25

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The wind roared in Hackney Downs today. I tried to figure out what the 'roar' consisted of – was it the cumulative effect of all the tree branches and leaves moving against each other? the city-wide friction of wind around buildings, streets and train lines? the scaled-up whoosh of the air across the grass? dog walkers threw sticks into the wind. They sailed high up and were pushed back to where they were released, the dogs doing circles, looking frenzied

2024-04-16 12:46:32

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The image I collected was crafted in between sudden downpours of hail! The first time the hail started, I crouched over my laptop and used my body as a quasi-umbrella, and it passed in about a minute. A break of three to four minutes gave me time to recover. In this gap, a young person jogged over from under a nearby tree to me to ask what I was doing. I started to explain by saying 'there is a weather satellite...' but as soon as I said 'weather satellite' he interrrupted me saying, 'oh yeah, I know it, I seen it, I seen it...' and he jogged back to his friends, repeating to them 'it's a weather satellite, I seen it'. Then the second downpour of hail arrived. This time I worried it was here to stay, so I quickly shut things down and got back inside, chunks of ice still in my hair!

2024-04-17 12:35:19

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The horse chestnuts are beginning to bloom, and their leaf foliage is now so dense that they cast deep, dark shadows on the grass of the downs. There is a big difference between standing in the sun on exposed grass and standing under a horse chestnut, in its cool shadow. A small, large-eared welsh corgi bounded over to me during the satellite pass, telling me I shouldn't be there. In the long grass the dog had to leap through the green, challenging for short legs.

2024-04-18 12:20:59

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Positioned in the middle of the freshly cut East field of Hackney Downs in full sun I felt like a planet with its own orbiting moon(s) and gravitational fields. Dogs – like asteroids or meteors – approached and veered away in long and fast trajectories. I studied my position and made sure to look in all directions. On my way back from the downs I passed a young, 4 foot high horse chestnut tree that I hadn't properly observed before. The tree is ringed by a small cage on which there are handwritten notes to 'Dad' and 'grandpa'.

2024-04-19 12:08:53

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I forgot to bring an umbrella on my way to the park today, and yet again had to use my body as a shield for my laptop when light rain started. I have been testing the water damage boundaries of my computer during satellite passes recently. As I was packing up two young men and a large curly haired dog approached and we chatted for a few minutes about how often and frequently the NOAA satellites orbit. I showed them the satellite image on my droplet-speckled screen and one said 'I am so glad I asked!'

2024-04-20 10:34:06

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

On the far side of the park close to the basketball courts I found myself surrounded by daisies. My head ached from a late night out with old friends, but I felt relaxed and happy to be in the air. The pass was a very social one- two joggers came over to me and inquired about what I was doing. They kept jogging in place for our whole conversation. Bill and Nutmeg appeared, and I learned about an app that notifies you whenever scientists detect gravitational waves- gravitational wave weather? A man on a bike, trailed by two kids, asked one question as he glided past. Finally I was visited by a small terrier who stared longingly at an older woman as she walked away over the field. She called to him but he would not follow her, and she kept going. Instead he came over to me and sat in the middle of my ground station for a couple minutes before bounding over to another dog.

2024-04-21 11:44:23

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Kites flew high in the park today, though the variable wind meant that they often crashed and needed re-launching. The grass has erupted in daisies recently, making white speckles across the ground. Yesterday I went to a local action for Palestine: a rally and march that began at Gillet Square and stopped traffic on Kingsland Road before turning down Dalston Lane and ending at the Hackney Picturehouse (the Rio Cinema and Hackney Picturehouse were chosen as start / end points as they have cancelled/ boycotted events in solidarity with Palestinian artists and people). I find local marches like this extremely moving, in some ways more so than the national protests attended by hundreds of thousands in central London (there is one of these next weekend). Yesterday the march ended with a speech by one of the organisers of Palestine Solidarity UK, about how we need to keep showing up in public spaces, especially as London remains an active site of public protest unlike other cities in Europe. Despite the strength of these local actions, I sense a growing despair and raggedness in the protests, a myriad of ways to conceal feelings of despair.

2024-04-22 13:11:32

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

On my walk to the park today I noticed the blooming branches of an eastern redbud tree, and I learned about how eastern redbuds are in fact closely related to legumes. This made sense as the flowers resembled those of sweet peas. The pass was cold and grey, though a man kept riding back and forth on the nearby path singing to himself, which made everything a little more joyful.

2024-04-23 12:58:47

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Today is one of those typical days in London where, from the inside, it looks like it is raining outside, but once you are outside you can tell that it's just a wet mist that has made all the surfaces shine with water. The park was relatively empty except for a few people dressed in coats and dogs dressed in little jackets and gillets. The clouds overhead seemed to match the weather systems swirling over the Atlantic, making dense white and off-white shapes.

2024-04-24 18:32:05

Sasha Engelmann

Shoreditch Park, London, United Kingdom

I arrived in Shoreditch Park after meeting a friend for a coffee on the Strand. It was very cold but people were lounging on the grass and strolling around the park making every effort to enjoy a semi-sunny early evening. The 'radio weather' was very active. The amplitude of the signal jumped around wildly, and the waterfall display was checkered and criss-crossed by lines of radiation. I belatedly took a screenshot to record this, but only after I had unplugged my antenna so it is not as representative as I hoped. I wondered about very tall, black streetlights installed throughout the park that looked like they had cameras or other attachments on them. The signal of NOAA-15 would jump into audibility for one or two seconds and then get swallowed up by interference, even at the height of the pass.

2024-04-25 12:35:37

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I arrived on the grass with ideas for an evolving piece of writing spinning in my head. I made a mental post-it board and logged some ideas for the last few sentences of the collaborative essay I was working on. Crows were pacing around on the Downs, maybe making mental notes of their own. One passed close by my ground station and I thought I picked up on a sense of curiosity in my actions. A very large husky, looking strikingly similar to a wolf, charged several of the crows and was only kept from my ground station by a very long tether.

2024-04-26 12:22:18

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

My ground station was visited by a number of dogs. At one point there was a big husky, a german shepherd, two small terriers and a middle sized dog circling and moving through the radio wires and narrowly overstepping my laptop- a dog seance! They arrived with three people who had come over to see what I was doing. Two people I recognised before (they immediately identified the 'weather satellite') plus a woman I hadn't met. While the dogs carreened about, and the others continued walking, the two of us spoke briefly about environmental science and education. One of the smaller terriers came to sit next to us, as if to get some shelter from the german shepherd, and the three of us watched the image load together as the satellite orbited south over France and Spain.

2024-04-27 12:13:44

Sasha Engelmann

Beach of the River Thames near Trig Lane Stairs, London, United Kingdom

I arrived at the beach of the River Thames shortly after low tide. The curve of stony beach accessible from Trig Lane Stairs was criss crossed by mudlarkers who hardly noticed me as they bent to the ground and turned over pebbles and pieces of seashell. Arriving at the beach straight from a symposium at the Tate, my head was filled with dialogue about sirens, alarms and states of emergence / emergency. The radio spectrum had its own sirens. Around every two minutes or so, the relatively calm 'ocean' of spectrum in which I tuned my ground station was interrupted by what I can only describe as 'blasts' of energy that drowned out all other signals. The blasts would disappear, allowing a minute or two of calm, before returning. I tried to discern whether they coincided with the Uber Boats traveling up and down the Thames. A mudlarker passerby – who turned out to be an art history professor at a university in London – speculated on this wtih me for a few minutes. As I took a final few photos of my ground station the tide was already beginning to come back in.

2024-04-28 12:01:18

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The air of Hackney Downs was wet – sparkling with water – and though it wasn't exactly raining, droplets fell on my body, antenna and laptop. After so many days attempting to record satellite passes during hail, drizzle and rain in Hackney Downs this last month, I wondered if a tree could serve as a tempoorary ground station holder and shelter. A Montpellier Maple tree was close by, bright red, winged seeds were clustered along its branches. My antenna was too heavy for its branches but I observed how the branches and leaves were porous to the radio signal of NOAA-18 to the east.

2024-04-29 18:02:25

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Hackney Downs was golden in the late afternoon light, dogs frolicking and wrestling with each other across the grass. I had chosen a place for my ground station in the thicket of the action. A woman kept yelling for 'Eric!!!' though she didn't seem worried, it was more of a 'come on!' kind of yell. Eric turned out to be a small bulldog who paid zero attention to the calling of his name as he stole tennis balls from other dogs. The satellite image I collected was unusually dark- I wondered whether this could be because of 'night time' mode, or because I am live-decoding with SDR ++ for only the second time and some settings are off.

2024-04-30 11:34:06

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

A pair of orange grass cutter machines, like small tractors, circled around Hackney Downs today, carving edges around trees and casting grass perfume into the air. It was sunny and bucolic. Over the weekend I attended a rally in support of Diane Abbott that took place at the centrepoint of the park, in similarly beautiful weather. As a new resident of Hackney (since last October) I didn't know much about Diane Abbott's story, how she was the first black woman elected to the UK parliament, but also how she faced so much overt discrimination and agression while an MP. Several speakers at the rally mentioned Diane's record of standing up in Parliament advocating for the rights of working people and communities, but also how she was frequently shut down or attacked. I also didn't know that in 2023, due to an article she wrote, Diane's 'whip' was removed, effectively suspending her from the Labour Party. As a foreigner in the UK, the idea of a 'whip' is a strange one, and I read that it comes from language around hunting, where a 'whip' keeps hounds from running off the path. Despite all of this, the atmosphere at Diane's rally was exuberant and energetic, with rousing chants of 'We stand with Diane!!!' echoing to all corners of the park. As I meditated on this and received a satellite image, Martin came riding over again. After I shared that I had been comically trying to take photos of myself by propping my phone up in a nearby bank of grass and running to my ground station to pose, he helpfully took some photos of me (thank you Martin!). The satellite image was made by live decoding with SDR++ and an RTL-SDR V3 dongle (sadly I tried the V4 again and there was no signal at all). The troubleshooting continues...

2024-05-01 11:41:15

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Warmer air has arrived in the UK over the last couple days, and I realised I was overdressed on my way to the park. The grass was still cool and damp to sit on. I wondered about the number of wood shards on the ground before realising how many dogs had been chewing sticks and branches. Two german shepherds chased a ball nearby, and one of them kept lying down not far from me, panting-heaving with his/her whole body. Yet when the ball was thrown again, she went for it. I later met the dog, Akira, when her owner came over to chat. My activities were approved with a 'good on you', and 'we need to know whats going on up there' (hand gesturing to the sky).

2024-05-02 08:38:36

Sasha Engelmann

Myddelton Square Gardens, London, United Kingdom

Myddelton Square Gardens is the name of a green, flower-filled square on top of a hill in Islington, and in which St Marks Church stands. According to the St Marks website, it is 'a country church in an urban setting'. As I held my V-dipole antenna to the sky, I tried to imagine where I was standing 'as country' without the church or surrounding three-story Victorian buildings. The Thames would probably be glistening in the distance, widening on its way to the sea. Or, given the density of the mist in the morning air, the hill would be shrouded in a small cloud, wrapped up without a view of the horizon.

2024-05-03 12:34:52

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Drops splashed lightly on my laptop as I took cover under a Sycamore tree during the satellite pass today. While the tree mostly sheltered me and my ground station from the rain, periodic wind gusts would shake the leaves and a rain of large droplets would fall down, teaspoons of rain that pooled above. Thankfully, I could always tell when this would happen because of the sound of the upper tree leaves, and only a few splashes managed to reach my keyboard. As I was focused on this, an elderly couple walked by and both smiled at me.

2024-05-04 11:04:28

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

This week in London, there have been lightning storms in the middle of the night. My partner woke up one morning earlier in the week with a story of how the sky flashed brightly at 2am in quick successions of electricity with no thunder. I slept through the lightning. The sky today is a deep cerulean blue, so deep and bright it feels charged, amplified. I wondered about the residual effects of lightning: what happens to the electromagnetic pulses of energy, the sferics, that are emitted? How far do they travel around earth, and do they return?

2024-05-05 10:51:28

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I returned home from Brighton very late last night after celebrating with a group of close friends, and memories of the beach, the sparklers we lit, the twilight and our group dances are fresh in my memory. The sun feels too bright for these memories! In the satellite image, two swirling cyclones curve over the Atlantic and northern Europe, and I am reminded of the von Kármán vortex streets, or repeated patterns of swirling vortices, described by Esther Leslie in her essay on 'Fog, Froth and Foam': 'stress factors on a curve, the agitation of the air, clouds, the wind...'

2024-05-06 10:42:23

Sasha Engelmann

Downs Road, London, United Kingdom

The Met Office have issued a 'thunder warning' and a 'wet washout' to the end of the Bank Holiday weekend. One forecaster commented, 'if you manage to avoid showers, then it will be nice in the sun'. The contrast in these comments struck me as I held my antenna out of the flat window to catch the signal of NOAA-19. If sun... then very nice sun! If rain... then thunder and floods.

2024-05-07 17:57:11

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The solar elevation was only 10.2 degrees as NOAA-15 passed overhead in the early evening today. The chestnut trees, now dense with foliage and pink-white flowers, cast long shadows on the grass. A man and a young woman (I presumed his daughter) walked up behind me, the man asking 'are you in touch with outer space today?' or some variation. I explained the image loading in on the screen, though it was too dark to make out land and sea borders, and I fear it might have looked very abstract to them. As I left the park to do an errand I noted a burst of blue underneath a sycamore tree and identified the plant as 'green alkanet'. Reading later, I learned that the five petalled, deep blue flowers of green alkanet are edible and can be added to salads and drinks. The roots were traditionally used for red dye. And the leaves, though mildly toxic, have various medicinal properties, recommended for treatment of coughs, digestive issues and fevers. When crushed and combined with vinegar and rose water they are also an effective remedy for burns and ulcers. As I walked through the neighbourhood to the grocery store, I noticed how much green alkanet was springing out of cracks in brick, in shady corners and in other uncared-for places.

2024-05-08 10:16:19

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The sun has flooded London these last two days. I use the word 'flood' deliberately as the city feels like it is inundated with light, beyond its own capacity. In central London yesterday on an errand, I noticed people with their eyes closed, standing or lounging on streetcorners. The sun leaks into apartments and buildings through open doors and flung-wide windows. In the park today, I set up my ground station on the south side to feel even more of the sun's rays. Nearby a woman practiced throwing frisbees. A small terrier came running up to me with a growl, but soon softened as I said hello. 'You must be seeing a lot of weather today' the dog's owner said. I didn't know what he meant until he mentioned the thunderous rain on the bank holiday. As we spoke, the dog – who is named 'muffin man' due to an incident with some muffins – cuddled next to me on the grass. As I left I admired the burnet roses and the ladybugs asleep in their leaves.

2024-05-09 11:44:18

Sasha Engelmann

Founder's Field, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom

On my walk to the train station at 6:30am, the sun was already warming the park and highlighting its colours. I passed an orchid rockrose that looked eager to be seen, so I stopped and took its portrait. I learned later that rockrose flowers last one day. Later, at the university geography department where I work, I attended a seminar on 'plant humanities' in which someone suggested that plants 'scale time' in nonlinear ways. They hold hours, minutes, and seconds in recursive spirals, cycles and loops. This made me speculate about non-linear plant-weathers. In the orange rays slanting through windows on the train ride home, I wondered if the rockrose was finishing its rotation or defiantly resisting the dimming light, stretching time.

2024-05-10 11:31:05

Sasha Engelmann

Burgess Park, London, United Kingdom

I have been thinking a lot about how atmosphere can gather like a force field around a person, an object, a space, a time. One of my favourite writers of atmosphere Kathleen Stewart, says: 'It was then that I began to think, along with others, that nameable clarities like family or friendship or love or collapse or laughing or telling stories or violence or place are all atmospherics. All forms of attending to what's happening, sensing out, accreting attachments and detachments, differences and indifferences, losses and proliferating possibilities' (2011: 448). This morning I cycled through the uncannily warm, dusty, petrol-infused air of London to Burgess Park, which used to be my local park and the place I captured many satellite images in the early days of open-weather. On the hill in the park I thought about its atmospherics, how my move to Hackney has changed my attachments and detachments to the park's hills, fields, communities and skyline. As if to interrupt my nostalgia, a couple men who had come to lie on the hill started speaking and then fighting. One started laughing at the other, clearly in a way to make him eveny more angry. I rushed to pack up my antenna and rolled down the hill on my bike, noticing that the other hilltop walkers had done the same.

2024-05-11 12:36:42

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

A geomagnetic storm reached Earth in the last twenty four hours, creating magenta-pink auroras as far South as Florida. Last night around 10:30pm Soph called me when a bright pink streak appeared over Vienna and I rushed to a window to look North, only to find that there was nothing pink in the sky of London. Heading out to the park, I found a spot in the middle of the largest field, where I normally set up my DIY satellite ground station, and waited. I could hear the club night in full swing at The Star, and I could practically feel the friction of bodies, torn tights and trainers on the sweaty dancefloor. In contrast, the open grass was invitingly dark and cool. A few minutes later I thought I could see a faint pink glow. It grew slowly in intensity. At first I thought I was wishfully imagining it, but suddenly I felt overwhelmed with its vastness and managed to take a photograph. My iphone could see the colour better than me. Like many thousands of other people I dreamed of the aurora last night, and woke up today with its colour fresh in my memory. I wondered what form of collective unconscious we were experiencing, and I remembered Sara Ahmed's words: "We are turned toward things. Such things make an impression on us". Where are we turned when we turn toward the nebulous aurora, collectively? What are its impressions? Another coronal mass ejection is apparently on its way to Earth now, according to space weather scientists. These ejections affect radio: "Radiation from the flare caused a deep shortwave radio blackout over the Pacific Ocean. Ham radio operators and mariners may have noticed loss of signal at frequencies below 30 MHz for as much as an hour after the flare's peak" (Spaceweather.com). The NOAA satellites transmit at 137 Mhz, far from the 'blackout' in the shortwave frequencies, but I still wonder whether transmission could be altered, distorted, even slightly 'agitated' by the spike in charged particles reaching us from our nearest Star. Today during the satellite pass, in the bright sun not far from where I stood last night, three girls passed by some distance away from me, and I could hear one say: 'what is she doing??... is she charging her phone?!' Maybe not my phone, I thought, but I couldn't help wonder if I was charging something else as I pointed my antenna to the solar winds in the sky.

2024-05-12 12:23:03

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I spent an inordinate amount of my waking hours this weekend doing two things: 1) looking for and thinking about the aurora during the unfolding geomagnetic storm that started on Friday, and 2) re-reading Sara Ahmed's book Queer Phenomenology. My head and body are full of orientations. Last night I went out after 11pm to see the northern lights again. After the news media coverage of the G5 storm and the countless magenta-pink photographs on social media, the park was unusually crowded, and I could see people craning their necks to the sky. One person said in the distance: "does anyone see it? Oh come on!" as if urging the ions and Oxygen isotopes to light up on cue. The intensity of the solar storm had decreased and there was less chance of seeing any colour last night. Yet I couldn't help but think more about what was happening to everyone in the middle of their Saturday evenings, standing in a park and peering into the dark, trying to see pink. Ahmed writes, "Seeing such objects as if for the first time... involves wonder, it allows the object to breathe not through a forgetting of its history but by allowing this history to come alive" (2006: 163-164). The bodies in the park were certainly poised for wonder, eager to see the urban night sky 'as if for the first time'. It would be easy to suggest that people were disappointed, but I think something else happened. In the gesture of going out in the dark, waiting and gazing up, and in seeing this gesture repeated by many bodies, I think something did 'come alive'. We faced the same direction, we waited, we produced lines of orientation (and disorientation). While this sounds romantic, I don't think it was; indeed we can question how romantic a gesture of 'looking up' really is when the sky is occluded with light pollution, smog and strings of corporate satellites forming a shell around earth. Instead I think this was about "allowing the oblique to open up another angle on the world" (2016: 172). It was about seeing (and failing to see) something wondrous, something strange and unusual 'coming alive' in the opaque familiarity of the urban night.

2024-05-13 12:10:02

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I received some bad news last night, and made the mistake of watching a TV show that is a dark, psychological thriller before bed. I dreamed I was in a city under siege and friends were scattered in distant countries. I was trying to send them messages hidden in the frequencies and lyrics of protest songs. A light but deeply gray cloud hangs over London and the park was almost entirely deserted, strange after the way it filled to the brim with people over the weekend. On my walk home I noticed the glossy new leaves of a young horse chestnut tree, and I wondered about its red pigmentation – is it absorbing different wavelengths of light?

2024-05-14 10:41:48

Sasha Engelmann

Mint Street Park, London, United Kingdom

After an early morning appointment near London Bridge I paid homage to a site that hosted one of the first 'satellite seances' of open-weather in August 2019: Mint Street Park. As I set up my ground station next to a large flock of pigeons at the top of the park's terraced mound, I remembered the gathering of people who had participated in a satellite pass and poetry reading (by JR Carpenter) at the same location almost five years ago, as part of a series of gatherings and a reading group called 'Weather or not', led and curated by Arjuna Neumann. Soph and I contributed regularly to the reading group and discussion sessions for several months before open-weather was initiated. Today, the air is far colder and my laptop is speckled with rain. I ask a lone walker to take a photo and he takes fifteen. Later, I am meeting the author and scholar Jean-Thomas Tremblay for coffee in central London. They are visiting London for a conference and it is a rare chance to meet a North American scholar who I admire so much. Tremblay wrote the incredible book Breathing Aesthetics (Duke, 2022) that has circulated widely in the humanities and has inspired entire exhibitions in Canada, and I was asked to review it. The review came out last week. Over coffee, at the end of a conversation about book writing, air scholarship, environmental humanities and 'negative action' (another forthcoming book by Tremblay) I show them the satellite image and ask if they would like to contribute to this weather note. This is a half-typed, half paraphrased record of what Tremblay generously offered: "In the context of the Palestine solidarity movements I am thinking about the lack or absence of the possibility of gatherings for resistance [in London]. I am thinking a lot about denouncement... this has been a bit uncanny to see [here]. When I was in New York City a few weeks ago there was an omnipresence of the performance of politics (in the most generous sense of performance), and I've been looking for it here"

2024-05-15 10:29:49

Sasha Engelmann

Founder's Field, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom

In a recent article on 'breathing climate crises', Blanche Verlie and Astrida Neimanis advocate for a move beyond strategies of bodily 'attunement' found widely in the environmental humanities and toward practices of 'conspiratorial witnessing' involving the use of 'proxy stories' as 'amplifiers and sensitisers' of our own attunements (2023: 126). For these authors, microscopes, qualitative interviews and poems might all be "mediating prostheses that open certain experiences for us" (2023: 126). As I stand on a picnic table on the west side of Founders Field at Royal Holloway, I think about the antenna I am holding as a prosethetic. This is not unfamiliar: together with other members of open-weather, Soph and I have written about the relationship of body to satellite (and DIY ground station) as a “subversive prosthetic” (Engelmann et al., 2022). In later writing (Engelmann, 2023), and in dialogue with Soph’s masters dissertation work on the material politics of radio (Dyer 2017), I have tried to understand the relationship of body to antenna (and satellite) not through the lens of the prosethetic but as a mutual 'agitation': an agitation of embodied and sensory weather knowledges, and, in turn, an agitation of the “scientific weather” made accessible through orbiting satellites. When we use technologies to tell 'proxy stories' of weather and climate, how much do we need to account for the way these stories come into friction, creating agitation and heat? How might this agitation, this heat, itself be a site of 'witnessing climate'? Midway through my satellite pass on Founder's Field I manage to ask a second-year undergraduate 'Financial and Business Economics' student to take some documentation photos of me waving the antenna at the sky. He politely keeps from looking amused or bewildered. Walking down from the field through the Royal Holloway woodland, I can't help but notice the swampy waters of the woodland pool and a green-feathered duck asleep at the bank. The woods are buzzing with green life, but they feel far too warm and languid for May. Later in the afternoon at a staff meeting, serious conversations about university finances cause various states of anxiety and worry, and bodies slope in their chairs. I think: how do we witness when things heat up? What is the 'heat' we witness?

2024-05-16 11:34:21

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Though the sky was bright, a light speckling of rain fell as I walked to the park. A crowd of people was spilling outside the Open Doors Baptist Church. The attire was mostly black, however, so I wondered if there was a funeral or memorial service. I took cover under the canopy of a sycamore tree. In the distance, I could hear the human companion of Muffin Man (a small black terrier) explaining to two women what I was doing. They were pointing in my direction and I caught phrases like "she works for..." and "I see her...". As they were deep in the shadow of the grove of trees and I was on the edge of the shade I felt like I was on display in a lightbox, silently going through motions. They didn't approach. The satellite passed to the East and a large part of the Mediterranean appeared on my screen. I assumed there was sun-glint when I saw some blurriness over the ocean, but later realised there were wisps of dust. Using EumetView and the Dust RGB algorithm I confirmed the dust, which appears in a soft cloud of magenta-pink over Northern Africa, Sicily and the seawater in between. I thought of Aya Nassar's words about dust as an 'unravelling traveller' (2021: 458) and wondered how the dust was moving, circling, shifting in its passage. Through the tools of remote sensing and the algorithms used to 'enhance' what is sensed, the dust felt like another curious moving entity, silently on display.

2024-05-17 10:03:25

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Water and dust: these are the two prominent features in the satellite image I collected today. In the North, Lake Onega and Lake Ladoga are dark prints in the land near the now ice-free Gulf of Bothnia. Northern Europe is unusually cloud-free and seeing these lakes so clearly makes me feel uneasy, as if these waters are 'laid bare' by the sun. Another notable 'body of water' in the satellite image is unmarked on Google maps, but searching further reveals this is the Rybinsk Reservoir built by Russia in 1935. It was the largest man-made body of water at the time of its construction. The reservoir caused 150,000 people to be displaced and over 600 villages were submerged. In contrast, further South, there are other geographies and histories of immersion and displacement. The borders of sea and land are obscured in places by a current of dust making a soft streak from Tunis to the Southern tip of Sicily. News media are alert to this dust in different ways: an online publication called Gloucestershire Live warns readers that a 'scorching' Saharan dust plume is about to 'hit' the UK, and goes so far as to offer advice for how to 'properly clean your car' (hint: 'brushing' is not enough!). In the Swindon Advertiser, Saharan dust will 'sweep' across the UK. Yet in the Metro, these alerts to dust are dismissed with evidence from the Met Office: "their forecasts have no suggestion of a Saharan plume heading our way – good news for our cars which would otherwise end up coated in dust". The car is, once again, the primary surface on which we 'see' dust in European news media, and the object that needs most protection from it. When there are half-hearted gestures to the way dust can affect breathing for 'vulnerable' and 'asthmatic' people, these are rarely gifted the same emotional fervor for protection. There, scattered across the windscreen or front hood, dust speckles and glitters, forming 'galaxies' (as described by Nicola via Soph in an earlier weather note) to be 'properly' and thoroughly removed in the wash.

2024-05-18 09:51:04

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I knew I was out earlier than usual this morning as the fluorescent cones for the children's soccer practice had yet to be distributed across the field, and balls were piled in a corner. The air was grey, and though it wasn't exactly foggy, things felt muted, soft and indistinct. This made me think of Craig Martin's article on fog (one of the first articles I really engaged with in my studies of atmosphere as a young MRes student at Oxford). Fog, for Martin, "is located at the interstices of the incoming and the outgoing: lingering at this juncture, it could be said to determine the immanent connection between body and world" (2011: 456). In other words, fog makes us feel the air as something 'thickening', but in doing so, it demonstrates "a different absorption of time and space" (458), one that counters the 'invisible' and 'transparent' freedom we often associate with air. There is also something resonant between the experience of fog and that of heat. Martin quotes Taussig: "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, cited in Martin, 2011: 457). Later in the morning, on a train to Bristol, I decode the satellite image and the cloud-free lakes of Russia come into view once again. I think about the exactness of the image: today it feels full of lines, curves and arcs, land-shapes outlined against the darkness of ocean. Instead I try to feel the 'thickening' of air and fog, and the 'radiance' and 'immanence' of the too-warm land.

2024-05-19 12:36:44

Sasha Engelmann

Private field near Leigh Woods, Bristol, United Kingdom

I awoke this morning with a slightly sore head after one too many Ardnamarchan whiskies in a pub on a hilltop in Bristol. Sun blazed through the ‘blackout’ curtains. Bristolians had been anticipating Sun for several days, as we learned when speaking to a friend who runs a small cafe on the Northwest side of the city. There were numerous jokes, practically by everyone who walked in the cafe, about how rarely the Sun appeared and how the summer would be ‘over in three days’. Today my partner and I got a ride to the edge of town and spent the day in Leigh Woods, pointing out sculptural roots and feeling our way through the landscape without much help from maps. I wondered how common the experience of ‘data free’ or ‘no connection’ zones might be in a Sar-linked or One-web future. We hopped a twisted wire fence into a field of high grass and wildflowers to capture a satellite image from NOAA-18. Later, passing by the wide silty banks of the River Avon we stopped to watch small rivulets carving lines into the hillside. Having walked for over four hours we finally arrived back in Clifton Village for a 3:30pm lunch and ordered piles of food. Before the food arrived a middle aged man fainted and nearly fell over while standing next to our table. My partner helped catch him, and while he recovered I remembered my own short-lived phase of fainting in public while standing on street corners in hot, humid Manhattan in the summer of 2011. This was the summer that Hurricane Irene hit New York City and much of Manhattan was evacuated, an eerie precursor to Hurricane Sandy.

2024-05-20 12:22:50

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Some days I feel as if so much in the world 'matters', that what we choose 'matters' for us is a very risky and selective exercise. I am re-reading (for probably the twentieth time) Tim Choy's chapter on 'Air's substantiations' in his book Ecologies of Comparison (2011). Tim describes how, as an ethnographer in Hong Kong, he tried to ignore the city's worsening air pollution because wealthy, foreign business people were the ones most often complaining about the air. In contrast, local communities in Hong Kong were suspicious of middle-class and elite efforts to use air pollution data as a political device. It was only when Tim's partner developed a series of very bad sinus infections, and when air pollution made headlines when Disney's boss voiced concerns about locating a Disneyland in Hong Kong due to 'poor air' and its disruption to 'family values', that Tim started to take air's matter seriously. In ignoring the air, Tim was drawing 'lines of distinction' between himself and the largely white foreigners, though he is hardly a local either. In other words, by drawing lines of distinction as we all do every day, we are capable of ignoring what does not align with us, even when that thing is the most obvious element of life. I have been feeling this in relation to heat. I am noticing how people in the UK draw lines of distinction around heat, when for example someone claims to be a 'sunny person', 'warm blooded' or 'Mediterranean at heart', and so better served by sun than rain. This is a relatively inocuous alignment in some ways, but in others it suggests lines of affinity between people and certain geographies, some of which the people doing the aligning have never actually visited, or if so only rarely on holiday. Some of these geographies are also the ones most affected by global heating. What level of heat, or what new distinctions, will maintain or redraw these alignments?

2024-05-21 10:58:24

Sasha Engelmann

Brunswick Square Gardens, London, United Kingdom

Brunswick Square Gardens was empty this morning except for a circle of exchange students trading stories about English habits of life, and a long-haired older man walking in circles, puffing on a joint and coughing vigorously. Despite the tall brick buildings around the square I was able to capture a relatively clear image of the UK and the middle of the continent. Yet I failed to recognise the impending rain that would baffle all predictions for the day's weather. Later in the afternoon, at a seminar where three of my PhD students were presenting their work while weather brewed above, ideas of the planetary were discussed in relation to sonic geographies. One of my students is building networks of 'live audio streams' as an investigative tool to listen to sites of extraction, and another is listening across great timespans and timelines through conservtion bioacoustics archives, through which scientists trace the changing compositions of species in landscapes, and observe how the memory of sound is intergenerational, held in the bodies of animals (even non vocal animals) in ways that far exceeds individual lifetimes. As I listened quietly, resisting the urge to speak as the rest of the research group asked probing questions, I reflected on the different modes of planetary 'stretching' and 'scaling' being enacted in their work, and the devices they were using, from DIY audio streamers to experimental notation systems. The climate crisis requires us to 'stretch' and 'scale' but sometimes our conceptual frameworks scale unevenly or in unexpected ways. By the time we had celebrated the seminar and had dinner, the brewing weather had arrived, and it was pouring (an event that had not been predicted on any platform I had checked which suggested 35 percent light rain). I cycled home for 40 minutes, at times coasting through rivers of water that came up to my standing knee. Of course I had also worn my nice white trousers. I felt thoroughly stuck in space-time, unable to stretch or extend, each peddle bringing me two metres closer to home.

2024-05-22 11:58:09

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The surfaces of London are covered in traces of the downpour that happened last night. Though the rivers and ponds of water have drained away somehow, pools and thick mud remain. I meet Bill, his partner and their dog Nutmeg during a break in the rain on Hackney Downs. We speak about gravitational waves and the aurora. Bill asks to hold the turnstile antenna and kindly agrees to a photo. As they head on their way, I overhear Bill explaining to another dog owner what I am doing, and I feel grateful that Bill has become a mediator for the project in the neighbourhood, as I might otherwise get quite different reactions! Meanwhile the satellite stays 'in the sky' so long that my recording software automatically cuts off the recording when it nears fifteen minutes, but I can still 'see' the signal. As I decode and examine the weather image that reaches from Kirkenes, Norway to the Western Sahara, I join an online call where my union debates a motion to show solidarity with Palestine in the context of the ongoing 'scholasticide' in Gaza. After much discussion about 'logical fallacies' and whether the motion was 'doing too much', we are called to vote on a secondary motion to let the authors of the first motion take more time to amend its 'scope' before we actually vote on it. Meanwhile, someone in the room says, over 35,000 people in Gaza have been killed. Those who live in the ever-expanding houseless camps near Rafah are deeply unsafe and vulnerable. And yet those of us who are safe, who can 'drink a gin and tonic and go to bed' as one member puts it, are fighting about whether we should keep a point saying the university should divest from arms manufacturers involved in the unfolding genocide.

2024-05-23 11:45:30

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

As I knelt in the cut grass watching an image from NOAA-18 form, I noticed a tall man drawing a yellow tape around the gnarly plane trees nearby. After measuring the circumference he started to circle the trees from below and make notes on a pad. When I was done with the satellite pass I went over to speak to him, and learned that his name was Nathan, and he was surveying the plane trees for health on behalf of the local council. He told me about Massaria disease, believed to be caused by the fungus Splanchnonema platani, which used to be known as Massaria platani until scientists discovered features that required a species name-change. Massaria disease has been found in several parts of the UK in the 21st century, but it is believed to originate in the Mediterranean region. Yet spores were even detected in the air by a survey ship stationed over the mid Atlantic oceanic ridge between the Carribbean and Africa. The distance was somehow fresh in my mind as I had just captured a long satellite pass that included a long stretch of the Atlantic. The fungus has a reddish colour and causes bark to peel off branches, and eventually branches die back. Massaria specifically affects plane trees, but because plane trees are so crucial to the health of London - their leave collect and absorb air pollution, they provide large amounts of shade, and they are resistant to other urban conditions including heat - the Massaria has implicitations for the exposures and vulnerabilities of London's human communities. Nathan suspects most plane trees already have the disease, but it is when they become stressed that they manifest symptoms and health issues. The plane tree in front of us was probably 200 years old, had a diameter of 160 cm, and was doing reasonably well despite its 'pruning scars' and one low-hanging branch that showed signs of Massaria. Nathan asked me in return about my antenna and what I had been measuring. There was something poignant in our encounter - a tree health specialist carrying a diameter tape and notepad, and me with a handheld antenna and laptop - reflecting on air-travelling spores, urban trees and climate.

2024-05-24 09:10:47

Sasha Engelmann

Founder's Field, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom

Today, the headlines say that the ICJ is delivering 'a new ruling on Israel's war in Gaza'. In doing so, reporters state, the ICJ could order a halt to Israel's offensive. This is coming months after the ICJ ruled that Israel was plausibly committing genocide back in January, and many thousands of deaths later. Meanwhile, Israeli forces intensify attacks in Jabalia and Rafah. Meanwhile, the Guardian warns that we are about to experience the busiest bank holiday in years with more than half the nation's cars on the road this upcoming weekend. Meanwhile, this last week's heavy rains have caused playgrounds in East London to flood with sewage, according to my geography colleague who lives on a boat and works as a river guardian. Meanwhile, students in my department are taking an exam in a third year cultural geography course on commodities. The university campus is green, leafy and quiet; there are no visible acts of protest, no encampment, no sit-in or lie-in. Yet, from a union meeting earlier in the week, I know the university has passed new policy making it more difficult for students to engage in protest in the form of encampments, though people objected to this new policy being called 'draconian'. In a poem titled 'Fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying' Noor Hindi writes "Colonizers write about flowers / I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks / seconds before becoming daisies". Later she writes, "Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound / When I die, I promise to haunt you forever".

2024-05-25 13:01:26

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

In a new book called 'The Nerves and their Endings: essays on crisis and response', Jessica Gaitán Johannesson writes, "For those who haven't yet experienced climate collapse in our own bodies, a history not yet written into us, the feeling [of] it arrives in the shape of shadows, an atmospheric wrongness, and harrowing predictions" (Johanesson, 2022: 6). When Johannesson refers to 'those of us who haven't yet experienced climate collapse in our own bodies' she invokes a double meaning. Those who haven't yet experienced climate collapse in a bodily way might refer to the privileged, largely global north 'us' who have yet to experience the world-endings of global heating in an immediate, visceral sense. However, since Jessica opens the book with a vignette from a hospital ward where she was treated for anorexia in her 20s, this phrase may also refer to 'those of us who haven't experienced climate collapse in our own bodies - i.e. an illness like that of an eating disorder' that is fundamentally an illness of control, but also one in which agency (the 'cause') is heavily blurred by the 'slow violence' of gradual but persistent self-harm, diet culture, fashion imagery, 'health magazines', enforced gender binaries, parents and friends too scared or busy to say anything, and the exposures of growing up in capitalism. Johanesson makes the point that by the time one ends up in a hospital ward because every day, for a long time, one has chosen death over life, the advertisers, celebrities, coaches and early childhood events are long gone- you are all that is left, and there may not be much of you left. By the time we cross 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, the 16th century colonisers of Africa and the Americas, the architects of 'development' and 'aid', and the engineers of late liberal capital, are long gone. I do think the analogy has its limits. But I wonder, with Johanesson: might it be that those who have reached the brink of inexistence (by their own means) and come back, who have responded to the harms of contemporary society by so severely harming themselves, and then returned, have something to say about 'climate collapse'? Might they see a bit further than most through 'the shape of shadows' the 'atmospheric wrongness' and the 'harrowing predictions' ? And might the tools of recovery be relevant - tools that require one, every day, long after one might be 'recovered' (as recovery 'never ends'), to consciously 'choose the world'; teachings that one is not 'in control', no matter how much control one may have demonstrated by not eating for days; and the insight that unless the world around us is nourished, we will fail to nourish ourselves.

2024-05-26 12:50:04

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The pass started with an experience of signal flooding: Meteor MN2-3 drowned out the signal of NOAA-18 in a powerful broadcast many times the bandwidth of the analogue NOAA satellite. I could spot the Russian satellite by the characteristic 'surge' of energy that suddenly appeared around 137.9125 MHz, also the downlink frequency of NOAA-18. Only a few minutes later, I found myself speaking of another kind of flood with Ria and Philip, two Jehovah's witnesses who visited my ground station. We had a wonderful conversation about 'seeing' the satellite through radio waves and the types of clouds forming (of which Ria could identify many), and when I mentioned NOAA, Ria immediately connected the name to the Noah who predicted the great flood. I was immediately reminded of the words of Daisy Hildyard when she wrote a response to my and Soph's first open-weather performance, 'Open Work, Second Body'. Daisy begins with the story of Noah's ark as remembered by Proust: "Noah could never have had so a clear view of the world, wrote Proust, as when he gazed upon it from within his ark, sealed though it was, and when darkness was all over the Earth". Later, she describes, "that feeling that isolation and solitude can illuminate if not irradiate a feeling of the outside world". As it was for Ria, for Daisy, "it's hard not to see a gesture toward the old story of the ark that floats alone above the world it came from, a story that was also about making sense of strange weather and predicting or creating futures... a story about how different bodies weather the environment differently". As I leave the park, Ria asks if I can email her the satellite image, and of course I say yes. I think about the image as another kind of ark, floating between my laptop and Ria's, though perhaps on a journey that, by virtue of our conversation, is slightly less lonely.

2024-05-27 12:36:10

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

King of Hearts lying listlessly in the grass, crumpled from hands, wind and rain, and ripped (possibly burned?) on one of its edges. A woman and a dog walk past, and the dog makes a wide circle, looking at me inquisitively. "You must get many such looks of suspicion!" jokes the woman. A corner of Svalbard - Spitsbergen - appears at the top of the satellite image as I manage to capture the transmission from the 'High North', much earlier than usual, by standing on my tiptoes and stretching the antenna above my head and at a semi-parallel angle with the ground. I generally avoid such acrobatics as I usually run out of my flat and set up my station only moments before the pass starts, missing the noise from the North. My t-shirt threatens to come out of my denim jeans. For some weeks, a tent has been quietly living under the shade of the vines next to the bike parking area where Downs Road meets the park, and today there is a piece of laminated A4 paper saying '7 day notice'. The notice looks ridiculous strapped to the fabric of the tent with a black zip tie. The absurdity of the notice and the underlying violence it represents reminds me of D Asher Ghertner's (2020) work exploring how contemporary architectures of space and atmosphere "draw from colonial logics of bodily sequestration from outside threats". In other words, we are not just 'living' and 'breathing' the last several centuries of colonialism, extraction and exploitation building up as heat and toxicity in the air (as suggested by Denise Ferreira da Silva), we are also living and breathing "durable spatial dispositions governing how atmospheres are felt, arranged, and imagined". In other words, we are living and breathing ways of engineering and creating air/space that can be traced to the racialisation of the lungs of bodies of colour, the architectures of 'hilltop sanitoriums' where the wealthy could breathe 'clean air', and the personal technology of the air pollution mask, which has a very long history that far predates covid-19 or recent air pollution debates (Ghertner, 2020). Attempts at 'climates of enclosure' that work differently, like that of the streetcorner tent, and that engineer airspaces for those in crisis, are 'given notice' precisely because of this history.

2024-05-28 12:24:53

Sasha Engelmann

Downs Road, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-08 11:46:39

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-09 12:04:33

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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'...

2024-06-10 10:09:56

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-11 12:49:55

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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).

2024-06-12 12:36:57

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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?

2024-06-13 12:25:27

Sasha Engelmann

Founder's Field, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-14 12:14:18

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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).

2024-06-17 13:17:03

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-18 10:14:12

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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...

2024-06-19 16:48:07

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-20 12:37:48

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-21 12:25:31

Sasha Engelmann

Wildflower Meadow in Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-22 11:03:52

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-23 12:02:01

Sasha Engelmann

St Patrick's Catholic Cemetary, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-24 18:56:11

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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!).

2024-06-25 11:37:32

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-26 11:22:27

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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?

2024-06-27 09:35:31

Sasha Engelmann

Between Queens and Schilling Buildings, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-28 09:06:47

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-29 12:27:48

Sasha Engelmann

West Hackney Recreation Ground, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-30 18:05:38

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

'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.

2024-07-01 10:57:13

Sasha Engelmann

Meadow near the Biological Sciences Bee Apiary, Royal Holloway University of London , United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-02 10:41:06

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-03 10:29:29

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-04 10:18:03

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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".

2024-07-05 12:56:19

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-07 12:31:03

Sasha Engelmann

Buddle Inn, Niton Undercliff, Niton, Isle of Wight, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-08 12:50:43

Sasha Engelmann

Ferry from Ryde to Portsmouth, The Solent Channel, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-09 12:01:53

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-10 12:25:14

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-11 11:35:36

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-12 10:20:14

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs Funfair, London, United Kingdom

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...'

2024-07-13 12:52:06

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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'...

2024-07-14 12:40:13

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-15 12:25:50

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-16 12:15:09

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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?

2024-07-17 10:58:28

Sasha Engelmann

Founder's Field, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-18 11:51:41

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-19 11:37:22

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-21 18:59:29

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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'?

2024-07-22 11:37:21

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-07-23 12:28:13

Sasha Engelmann

Tide Square, North Greenwich , United Kingdom

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..."

2024-07-26 10:48:57

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-05-29 12:11:41

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-05-30 12:03:48

Sasha Engelmann

East Park, Southampton, United Kingdom

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.

2024-05-31 10:32:35

Sasha Engelmann

Burgess Park, London, United Kingdom

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

2024-06-01 11:34:03

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-02 13:03:32

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-03 12:49:14

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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.

2024-06-04 09:27:43

Sasha Engelmann

Grassy Field near the Physics Department, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom

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'.

2024-06-06 12:11:30

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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?

2024-08-24 19:20:36

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

From the heat, humidity and air pollution alerts of northern Italy, T and I travelled back to the UK by airplane in the mid-morning. The previous evening, a thick red and orange layer of particles coated the horizon. It was particularly visible during a long, late afternoon swim to the buoy that marks the limit of the swimming zone at the beach of Lignano Sabbiadoro. Normally, while swimming one can see the coastline of the lagoon and even as far as Trieste, but the haze completely occluded our vision. I read that the air pollution alert would increase in urgency over the rest of the weekend, and wondered whether my asthmatic lungs would react, or whether we were leaving too early on Saturday for my lungs to register. The airplane journey was cloud-free until we reached the agricultural flatlands of Germany, when a few cotton ball clouds appeared. By the time we were crossing the English channel, there were at least three layers of cloud: a thin, staccato layer above the airplane; an intermediary, patchy layer below; and a thicker, grey, monotonous layer close to the ground. We descended through the middle layer but spent another thirty minutes circling above and within the lower layer before landing. As we emerged from the plane, passengers cried out at the cold drizzle and wrapped their bare, tanned shoulders in scarves and other random clothing items - taken by surprise. The rain came and went for the rest of the day. I chose a lucky rain-break to head out to Hackney Downs with my yagi antenna for an evening pass. I noticed yellowed grass; large clumps of maturing chestnuts; and the late-August sunset piercing through the trees to the west, making silhouettes of people gathered around a bench with a sound system. I thought about Soph and urged Soph's cells and molecules to keep binding, smoothing, healing.

2024-08-25 18:56:29

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I awoke to a flood of sunlight in the apartment, though the colder air temperatures persisted. My head and body ached and I wondered about residual tiredness or a travel bug. This was all counter-balanced by a morning of indoor plant gardening: trimming the willow tree in the corner of the living room, crafting support structures for newly grown arms of vines near the ceiling, and watering others. When I finally emerged from me and T's apartment to catch an early evening pass in the park, the wind caused the dipoles of my tape measure Yagi to bend and angle all over the place. I tried to find positions where the antenna would slice through the air rather than be buffeted like a kite, but often gusts came from unexpected directions. It was not stormy, but unusually unpleasant, especially with the recent memory of sun-drenched beaches and warmer air.

2024-08-26 12:02:33

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

On my way back from the park with my tape measure Yagi, I saw the well-known local character who wears a tracksuit and stands on benches practicing martial arts, every day rain or shine. I smiled and waved hello, and he immediately exclaimed 'there's the aerial!' and for a moment, I think, mis-gendered me, as he called out something like 'oh- a girl!'. He jumped down from his bench and started asking questions- had he seen me before in the park? was I from America? how do I like Hackney? I learned his name is 'Joe' but everyone calls him 'Shaolin Joe' because he practices the Shaolin Arts (martial arts) in public around Hackney and Clapton. I tried to explain why I use my Yagi antenna to capture images from satellites, and he compared my daily satellite passes to the Shaolin Arts... 'meditating with your satellites'. We shook hands and he called out after me 'Have a great day!!' and something like 'good American!'

2024-08-27 11:52:02

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Another windy day, with gusts coming from both the south and west across Hackney Downs. Tree branches and pieces of bark have been peeled off trees and lie on the pavement or grass. Once again my tape measure Yagi was pushed and pulled around by the air, and once again I feared the delicate bits of soldering would come undone. When the dipoles bent down at odd angles, lines of noise permeated the audio recording. I realised today that I had never fully explored the fact that antennas could be malleable- able to move and bend with the wind. We associate antennas with very tall steel towers or elaborate metal sculptures that are nevertheless solid and static- but what about an antenna made of flexible material? I've been aware of 'wearable antennas' via the work of artists like Afroditi Psarra or Audrey Briot, and I have seen experiments in metal weaving, but my tape measure Yagi has raised other questions about working with semi-flexible, yet conductive materials that change rather than holding shape when exposed to air.

2024-08-28 10:46:50

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Today the air is still - not so much as a small gust as I orient my Yagi antenna from north to south, tracking NOAA-19. The sky is veiled with light cloud and contrails, and things feel grounded, heavy but not placid. Indeed I feel so unusually calm that I don't leave the house until the satellite pass is actually starting, meaning I am six minutes late to press 'record'. A man is driving around the park with a large tank of water on the back of a truck, watering trees. This feels like such a benevolent and kind thing to do, though I am sure water must be rationed as the trees are turning yellow-brown far too early. As he drives by me, he smiles and gives me a thumbs up from the car window.

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