Weather Between Us – open-weather

2024-01-25 10:21:30

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Today the park was spontaneously drizzly and I hunched over my laptop to keep it dry for the ten minutes of the pass. As I was crouched so low to the ground for most of the time, I experienced the weather of the park at the height of a small child or animal.

2024-01-26 10:10:04

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The sky is a deep cerulean blue today – cloudless, and slightly purple in hue. I spent part of the satellite pass lying on my back looking up. The grass was so wet and cold that I didn't stay on the ground long, but the feeling of being engulfed in a January blue has stayed with me.

2024-01-27 11:34:33

Sasha Engelmann

Abney Park Cemetery, London, United Kingdom

Abney Park Cemetery was muddy, wet, and full of dog walkers and strollers on this Saturday Morning. The density of the winter trees and the humidity of the air created a mist that felt appropriate to the vine-covered tomb-stones, monuments and crosses. I thought of the way early radio enthusiasts heard 'something in the static' that spoke of other spaces and times of the past and future. I pointed my antenna at the moist ground, wondering if the static would pick up frequencies underneath.

2024-01-28 11:20:46

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Today is an unusually warm Sunday in London in January. Although the weather has been overcast, the clouds feel veil-like and thin, and the Sun either burns them up or pushes them away by midday. As I was due to make a Sunday lunch for some friends, I spent most of the pass alternating between looking up recipes on my phone and checking the satellite signal. By the end of the pass I had both a long WAV file and a list of ingredients.

2024-01-29 11:14:13

Sasha Engelmann

Downs Road, London, United Kingdom

The weather of my body today is turbulent and choppy. Though I am usually able to remain calm on the surface, today is proving difficult. I am surprised when my bodily, emotional weather bursts out into the conversations I have with students and colleagues throughout the morning. I have begun to edit apology notes (probably unnecessary) to be sent later over text and email.

2024-01-30 10:57:24

Sasha Engelmann

Lesoco Building, Goldsmiths University of London, United Kingdom

Low, gloomy clouds hung over London as we gathered in the middle of a green circular lawn outside of the LESOCO building in which Goldsmiths design students study for their masters degrees and work in their studios. Deptford creek gurgled just a few metres away, though it was closed for access by a tall metal fence. A highway overpass arced to our east and a six lane intersection around the corner made a constant soundscape of motorbikes and car engines. In this context we huddled around my turnstile radio antenna and attempted to orientate our bodies in relation to the satellite orbiting overhead and the series of urban infrastructures around us. A constant interference pattern caused audible distortion to the satellite signal and produced regular and oblique lines in the image, like counter-currents of wind or a graphical anti-pattern.

2024-01-31 20:38:08

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The weather of Hackney Downs park close to 9pm at night on a Wednesday was surprisingly calm. A whispy wind blew blades of grasses but didn't manage to move dry leaves on the ground. I caught the wrong satellite – I had intended to capture an image from NOAA-19, and tuned to NOAA-18 instead – and unexpectedly started recording a 30 degree eastward pass. This first felt inconvenient because a line of Victorian houses blocked my 'line of sight' to the east. But the signal came through anyway, and this accident meant that I captured a dramatic cyclone swirling over eastern Europe and Russia. Seeing the image startled me- a dramatic disconnect from my experience of mild weather in the park.

2024-02-01 10:33:13

Sasha Engelmann

College Green, Goldsmiths University of London, United Kingdom

I met the Centre for Research Architecture students on the top of College Green at Goldsmiths University on a brilliantly sunny morning of the 1st of February. I introduced the DIY satellite ground station we would use to capture an image from NOAA-18, and immediately there were about a dozen questions. Melodie held the antenna first, tracking the satellite from the southern horizon to a maximum elevation of 43 degrees. Excited chatter was constant throughout, and laughter rang out as Melodie and later Penelope tried different poses and antenna orientations. The atmosphere was joyful and lively, but as the pass came to a close, the group was happy to return inside to warm up and look at the image in darker / calmer conditions.

2024-02-02 10:28:19

Sasha Engelmann

Downs Road, London, United Kingdom

London is gray and cold today, with a haze that feels like a soft blanket. On my way to buy bread this morning, the air made street corners, cars and shops look a little fuzzy. Being inside a bakery, and back in my flat with a warm loaf of bread and a coffee, was deeply comforting. It feels like good weather to be tidying up the house, changing sheets and watering plants.

2024-02-03 13:29:01

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Today I attempted to receive a satellite image from a pass that I assumed would be 'out of the sensible range' of my ground station. The maximum elevation of the pass was 13 degrees to the West, and I hadn't previously tried to receive anything under 30 degrees. Expecting to get nothing, I found a spot in the middle of Hackney Downs and held my antenna as high as possible to catch whatever radio waves could bend around the curve of the Earth as the satellite barely crested the horizon. Surprisingly, the signal was already visible at 13:28 and I had a reasonably strong signal by 13:30. As I watched the image load line by line, I realised I was seeing cloud patterns over Greenland and the north Atlantic, so far to the west that no coastlines of Europe were visible. Meanwhile in Hackney Downs a group of dogs played around me and the gray clouds hung low. There was something incredibly strange about seeing the North Atlantic so many kilometres to the west, while Saturday morning life kept unfolding in London.

2024-02-04 11:36:07

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Marshes, London, United Kingdom

A cold wind slowed me down on my cycle ride out to Hackney Marshes. Once in the marshes, I weaved between Sunday strollers, kids on bikes, canal boaters and athletes to find a corner of the marshes to set up my ground station. At first the NOAA-18 signal was drowned out by the characteristic signal of the Meteor satellite fleet, which caused a 'mound' of energy extending around 80hz to either side of the NOAA-18 signal. I started recording during this noisy occlusion, thinking NOAA-18 was about to pierce through (helped by Automatic Gain Control) but it took a couple more minutes for the signal to make it through the surrounding energy and noise. The wind continued to bluster as the pass progressed. A kind looking man with long gray curly hair and headphones stopped nearby and offered to take a photo of me. We spoke briefly about radio and satellites before he continued on his windy walk.

2024-02-05 11:23:11

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

There is high wind today, it feels like gusts are slicing across the surface of the city, though it is hard to tell from what precise direction. The clouds are patchy and partial, like a fast-moving lattice, and sun pierces through in very quick beams that meet earth's surface and disappear again. I imagine that from the position of the clouds, it might be like a high-speed game of shadow puppets. What shapes they must be casting!

2024-02-06 09:35:09

Sasha Engelmann

Russell Square, London, United Kingdom

The westerly wind was so strong this morning that, on my bike ride from East London to Bloomsbury, I felt at times that the strength of my body wouldn't manage to move my bike forward, and I regretted my choice to cycle in the first place. I was sweating so profusely inside my green puffer jacket that, once I arrived in the square, I risked the cold air and took off my coat to try to air myself out. I coudl tell that passerby were wondering what a person in nothing but a thin shirt and blazer was doing holding a metal object to the sky at half past nine, but no one approached me. On my cycle home in the evening, the wind, as I hoped it would, practically carried me forward, so that the roads felt glossy and smooth.

2024-02-07 09:22:06

Sasha Engelmann

Founders Green, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom

Today is wet, cold, soggy and muddy. A storm swept through London last night, and pattered the windows of my flat for most of the night. Most commuters early this morning had an air of being half-asleep and were hunched down into their scarves and woolly hats, like sea urchins. Founder's field, where I collected the satellite pass, was empty except for me with my V-Dipole antenna and laptop.

2024-02-09 10:46:17

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Rain pattered on the windowsills all morning. Water pooled and ran down the glass, and mist seemed to hover in between the three story houses on either side of our one-way street, like a wet cloud trapped in a crevice of our neighbourhood. I contemplated staying inside with my antenna held out the window, but ended up braving the rain with a big broken umbrella and a long insulated raincoat. Once outside, I propped the umbrella over a bench and set up my laptop and dongle under its shelter, with the antenna and cables curling out. At one point during the pass, the wind moved the umbrella and its flimsy, broken side sent pools of water splashing onto the keyboard of the computer- which I hurriedly brushed off with the sleeve of my coat, hoping no damage would be done. A man in full high-vis weather gear with a wheelbarow that looked like a recycling collection stopped next to the bench and asked what it was I was doing out here.

2024-02-09 17:58:13

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

A break in the rain allowed me to duck outside to catch a NOAA-15 pass. The sun had set already, and very few people were out in the park and nearby streets. I searched for a bench near a streetlamp and assembled my ground station. I sat on the bench in the orbit of light provided by the streetlamp and extended the antenna, its metal dipoles glinting.

2024-02-10 10:26:48

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

My ground station merged with the wet grass and mud of Hackney Downs field this morning. Mud was everywhere- attaching itself to my antenna bag, on the RF cables, the antenna dipoles, my coat and shoes. Nearby a young boys' soccer team was playing a morning match, egged on by a very loud coach who kept yelling at players by name and asking them 'who are you playing for?!'. I had forgotten my phone so I took photos of my ground station with my laptop camera. They were dark and gloomy but they somehow captured the atmosphere of the field, the game and the intermittent storm clouds.

2024-02-11 11:48:14

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

After a weekend of rain and mist, this Sunday morning is glorious, with bright sun coming through very soft clouds. The local Baptist church is in full swing and fragments of choir music and raucous laughter echo into the park from the church's open door. A small group of teenagers gather on the street corner in between the church and the park, angling their faces to the sun. As I recorded the satellite pass I was visited by a small grey curly-haired dog with a red collar who then sped over the wet grass in circles around me. I think about 'dog satellites' and speculate on what they might transmit.

2024-02-12 11:40:06

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I counted the seconds in the pass I captured this morning. Though the pass was of good elevation, and the weather is beautifully sunny and uncharacteristically warm, I truncated my recording and practically ran home with my antenna still assembled and my cables and laptop dangling. I was worried I would miss saying goodbye to my partner as she finished packing up and left for the airport.

2024-02-13 09:43:50

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

As I hurried out the door and toward the park, I realised that an invisible drizzle had become a light rain. I grabbed one of the broken umbrellas by the front porch and went to the park anyway. Crouching under the makeshift shelter on a park bench, I assembled my ground station and tuned to the frequency of NOAA-18. I knew the pass would be very low in elevation – only 19 degrees to the East – but I was hopeful. After a few minutes of weak signal as the satellite struggled to crest the horizon, a clear image began to appear- showing what I thought were Nordic glaciers and reflective lake surfaces. Only a minute or two later, the unmistakeable 'mound' of Meteor M N2-3 appeared surrounding and engulfing NOAA-18. Though the NOAA signal was strong, it was simply drowned out by the much wider and more powerful digital signal of the Meteor satellite, like someone trying to whisper in a crowded bar. I stopped the recording early, reasonably drenched by the rain, and returned with the glinting shapes of Nordic lakes in my mind.

2024-02-14 17:29:33

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Ashen, cinereal, dusky, smoky, slated, drab, grey: this is how I would describe my experience of the weather today. It is in many ways unremarkable weather, as it is not very cold, nor very wet, nor stormy or very windy. It is simply grey- a matte feeling of the colour like it surrounds you everywhere, inside and outside, dampening even your thoughts.

2024-02-26 12:05:23

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

All night the wind howled around our flat. It caused unusual squeeks and whistles in different rooms. As a worked alone at my desk in the living room, the smaller, more random sounds made me imagine other people in the house, so much so that I went into the bedroom and studio to check! The wind had calmed by the time I went outside to catch the satellite pass, but I kept thinking of the wind-people.

2024-02-27 11:51:48

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

This is the first day that feels a little like spring in London. The air has that shimmer that happens when it is misty but also bright. The green of the grass of Hackney Downs is vivid, an invitation to lie down (which I did) though I quickly learned it was also very soggy underneath. The satellite image I captured has a small cyclone curling over the North Sea, its long tail curving and sweeping all the way to the coast of Morocco.

2024-02-28 10:08:55

Sasha Engelmann

West Field, Royal Holloway University, United Kingdom

I was aware today that a meadow has its own weather. As I captured the satellite pass, I was conscious of the way the air in 'West Field' at Royal Holloway, surrounded by oak and plane trees, seemed denser than it had felt on my walk up the hill to campus. The open sky over the meadow seemed closer than it had when I woke up in London.

2024-02-29 09:57:27

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

There weren't clear signs of rain when I left my house to go to the park, but as I arrived in the open I could feel a sideways blowing mist of very fine droplets. Once my laptop was out for a matter of minutes it was complete coated in water. I debated the risks of completing the pass vs laptop damage, and decided to keep going, though huddled over the computer with my body. I imagine I looked quite strange to passerby- a hooded person bent over a small screen, trying to hold an antenna with one oustretched arm.

2024-03-01 11:15:14

Sasha Engelmann

Munro Fox Lab, Royal Holloway University, United Kingdom

My socks and shoes were already damp from weathering my morning commute to campus, and they got even wetter as I traipsed around the university grounds trying to find a good place for the satellite pass. The field to the back of Queens Building (where the Geography department is based) was virtually spongy with water. I decided to try to set up on a picnic table in the middle of two science laboratories. In full view of biological sciences researchers fiddling with pipets and samples through a bungalo window, I set up my ground station and hand-held the V-dipole. I was lucky that the first eight minutes were rain-free, but toward the end I had to lean my body over the laptop to protect it from drowning.

2024-03-02 12:45:48

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

This was a social day in Hackney Downs! I was approached by two men and their dogs, and speaking to them took up most of my attention during the pass. The first was an older, very large man named Bill and his dog nutmeg, a medium sized, curly haired deep brown dog, maybe a kind of terrier. The second was a younger man with a very big and wide laborador. Bill told me stories of his father who had used radio during WWII to listen to the Germans, and later erected aerials at racecourses across the UK (for reasons I didn't entirely understand). He also told me about a lecture he had attended by someone called Chris Lintott that was about microwaves and radio astronomy. The second man whose name I didn't catch had set up an antenna on the roof of his second floor flat to listen to ADSB. He mentioned he had gotten a dipole and tried capturing a satellite image but was unsuccessful. He also asked if I was into amateur radio and when I said yes, he said 'you and about five other people in the world, right?'

2024-03-03 11:00:47

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The bulbs and magnolias in Hackney Downs have been blooming in wild and 'spontaneous' groups. Across the UK, magnolias and camellias are blooming four weeks earlier than last year. As if in counterpoint to the conversations I had yesterday, today two older women and their dogs came up to me as I was kneeling by the daffodil beds in the park. One of their dogs, a terrier with huge whiskers, had come over to check out my antenna. The women were both wearing dark sunglasses and wool coats, and apologised for being 'nosey' before asking what I was doing. One of them remarked, 'there must be a whole group of people like you out here, I have seen them around'. I replied I didn't know who this group was, but that perhaps she was seeing me, as I had been in the park with my antenna almost every day (though the possibility of a secret Hackney Downs satellite group stayed with me). A younger woman then ran up to us, apparently having gotten confidence from the older women, and asked more questions with a lot of excitement- she had assumed I was tracking 'geotagged' animals, like birds.

2024-03-04 12:19:32

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

My allergies have been horrible today- so bad that none of my emergency allergy medications and measures are working. While capturing the satellite pass, my eyes watered so much that I couldn't read the frequencies clearly; once back inside the symptoms didn't let up. When this happens I find myself desperately searching for the cause, but the thing about allergies is that sometimes there isn't one that is clearly defined. I am speculating about dust, springtime pollen, a low immune system, or lack of sleep- but none of these feel like the obvious source.

2024-03-05 18:57:46

Sasha Engelmann

Windowsill on Downs Road, London, United Kingdom

Today is the first day I felt a slight note of spring in the air. When I woke up at 7am there was already plenty of light in the garden. On my cycle ride to Bloomsbury, my hands didn't feel the bite of cold on my handlebars. I was overdressed for the temperature, and had to unzip my coat halfway through the ride. Later in the evening I perched on our flat's back windowsill holding my radio antenna in full exposure to the night air.

2024-03-06 10:25:49

Sasha Engelmann

Founders Field, Royal Holloway University, United Kingdom

The university campus is coated and swathed in fog today. I set up my ground station on the near-end of Founders Field and could barely make out a group of students smoking (or just breathing in the cold) on the picnic table on the other side of the field. I met some colleagues in the local cafe afterward and they mentioned the fog to me too: 'it must be nice to see out of the fog today'...

2024-03-07 10:11:22

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

A cold mist is hovering over Hackney today. Fewer people seemed to be out with their dogs, though it could also have been the timing of the satellite pass. However a group of people had gathered on the far side of the open field near Downs Road, bikes fallen sideways on the grass. They were stood in a wide circle doing slow movements with their arms and legs. As they were mostly dressed in long puffer coats and thick scarves, and because of the blurring fog, they looked like people made of cushions or marshmallows, moving slowly in coordination.

2024-03-08 13:10:12

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I am writing this weather note on a laptop that has been stepped on by a dog. I can almost see the outline of a paw on the lower right hand side of my laptop keyboard! While I was out in the field this afternoon, a man came up to me and asked what I was doing. He said he was following groups on Facebook doing similar things, but had never tried himself. He seemed genuinely interested in learning about open-weather and as we spoke his dog circled us several times, getting in the midst of the ground station and possibly changing the frequency I was tuned to...

2024-03-09 11:17:08

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

A golden light has suffused the whole morning. The grass of the downs feels warmer, like the earth has heated up underneath. Near where I had set up my ground station, purple crocuses were pushing up through the weeds.

2024-03-10 11:08:28

Sasha Engelmann

Downs Road, London, United Kingdom

A light rain is forecast to fall all day today. It is coating the street, parked cars, trees, bricks and asphalt in a layer of water that is perpetually replenished from the sky. In weather like this, I wonder how the bugs and creatures of the soil are doing. As water logs the pores between grass roots and humus, do the smaller creatures begin to swim? do they breathe underwater?

2024-03-11 12:40:03

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

This Monday in London in early March is grey and dark. I had the living room lamp on for most of the morning while I was on zoom calls. I was several minutes late for the low-elevation NOAA-18 satellite pass at lunchtime but I'm still glad I went out to the park, as I met a young mom pushing a stroller, who stopped by to ask what I was doing. I showed her the clouds slowly forming over the South Atlantic, and we spoke briefly about the weather 'above and below'.

2024-03-12 10:43:42

Sasha Engelmann

Downs Road, London, United Kingdom

The darkness of yesterday has bloomed into spring rain today. Sitting by the open kitchen window, I could hear the pigeons cooing on the roof, perhaps making use of the partial cover of the chimney wall. Many people walked by on Downs Road, though their umbrellas and quick paces meant that they kept their eyes on the sidewalk, oblivious to a strange metal object being held out of a third floor window.

2024-03-13 09:00:48

Sasha Engelmann

Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom

I went for a very low pass today – only around thirty degrees over the horizon – but thought I could get something from the top of the fire escape at the back of Queens Building where the Geography Department is situated. Unfortunately there wasn't much of a signal, and for several minutes at the height of the pass, bursts of interference blocked any chance of clear reception. Still, standing at the top of the fire escape gave me an amazing view of the residential neighbourhoods to the East of the university campus, and I could clearly see airplanes taking off and landing at Heathrow Airport, just over the reservoirs.

2024-03-14 11:55:01

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I wanted to field the ground today, so I laid onto the grass of Hackney Downs while capturing the satellite image. It was wet, yes, and musty too, and it smelled a little like unhealthy compost and dogs, but it was nice to feel my whole body flat against the surface of the ground. The air was cool and mild and lots of people were out in the park, some staring at me as they passed a safe distance away.

2024-03-15 11:42:52

Sasha Engelmann

Greville Court Park and Playground, United Kingdom

An animated wind is bending tree branches, ripping petals off magnolia trees and making waves in the deep green grass that has sprung up in parks, squares and pavement-free soil around Hackney. En route to a pharmacy, I stopped in a small park in between the Greville and Rogate estates. A tower block, wrapped in blue fabric, was being constructed (or refurbished) at the far side of the park, sending drilling and hammering sounds into the wind.

2024-03-16 11:29:32

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The sun came brightly through our windows this morning. Hackney Downs was brimming with activity, including the usual small persons' soccer practice on the open field. I set up a good distance away from the soccer, but still two balls came my way, kicked high into the air by players whose fluorescent jerseys came down over their knees.

2024-03-17 11:17:21

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

A gentle rain fell for the first half of the morning but conveniently began to let up before I headed outside to the park. The grass felt warm somehow, even though it was slick and waterlogged. As I stood with my antenna in the usual field, reflecting on the horizon, a jogger passed close by and in the space of twenty seconds we had a brief exchange. As he ran off he remarked 'the things you can do in the local park!'

2024-03-18 09:35:45

Sasha Engelmann

, United Kingdom

Last night, while sitting in the corner of the park on a bench under a streetlamp, an older, long-beareded man on a bike stopped, circled around, and told me I was 'too far into the park'. He advised me to go to the edge of Downs road to be safe, and added 'you are my daughter too'. This encounter stayed with me as I went back to the park this morning for a satellite pass, and looked at the distance between the bench and the streetcorner – a matter of metres – but in the dark, perhaps much more than that.

2024-03-19 09:23:53

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

In today's satellite image, the the rivers Garonne and Dardogne are very prominent, carving a dark line into the west coast of France and joining into a delta meeting the Atlantic. In the High North, Lake Onega is a pale white, suggesting it is entirely frozen.

2024-03-20 09:12:20

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I perched my ground station on a forked tree trunk that lies on the grass in Hackney Downs. The bark and most of the trunk is wet but, unlike fallen trees that I've seen in forests, it doesn't feel like its decomposing. I wondered whether this tree has been preserved in some way, or whether its decomposition is slowed by the relative bareness of its surroundings.

2024-03-21 12:10:23

Sasha Engelmann

Russell Square, London, United Kingdom

On my bike ride to central London this morning, I noticed a cherry tree in full pink bloom in the courtyard of a church, and several magnolias in either late bloom or already dropping their oversized white petals. Yesterday was the spring equinox, but it feels like the singularity of spring happened some time ago. In Russell Square there were cordoned-off gatherings of bright yellow daffodils (though I wondered why it was necessary to ring these with black spokes and wire).

2024-03-22 11:59:02

Sasha Engelmann

Downs Road, London, United Kingdom

A weather system tremulous and noisy between walls

2024-03-23 11:44:08

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The temperature dropped by at least five degrees and a cold wind is sweeping over London. I was excited to 'see the wind' from above in the cloud fronts over the North Atlantic, but my laptop died within two minutes. In the sliver of an image that I managed to capture the white fingers of Iceland are just about visible. I remembered a conversation I overheard in a hair salon earlier this week about someone's upcoming trip to Iceland. They said 'we're going now as it's so volcanic, it might not be safe soon... then again, it's such a big destination, I'm sure 'they' will figure it out'

2024-03-24 11:30:45

Sasha Engelmann

Springfield Park, London, United Kingdom

I realised as I left the flat today that I was wearing all-blue: old blue denim jeans from Uniqlo, a faded blue denim jacket with a warm lining that was my Mom's and has always smelled faintly of cigarettes, a striped navy blue jumper from my partner, royal blue socks, and a blue backpack and antenna bag. In Springfield Park in North Clapton I set up my ground station in a pool of daisies. A young couple asked me if I would take photos of them with their new baby. After I did so I asked for the favour in return, ending up with about twenty very skewed photos of me crouching over my ground station. When I explained what I was doing, the man who took the photos remembered seeing a string of Starlink satellites, which for him was 'weird' and 'frightening'. We had a brief chat about satellite resistance before they continued on their stroll.

2024-03-25 11:17:59

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The grass in Hackney Downs has been freshly mowed either last night or this morning, and the smell is all-pervasive and enveloping, and feels even more potent given the relatively low wind. I could hear snippets of conversations across the downs (a dog walker asking another dog walker: 'poodle?!' 'no, labradoodle!'). A man walked nearby and when I smiled, he asked in an eastern european accent 'what is it'? When I replied, he asked 'are you a meteorologist'? I was surprised by my hestitation in answering, though I eventually confirmed 'no'.

2024-03-26 19:32:35

Sasha Engelmann

Downs Road, London, United Kingdom

The sound of the satellite, low and noisy over the nighttime horizon, mixed with the sizzling of a frittata and the slicing of salad leaves.

2024-03-27 09:26:58

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The last twenty four hours have been rainy in a nonstop, relentless kind of way. Today, shadows chase each other across the grass of the park as clouds give way to bright sun. My observations of shadows were interrupted by a squeeling bundle of dogs leaping by. One of the owners got upset that his dog had nipped another. For the next few minutes the park echoed with loud cry: 'Bruce!! that's THREE dogs today!!!'

2024-04-03 10:42:32

Sasha Engelmann

London Bridge, over the River Thames, London, United Kingdom

I found myself near London Bridge after an appointment at Guy's Hospital early this morning, a meeting with a specialist doctor which had me thinking a lot about the energy flows through and out of my body. Cycling out to the middle of London Bridge involved ducking and weaving through throngs of tourists and families who, despite the grey and blustery weather, were determinedly taking group photos and pointing at London landmarks. I had to hold my laptop with one hand and orient the antenna with the other, as gusts of wind wobbled both laptop and antenna dangerously close to the edge of the bridge's railing. Passing by my ground station and curiously observing my antenna, a young boy said 'Dad, what is she doing' and was answered with a flat 'dunno.. tracking something'.

2024-04-04 10:29:25

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

I felt happy to be back on the grass of Hackney Downs setting up my turnstile antenna this morning. After so many satellite passes in this location, I know the heights and depths of the park and its surrounding buildings like a favourite dreamscape. People in the park found me familiar, too. I man on a racing bike cycled over on the grass, and immediately recognised my Funcube Dongle, saying he had the same, as well as a full amateur radio license. We compared approaches to satellites and ADSB, I told him about open-weather, and he said this encounter had inspired him to break out his dongle again. A few minutes later, Bill and his dog Nutmeg came strolling over. Apparently Bill had been talking about me to his friends on the other side of the park, explaining what I was doing, and he approached to take a look at my image, while Nutmeg raced after a tennis ball. It was a good day to share the image, which was a long view of Europe and much of North Africa. Chott Melhrir lake is visible in Algeria, standing out as a dark spot against the lighter hues of Land. I read that this kind of lake, one characterised by Chott geology, is usually dry, but fills with water at certain times of the year. I want to keep a lookout for the lake in the coming months as it dries and most likely becomes crystelline and reflective with salt.

2024-04-05 11:42:53

Sasha Engelmann

Clapton Pond, London, United Kingdom

I have been thinking all morning about the wind, so I was particularly attuned to the creaks and murmurs of the wind around our flat and street this morning. The wind in my thoughts, though, was different to the one chasing clouds across the sky of London in big gusts. Instead, I was tracing my family's memories of the 'Jugo', a wind that originates in the South over Africa, and blows over North Africa and the Mediterranean. Once it reaches the Balkans, the Jugo has picked up many particles and water droplets along the way. In my family's lore, shared across many in the Balkans and former 'Jugo-slavic' peoples, the Jugo brings certain feelings and emotions to the foreground. Yet unlike the Bora, a brisk, cold wind from the Northeast, very little has been written about the Jugo's cultural value, its meanings, and how it maps onto ideas of 'the south' in ways that need attention and critique.

2024-04-06 13:10:09

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Across Europe the air is unusually warm and skies are cloudy and hazy today, but the atmosphere in London is bucolic, with picnickers spread out over the grass of Hackney Downs. I spotted an incredibly beautiful bird in the garden, I suspect a kind of Jay with very striking blue array of feathers on its wings. In my satellite image, Storm Kathleen swirls in a dramatic line over the Atlantic, and I wonder how it can be so un-stormy in London. According to one online news article, Ellie Glaisyer, a Met Office meteorologist, says: “The storm [Kathleen] is the reason we are seeing the warmer temperatures, because the location of the storm – situated out towards the west – is bringing a southerly wind across the UK.”

2024-04-07 11:36:53

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Writing of the atmospheres of the South Asian monsoon, Harshavardhan Bhat describes how the wind 'carries the ocean to the sky... transforming its air and everything in its temporal wake with the possibility of life' (2021: 6). Though monsoons do not occur in the North Atlantic, the aftermath of Storm Kathleen makes me think of the wind 'carrying the ocean to the sky'. The clouds feel like wave crests in fast-moving currents, spinning away from the weakening epicentre of the cyclone. In the park, as I was hurrying to set up under fast-moving clouds, a man and his dog asked what I was doing. After my reply, he said with more than a hint of humour, 'I wonder why I didn't wake up and think of doing that today'

2024-04-08 12:45:57

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Sun has been shining through the shutters of our south-facing flat's windows all morning, making ladder-like spotlights on the wood floor. The park was full of dogs and people: a body builder lifting what looked from afar like a giant, square piece of concrete, as if pulled up out of a London sidewalk; a young couple submerged and entangled in the grass; an office-attire wearing woman who spoke loudly to herself and a smartphone. The air smelled faintly of lemons and coffee.

2024-04-09 12:36:32

Sasha Engelmann

Downs Road, London, United Kingdom

As a bulb of fennel sizzled in olive oil on the stove, I leaned outside the second floor window of our flat, angling my turnstile antenna at around seventy degrees to the West. It didn't feel that long ago that doing so would have made me shiver with cold, but today I reached out the window withoat a coat or gloves. The air helped to soothe a splitting headache I developed from staring too hard at my computer screen this morning. The pain also made my perceptions fuzzy – a slight 'shimmer' in my peripheral vision.

2024-04-10 11:00:03

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Today my heart is racing and my chest feels tense. I have been in a sprint toward several deadlines. I have several chapters and many thousands more words to review of collaborators' and students' writing today, and every minute counts. Sitting in the grass of the downs was a welcome respite, at first, until a dog fight broke out nearby. One dog owner tackled his dog to the ground, and began agressively yelling and hitting the dog in front of several other dogs and people. An older woman with a terrier tried to intervene to say he should stop hitting his dog, but he yelled at her and she walked off. In the aftermath, the owner of the dog who had been attacked remained, and said to the one who had been violent, 'I would have done the same... everyone knows you here, mate'.

2024-04-11 10:07:28

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The sky feels heavy and low to the ground, and the atmosphere suspended, a bit surreal. There is a strange calm. We feel sleepy and low in energy. It is kind of warm and humid but it won't rain – this is where 'suspension' comes from, there won't be a release. In the satellite image, we notice the sharp intersecting lines of ships' tracks across the North Atlantic caused by aerosols released from the ships' exhaust. This morning, when we looked at iPhone weather app, the app said we are 'seven degrees above the historical average' for this time of year.

2024-04-12 11:57:27

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

The satellite image I captured today has so many striking details. There are clouds formed by orographic lift off the coast of Scotland – they look like short stripes or patterns, what are called 'gravity waves' in fluids. What I thought were ship's tracks yesterday, today look like contrails from airplanes criss-crossing France, the UK and the North Atlantic. The Alps are strikingly visible in the full sun and against the too-hot land of central Europe.

2024-04-13 11:42:23

Sasha Engelmann

Saint Paul's Church Garden and Labyrinth, United Kingdom

The Stoke Newington Farmers Market was at peak activity in the courtyard of Saint Paul's Church while I set up my ground station on the edge of the garden labyrinth. I could smell the Turkish gözleme being cooked on the large round stone, and an herb that I imagined was wild garlic. A man dressed in black with a thick-wheeled, heavy duty electric bike scowled at me from the distance. Another man sat down on a bench near the wall behind me and when I looked around and smiled he exclaimed 'technology!'. That one word hung in the air as I held my antenna to the horizon.

2024-04-14 11:30:08

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Somewhat hidden amongst some young trees and tall grass, and dazed by the bright sun, I heard a joyful 'hello!'. Bill and Nutmeg were walking over. We spoke for a few minutes while the satellite pass began. Bill had looked at the open-weather website, watched our talk at Sonic Acts, and then shared the project with his colleagues (Bill is a train driver). This was amazing to hear- I had never imagined that people I met in the park would take enough interest to follow the project online (I am learning fast about the social life of the Downs). Bill said he liked to think about how, while trains are moving over the ground in our daily lives, satellites are circling and sending signals overhead. The point of his story was to tell me that he had 'stood up for me'. Some of his colleagues are skeptical about feminism.

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?

prev 1 2 3 4 next