Contributions – open-weather

2024-03-28 11:42:10

Sasha Engelmann

Aire de Châteauvillain, France

The rather grandly named 'Aire de Chateauvillain' is a gas station, electric car charger port and a food court with a Paul and a bistro. After waking at 6am and driving the best part of the day, my partner and I were absolutely starving, but we had trouble finding anything to eat. After being shown to a table between two other traveling couples, we were turned away from the bistro when they said they were 'out' of both the squash soup I wanted, the cheese plate we were going to share, and the goat cheese in the salad my partner ordered. As many other people were eating there, I had a sneaking suspicion that the bistro wasn't really 'out' of all of these separate dishes (how can a french bistro be out of chevre!? or cheese in general?!) but that we were turned away for other reasons. We made the best of it, and after I captured a rather noisy satellite image from NOAA-18, we went on our way.

2024-03-28 20:06:43

Standing outside my flat, in the rain, Austria

I rush home from the tram in the wind and rain, hoping to leave my things inside before the satellite arrives. I don't make it so stand buffeted by the wind on a street corner. Cars pass me, headlights on. Despite the tall apartment buildings, I catch a strong signal and am feeling happy until, for reasons I don't understand (perhaps the wet) my phone crashes, ending the recording. The experience does not help my sense of being off kilter or out of sync.

2024-03-29 10:06:28

Sasha Engelmann

Courmayeur, Aosta Valley, Italy

We awoke in Courmayeur, the famous Italian ski resort near Mont Blanc. The weather was a hot topic from our first conversation with the hotel manager at Stella Del Nord, who advised us that the most accurate weather info would not be in our smartphones but in the hands of the ski shop owners. The person we spoke to yesterday evening said definitively 'non e bello', but today the verdict is that the clouds are 'high' and snow won't fall. A strong wind that was rumoured to arrive yesterday, also didn't materialise. To our good fortune- we are headed to the slopes!

2024-03-29 11:28:18

Usual spot, Augarten, Austria

It feels like the first day of spring, again. It is windy but sunny, warm and dry. I sit on the stone flowerbed in the park and receive a long image with the satellite just under 70 degrees to my West. Stupidly, knowing that we had to get up early this morning to view two flats, I worked late last night and then doom scrolled the Internet. Now, I am tried and annoyed with myself. I have been feeling unsettle for multiple days now, I hope this feeling passes. This afternoon I must focus on writing an essay for open-weather. I think that I will write about how NOAA-15, NOAA-18 and OAA-19 may be decommissioned as soon as September 2025. It is less the "ending", more the not knowing when it will happen that is a concern for the project.

2024-03-30 11:17:58

Diepoldpark, Wien, Austria

Why is it that I am so low energy? The sunlight that has made it through the dense semicircle-shaped cloud over Vienna is dim and omnidirectional. It's warm and humid. I woke early and could not fall back asleep. I had hoped to begin the day clear headed, ready to write. Yesterday, after uploading my satellite recording to this archive, I noticed a large plume of Saharan Dust over the Mediterranean. I wrote to Sasha who relied saying that she had not spotted the cloud in her imagery had observed a "light sprinkling" of a reddish dust on the snow. We share an interest in the ways satellite imagery is, “drawn to the dust, the particulate, which it has itself apparently become.” (Leslie, 2021: 102). I want to get better at reading particles, not just pixels.

2024-03-30 11:19:06

Sasha Engelmann

Playground at the Area di Servizio, Novara Sud, Italy

Continuing our road trip, we descended from Courmayeur through the Vallee d'Aosta and around mid-morning were surrounded by a thick, matte grey haze just north of Novara, en route to Milan. As a satellite pass was imminent we decided to stop at an 'area di servizio' and take a short break. The AdS turned out to be crowded with trucks (one with a banner reading HOPTRANS) and cars, so the only place to set up the ground station was in a tiny children's playground called PlayLand, ringed with a fence. As the image loaded it showed a promiment veil of dust crossing the Mediterranean and completely covering Italy. Later as we were driving further east, we noticed that rain drops made small red marks on the windscreen.

2024-03-31 10:38:31

Sasha Engelmann

Via Giovanni da Udine, Latisana, Italy

My satellite pass happened in the midst of preparations for 'pranzo di pasqua', and I could year the operations of the kitchen continuing as I set up my ground station and orientated myself in the garden. After driving directly into the saharan dust plume seen on my satellite image yesterday, and spending the night with family in Friuli, I wasn't surprised that the air was still hazy, and the clouds an obscure matte grey. There had been red spot patterns on vehicles and other stationary metal surfaces when we woke up this morning. Later in the day, while on a walk along the Tagliamento river, my throat and eyes felt the dust. As I got ready for bed, a 'tempesta' broke, causing a downfall of rain that my italian hosts called a water 'bomb', a new coloquial term for an extreme, unpredictable and heavy rain.

2024-03-31 12:04:22

Asperleiten (favourite place), Wienerwald, Austria

We went seeking satellites and Saharan Dust. Last night, I discovered the chrome mudguards of my bicycle patterned with rust coloured droplets. N said that they look like small galaxies. Now we are walking to my favourite tree-lined field in the Wienerwald (Vienna Woods). The light levels have increased, but even when the sun is out there is a thick haze. On reaching the field, I slip on a golden vest, clip belt and tool pouch. The beautifully gender neutralising astronaut-athleisure 'look' is intended to disrupt the documentary style photos we are about to take. Stood in the centre of the field among tubular Cowslip flowers, I scan the Northern horizon with the antenna while N snaps away on my iPhone. I almost forget to adjust the antenna's Gain. When I do, NOAA-18 appears. We spend the next 10 minutes enacting a satellite hunt, much to the confusion of a couple who walk past twice with two yapping lap dogs. The results of the very real satellite hunt photoshoot are great. To have spotted the iron and mineral-rich Dust cloud in imagery two days ago, and to now be immersed in it, to be experiencing it as 'weather', is uncanny. The walk to the bus home is longer and sweatier than I expected. A warm wind is being drawn North, and presumably with it the dust – a billion small crystalline galaxies.

2024-04-01 19:19:06

Ferienhaus Post Sozial, Wien, Austria

A cold wind cuts through my flimsy Uniqlo jacket, making me shiver during the satellite pass. Only three hours earlier, I'd been sat on our balcony in shorts and a cut-off tee-shirt, reading Lucy Sabin and Jorge Olcina Cantos' article 'Weathering Saharan dust beyond the Spanish Mediterranean Basin: An interdisciplinary dialogue'. In it, they paraphrase Michael Marder writing that "to face dust is to face not the Other, but the self" (Marder, 2016: 6) Taken out of context, for me, there is something liberating in the idea that we can change state, transmutate, to the extent that we are unrecognisablle, even to ourselves. Back in inside the flat, a change in the soundscape of the street alerts to the rain. Perhaps a interin "cold drop" or the end of the dust weather. N and I take the opportunity to return to the balcony in raincoats and, under the cover of darkness, throw fists fulls of flower seeds into the empty lot next door. Last year, when the old building that had to occupied the lot was being torn down, angry, I had bought online two litres of wildflower seeds. Now we were completing the plan. The seeds rained down, hopefully accomopanied by nutrient rich Saharan Dust.

2024-04-02 09:10:37

Dornerplatz, Wien, Austria

It rained all night. Not "blood rain" coloured by Saharn Dust, normal rain. I sat on a bench in Dornerplatz and received the satellite image in the sun and wind. The sky is a true blue this morning. Seeing it made me realise how grey and brown it has been the last couple of days. It's amazing how quickly one can forget the colour of the sky, and then be shocked by its rediscovery. In The Memory Police by Japanese author Yōko Ogawa, a community living under a phantasmagorical authoritian leader slowly forget the existance of mundane things: hat, ribbon, bird, rose. These things disappear in the night. Once they are gone they no longer have meaning. In the community, forgetting is policed and takes three stages (1) the erasure of the thing (2) the erasure of the memory of the thing (3) the erasure of the memory of the memory of the thing. The news this morning is all about the war in Ukraine and the war in Palestine, and how Israel had killed Iranian Military Commanders in Syria. Iran has sworn to take punitive action against the United States. [Interval] Three people close to me messaged today to say that someone they knew had died. I have sent my condolences, even thought this never feels enough. Today, has grown into a day marked by learning of the passing of people who I will never know. I am writing this down as a minor act of recognition and remembrance.

2024-04-03 08:43:01

Rossauer Brücke, Wien, Austria

It is beautifully clear and sunny. I woke early feeling rested after a good swim in the Stadthallenbad last night, which surely helped rid my body of stress hormones. This morning, I stopped on a bridge on the way into the studio to receive an image from NOAA-15. I've noticed that its imagery appears degraded, less detailed, compared to the other two satellites. At this time of day, the sunlight bounces off the Mediterranean, Aegean and Black Seas creating a white flare around the the coastline of Crete and other Greek islands. No Saharan Dust was visible in the image, just two large anticyclonic clouds.

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 10:04:37

Resting on the grass, Augarten, Wien, Austria

Israel-Palestine, Gulf of Suez, Cairo. Each image yeilds a different combination of landforms, coastlines, rivers and seas by which to orientate by. In land, light and dark patches index dry steppes and deserts, river basins thick with vegetation and cities. I did not capture an image yesterday because I was feeling worn down. In the morning, I had another emergency appointment to diagnose my chronic pain. To express my anger and dispair, I wrote a poem. I am submitting this word-image in place of yesterday's image: 'Try this' It's not an emergency the doctor concluded. / I become so submissive during medical appointments, it was / only when I left the hospital, and / lost another night's sleep to pain, that / I felt like crying and shouting. / Try living with this pain? / Try working after lying awake for multiple nights because / you cannot sleep because / the pain is gnawing at your insides. / Try living with this pain / for more than five years and being told by medical professionals (who you naively assumed would help) / that it is stress, / indigestion, / "your body is changing as you age", / "I have reassured Ms Dyer that the pain is nothing to worry about." / Try living with this pain and repeating those claims. / Screw your lack of emergency. / The discharge note I was sent home with yesterday said I had / blood in my "Douglas Pouch" and advised an operation / using a "DiVinci robot". / How fitting that my body part is named after a man / and the machine that will be used to to probe, cut, mince, remove the my offending flesh is named after a 'male genius'. / Try weathering this climate of sexism. / Try weathering a climate of sexism / in which women's health issues such as endometriosis are still so poorly researched and understood. / Try living with this pain, / then tell me that this not an emergency.

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.

2024-04-14 22:23:46

Augarten, Wien, Austria

The wind has been squally, like my body. I woke tired. To reclaim my body, I swim one kilometre at the local pool. The full sensory experience of swimming focuses me on breath and rhythm, in ways other sport cannot. I feel my muscles and enjoy imagining the small exercised-induced testosterone boost. I feel back inside my body, home.

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

2024-04-15 22:08:13

Hanging out of my window, Wien, Austria

A sunny morning was followed by heavy rain in the late afternoon. At one point, I opened the window facing onto the street and smelled cut grass, which is strange as there are no parks nearby. Before leaving the flat to attend a fundraising meeting, I check the weather radar on my phone and see two large bands of rain almost upon Vienna. Geopolitics is even stormy today. Israel is threatening retaliation against Iran, and stories of dissidents being silenced in Russia and Belarus are in the news. Meanwhile, here, Austria is keeling over to the right. Today, I also learned that abortion is still illegal in Germany.

2024-04-16 12:08:18

Local park, Wien, Austria

Can relief be an atmosphere? If so, it is enveloping me. I finally managed to speak to someone who would about my health insurance problem. I think that an end could be insight. It is dry but the clouds are low and the temperature has dropped significantly, again. These days I am alternating between shorts and tee shirts and a heavy winter coat.

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.

2024-04-17 13:33:12

In the car park Hotel Mariënhage, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

The Netherlands

I caught the image between bursts of rain. Drowsy after the night train from Vienna, I enjoy catching rays in the hotel car park. The air is moist and fresh. The clouds few but ripe. Tomorrow my experimental and sometimes unwieldy Critical Cartographies course at Design Academy Eindhoven ends. I'm excited to see the students work, its always energising and surprising. Hopefully they've enjoyed the experience as much as me.

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.

2024-04-22 22:21:27

Hanging out of my window, Wien, Austria

Clear skies, still cold. I am tired yet relaxed. It is a long day. In the afternoon and evening I helped to remotely interview applicants for the design school where I teach. Every 15 minutes a student joined the call from a different location: Moscow, Guangzhou, a city I can't recall in Canada, then maybe Barcelona, Offenbach in Germany, a few streets away from me in Vienna, the list went on. Our questions were a variation of: why this course now? The answers overlapped, but the reasons for studying and urgencies were diverse, so too were the concerns about visas, queerness or work after graduation. About half of the candidates expressed a desire to develop a personal creative practice while the others leant toward collaborative or collective work. It is exciting to hear so many desires in one day.

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.

2024-04-23 20:52:44

Lorenz-Bayer-Park, Wien, Austria

The software defined radio app I was running on my phone crashed as two teenage boys walked right up to N and I and got in our faces. I was a wary. "I'm from Tschetschenien (Chechnya)" one of the boys said. When I told them that I was from the UK, they proceeded to speak in awe about how "you know in London you get stabbed, just like that". When I said that we had lived in South East London they were unduly impressed. The boys willingness to come into our personal space made some sense when they told us that they were on drugs. I asked what and they said cocaine and then, as if to prove it, did a line in front of us on the picnic table. We chatted, I tried to restart the software defined radio and recorded this image (the first recording had corrupted), they offered us a cigarette. The satellite dipped below the horizon. We wished each other "Schön'n Abend", and N and I left the two boys in the darkness of the park.

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.

2024-04-24 19:27:05

Augarten, Wien, Austria

Athens is enveloped in Saharan dust, but it remains so cold here! On Friday it is forecast to drop as low as 1C degrees. An Austrian friend told me that it has snowed nearer the Alps, harming the fruits trees, which had budded early and were already in full leaf. On an emotional level the cold and damp is making me want to curl up and stay away from more energetic tasks, such as work and exercise. I checked 'wind map' to improve understanding hoping that this would bring me comfort. The slick data visualisation shows cold air coming from the artic, passing Sasha in London, before arriving in Southern and Central Europe. Sasha are you cold?

2024-04-25 10:36:33

On my balcony, Wien, Austria

Sehr geehrte W, Ich habe im Januar dieses Jahres eine QFH-Antenne und zwei Zwischenkabel bei Ihnen bestellt. Ich fürchte, dass ich einige Probleme hatte. Ich habe ein schlechtes SNR bei Verwendung des QFH und eines der Zwischenkabel ist kaputt. Ich befürchte, dass ich möglicherweise die internen Lötverbindungen an der QFH-Antenne gebrochen habe, obwohl ich nicht glaube, dass sich die Buchsen im Kunststoffteil verdrehen. Haben Sie einen Rat? Wie kann man beispielsweise das Problem eingrenzen? Sasha Engelmann und ich nutzen Ihre Antennen schon seit vielen Jahren und hatten vorher keine Probleme. Vielen Dank für jede Hilfe. Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Sophie Dyer

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.

2024-04-26 20:17:23

At home, Wien, Austria

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.

2024-04-27 23:04:59

At home, Wien, Austria

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.

2024-04-28 19:26:34

On my balcony, Wien, Austria

Sun. I sat in the sun and willed my vitamin D level to rise. I have been feeling under the weather since Friday and blame it on a lack of vitamin D. After sunset the temperature dropped quickly, then stabilised. N and I sat on the balcony without the lights off and watched the stars for a good hour. Bored from bring at home all day resting for the day, I used the broken co-ax cable, magnet wire from Shortwave Collective and some copper tape to improvise a full wave length v-dipole antenna. I can't find any documentation online of full wavelengt v-dipoles to receive NOAA POES satellites, so maybe it is not a good design. I recived a faint, noisy signal from NOAA-15. Perhaps the poor signal was because I had accidentally cut the dipole wire 30cm too short or becasue the balcony didn't allow for a true North-South orientation. Regardless, the anntena was satisfyingly sculptural.

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.

2024-04-29 21:16:51

Diepoldplatz, Wien, Austria

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...

2024-04-30 22:25:17

Beside the Rathaus, Wien, Austria

As I receive the satellite transmission, I listen to pop music from a large concert for the SPÖ youth organisations. To get to the street corner we walk through groups of teens. In the shadows of the park they could have passed as much older, but occasional childish impulse to jostle, shout or run after one other gave them away. I read that each year the socialist youth organisation's march through the city with torches, this year their motto is 'Vienna against the Right' or „Wien gegen Rechts“.

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).

2024-05-01 19:47:52

My flat, Wien, Austria

It's 1 May or Workers' Day or Labour Day. It's still novel for me live in a country that celebrates the 1 May with a national holiday and street parties. I cycled into my studio and instantly felt guilty for working, as if I were a 'scab'. Vienna has a festive, carefree atmosphere. I crossed two rallies for the Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ) and for the KOMintern at Sigmund-Freud-Park. According to a crude translation of their German-langauge website, the KOMintern is a "combative, internationalist association and trade union fighting alliance of working people, councils, the unemployed and trade union political activists". The weather is sun with some cloud and wind. If I had a barometer, it would have pointed to "Change".

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.

2024-05-02 12:07:54

On the corner of , Augarten, Wien, Austria

It remains windy today. I learned today that the expression "winds of change", which I had taken as old adage, was coined in 1969 by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. In a speech in Cape Town, Macmillan referred to the "wind of change […] blowing through this continent", in reference to the decolonisation of Africa. Now I know the expressions origin, I am wary of how it naturalises a social-political struggle, making it feel as inevitable as the changing of weather patterns. I am reminded of a poster I picked up in a corridor in Goldsmiths after the terrible passing of Mark Fisher. Printed in riso red, the poster reads "emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable" (Fisher 2009). I see traces of the Polar Jet Stream in the clouds in the satellite image. Or rather jet streams in plural because the more I read the weather and its winds, the more my imagination of a single wind, a kind of wind super highway, breaks down. Instead I see many jet streams: curling and unravelling, breaking up and rejoining, strengthening and weakening. Sasha has shared with me an article on 'global stilling': a prediction that the climate crisis will cause global winds the weaken and possibly, eventually, still.

2024-05-03 10:38:36

Schillerplatz, Institut für Kunst und Architektur (Institute for Art and Architecture), Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Austria

This image was received during a workshop with third year architecture students at the Akademie der bildenden Künste. It is raining heavily, however we got lucky with the weather and satellite orbits. During a dry moment between down pours and drizzle, we stood in Schillerplatz and pointed the turnstile antenna toward NOAA-19. For some reason the signal to noise ratio was poor. I will try to understand why, perhaps the dongle I was using has seen one too many workshops. We tried later in the day with v-dipoles and the students got clear images, so, it must have been my set-up. A noisy image can be intersting in a workshop. Overall we had a good day. During the WebSDR exercise the students heard lots of radio amateur chatter, including two men with heavy British accents talking about one of the men's father passing away. Another students heard a man in Germany describing how the Rhine River had flooded his cellar. All in all, it was a very radio active workshop.

2024-05-03 11:52:59

Vienna, Schillerplatz, Austria

Overcast with a light rain.

2024-05-03 11:55:30

Selma, Karlotta, Pau

Vienna, in front of the Academy of Fine Arts, Schillerplatz, Austria

2024-05-03 12:01:22

Philipp Ortinger

Vienna, Austria

It was a rainy day.

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?

2024-05-04 21:54:40

On the balcony, Wien, Austria

I think I saw NOAA-19! I was looking at the sky at exactly where I imagined NOAA-19 to be, 50 degrees above the horiszon to my West, and there was a faint white dot moving steady across the sky. It's a clear night but there visibility isn't exceptional and the stairwell lights of the neighbouring building kept turning on making it harder to see the stars. Yet, the position and velocity matched those of NOAA-19. I could only track the faint point of light for a few seconds before loosing it. Sasha and I have speculated about what it would be like to 'return the gaze'. I felt that I was locking eyes with an old but elusive friend. I need to think more about this moment and what it means to watch a satellite, watching earth. Watching you, watching me. I was so concentrated that I forgot to take any documentary photo. So, I've uploaded a photo from earlier in the day of me shoving free compost from the city's recycling centre.

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...'

2024-05-05 19:47:02

Reclaimed community garden, Hernals, Wien, Austria

First day of summer, first mosquito bite of the 2024, my first ever swim in the Alte Donau (Old Danube). The forecast on my phone predicted rain at 3pm, but the clouds passed us and Veronika, her dog and I enjoyed several hours at the Alte Donau. We made the most of the cooling clear waters before they turn murky with summer algae and river weed. I didn't realise until I got home, how much my face had 'caught the sun'. I received an broken-up transmission from NOAA-15 in a long abandoned building lot, recently commandeered as an unofficial community garden. On the way home, I could see a towering anvil cloud to the South. Tomorrow should be sunny, despite multiple storms in the region.

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.

2024-05-06 19:19:44

On the corner of Diepold Park, Wien, Austria

Bright sunlight, thunder booms and rain drops the size of marbles. Israel has ordered civilians to leave Rafah, but to where? In Vienna, European Election posters line the larger streets: Patriotisch, Zusammen in Europa, … I will try to collect the slogans.

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.

2024-05-10 12:09:30

Just off Obere Augartenstraß, Wien, Austria

Woke up to Netanyahu's face on the front page of the Guardian. Felt grim despair. Got up, messaged my sister, made a medical appointment, and went to the studio. I received this image on my way in. Veronika, my studio mate, had made spare lunch so we ate together with her collaborator, T. Being cooked food quiets the soul. My hormones at still languishing somewhere at the bottom of the mid Atlantic trench. I feel dreadful. It's a beautifully sunny, clear day.

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.

2024-05-12 23:13:34

My flat, Wien, Austria

My hormones have been so low, I have felt dislocated from my body. Come this evening I finally felt a little better. Last night, I was up until 2am watching the Northern Lights or Polarlitchter from a north-facing window in our flat. I was incredibly lucky as I hadn't seen the space weather forecast, but a friend messaged, "Don’t forget there might be polar lights tonight!". At first, I thought that she had misunderstood – we're too far South. Google affirmed my skepticism. Still, it was a clear night so I looked outside. At first, I could see nothing. After around five minutes a bright pink glow appeared behind the rooftops. I completely freaked out. N and I dropped our plans to sleep and ran to a local sports ground. We were both in a state of shock and awe. In my elation called Sasha, texted my family in the UK "Look North!", patronised N for using a flash, and garbled "Danke" to a groundsman who was explaining that we needed to leave as he was locking up. We headed to a local park but the lights had dimmed to a level were I wasn't sure if I could still see them or the pink glow had burned itself into my imagination. Back at home they flared again, this time visible from the flat. N went to bed but I stayed up watching. The pink became almost as vivid as in the long exposure photos I had been taking. White shafts of light appeared and disappeared, so did a fainter green glow. My skin tingles just thinking about it.

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?

2024-05-13 23:01:31

Balcony, Wien, Austria

Sun, clouds, and a cool wind. Today is a day of body euphoria. This has become a monthly ritual and one I should get better at celebrating. I am back inside my body and its a wonderous feeling: I have energy and I feel (almost) clear headed. After a long day of work calls, I made it out of the house around 7:45 pm to buy food from the local supermarket before close. On my way home, the sun was low, hidden, except for explosions of gold at the end of every side street. I walked slowly and took in the soothing quality of the 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"

2024-05-14 22:49:02

On my balcony, Wien, Austria

I saw NOAA-18. I tuned off the lights and then, like magic, mid-pass, a white dot appeared almost directly overhead. I could keep eyes on it for several minutes. The satellite glided across the sky, so much faster than I had imagine. It makes sense, that the satellite appears to accelerate when directly overhead and then slow down as it approaches the horizon. Despite this logic, I had always imagined it moving at a constant speed, like the hand of a clock. I am twitching with excitement.

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?

2024-05-15 21:23:30

On the balcony, Wien, Austria

Apparenly poets and shopping centre security guards can be assassins too. The media are reporting that there has been an assasination attempt on the incoming Prime Minister of Slovakia. The location is a few hundred kilometres from Vienna. News feeds identify the assassin not by name but by his profession: shopping centre security guard and poet. Poignantly, NOAA-19 passed between Vienna and Bratislava. I am certain that saw the satellite. I had set an alarm on my phone for the satellite pass but when it rang I had just drained a pan of boiled asparagus, so I gave into to hunger and ate dinner. After finishing, I ran outside to catch the second half of the pass. I used the new cable Sasha has sent me. It is a clear night and a gentle temperature. Earlier, I swam in the Danube. It was windy and spray forced my eyes shut. I had the water to myself, save for a swan and passing cyclists and whatever or whoever was lurking below. I dived in a couple of times before almost slipping on the plastic pontoon. Swimming is perhaps the most effective way I deal with pain. I hope today is the last day of my period-related pains and restless nights. My body is aching to begin the slow process of unknotting itself.

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.

2024-05-16 12:32:00

Augarten, Wien, Austria

It didn't record, which was such a shame as the satellite pass was long and a sweet 60 degrees to my West. The weather is here warm, gusty and cloudy. The weather app on my phone says that it'll be cloudy for the next two weeks – I hope not. After reading a news story on how people with freckles are at high risk of skin damage, I purchased a pocket-sized tube of sun cream. I am ready for the sun and now its gone. The Slovakian Prime Minister has survived the attack on his life. The latest reports suggest the gunman is in his 70s. It is likely that he grew up in the Soviet era Czechoslovakia and lived through the 'Gentle Revolution', possibly even the 1968 Prague Spring.

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.

2024-05-17 12:22:00

Augarten by the flowers, Wien, Austria

Dust, grey skies, low light. I am reading over lunch an article on Microsoft's Planetary Computer, shared with me by Sasha. I began reading it during my last hospital appointment, which felt appropriate as, in my experience, hospitals are sites dislocation, dissociation and disorientation (as well as the putting back together of bodies). The authors are arguing for "pluralising the planetary" and recognising its "radical incompleteness"; they are favouring "messy operation(s)" over smooth form (Richardson and Munster, 2023). I message Sasha extracts, so as to not forget them and share resonances. The first reads "a computational enclosure reimagined as liberation".

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.

2024-05-19 22:10:44

On the window sill, Hernals, Vienna, Austria

I willed myself to stay awake to capture the transmission, even if I knew that it would likely be more noise than image because of the low elevation of the satellite. I missed yesterday. Another absence in the archive due to another night's sleep lost to discomfort. The weather was better than expected today, so I dragged my body out of the house into the city and into contact with other bodies. I went to a beautifully queer refugee football tournament with M, where we sat in the sun and sweated; a solo swim in the cooling waters of Kongreßbad; to the Kino de France where I sat in the airless dark and watched GUAPO’Y by Peruvian director Sofía Paoli Thorne, my body tensing at the noise of a young guy in the row in front, munching popcorn; and lastly to the warmth of friend's flat for a takeaway curry with her adorable two-year-old. I am particularly excited about my first swim at Kongreßbad. It's incredible outdoor pool complex opened in 1928 during the 'Red Vienna' years, when the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria (SDAP) governed the city. Despite my sleeplessness, it has been a full day. I meditate on this and give my thanks as I receive NOAA-19.

2024-05-20 11:44:50

Diepoldpark, by the picnic benches, Vienna, Austria

Happy launch-day satellite NOAA-18! It's been 19 years since on this day in 2005 you were launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Your planned mission was only two years, yet you are still transmitting. Back on Earth, I have cast aside my mum's landline telephone, for a Motorola mobile, for a my first smart phone (a friend's hand-me-down), for an iPhone 13. Can you imagine? It's a pocket-sized radio transceiver that has more computing power than Apollo 11. Dear NOAA-18, radio technology has not only transformed how we make phone calls, it has become cheap and easy to combine with code. While you have been in orbit, software defined radio has become a truly low cost alternative to conventional radio – it is what makes this project, open-weather, possible. Perhaps you already know this since last year, the American government outsourced the management of your data to the longtime defence contractor, Parsons Corporation. Parsons enrolled you in trial cloud-based ground system that is running off Microsoft Azure. As I mentioned in a previous Weather Note, Microsoft has announced that it is building a 'Planetary Computer'. Given your involvement in the trial, it is probable that in your "extended life" you are helping to build this 'digital double' of Earth. Next year, in September, the contract awarded to Parsons to maintain you expires. September 2025 could be date of your mission, but we don't that as information is hard to find. (Parsons, 2022; NOAA, 2023; NCEI, 2023). If true, you have one more birthday to celebrate. Until next year NOAA-18!

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.

2024-05-21 13:12:14

Augarten, Vienna, Austria

Its humid, muggy, close or "schwül" as my German speking studio mate, DD, said before we tried to find a good translation. Weather words rarely seem to translate one-to-one. Or, perhaps this is true for all words, and the high situated, experiential nature of weather exposes the limits of translation. Perhaps then we should get better at learning each other words for weather? Extend our fluency in talking about the 'ever starnger weather' and decoding memories of past weather. Or, maybe we should not rely too heavily on words to communicate weather? After all, its so bodily. Here, it is getting 'muggier'. I am going home as I feel a heaache coming on.

2024-05-22 09:25:54

At home, Hernals, Wien, Austria

The air is fresh. Broken sun and wind. I left the bedroom window open during the night and half-asleep-half-awake dreamt of a fierce wind, rain lashing the window, and flying debris. I have been thinking and writing about 'fire weather'. This morning, staring my left eye that had swollen shut in the night, for not apparent reason, I wondered if inflammation is a an internal, bodily fire weather.

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 08:56:54

Vienna, Austria

Sunny morning, slightly hazy sky

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.

2024-05-23 21:21:17

Friedhof Hernals (Hernals Cemetery), Wien, Austria

Again, my phone's weather app says that it will rain, but the day turns out fine. I doubt the algorithm's ability to account for the dramatic effect of the Alps on Vienna's weather. There can be huge thunderstorms only a couple hundred kilometres South, and Vienna will be basking in sunshine. My day, too, defies my expectations. I woke early, rough, the swelling in eye gone down but the pain in my side throbbing. Yet work was good and afterwards I cycle to an outdoor pool, then indulged in sushi at a neighbourhood restaurant with N. I received this image from a hilltop cemetery. In the silence afterwards, stood on a path between the flickering of red lamps of graves, I feel time thicken. I am reminded of how Libyan author Hisham Matar, when stood at a cemetery's edge, asks "What is it to remember the dead?" For Matar, "the scale is unfathomable". It is "[d]eath’s endless appetite", he writes. "The deceased outnumber the living by such a scale that the present suddenly seemed to me to be the golden rim of a cloth". (Matar 2019)

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.

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