Contributions – open-weather

2024-07-11 22:25:02

Duboka, Vis, Croatia

I am getting better at staying cool headed in the heat. Blue skies, a few clouds. A gentle wind brought some relief. Today was hotter than yesterday. Our host said that he installed the air conditioning unit the day we arrived. He complained many times about the heat. It was a reassuring to know, as a Northener, that I was not the only on struggling. Yet it was disconcerting to know that the heat was new. It has not always been this way. N and I waited until the relative cool of the night to receive a satellite pass. We walked down to a track leading away from the village. Using a head torch, I checked for snakes. To my relief, I found a grass hopper laying eggs and a stray cat. Towards the end of the pass, curious to know what other animals might be near, I looked around for more eyeshine. My survey revealed many small green dots. I approached, expecting to find small animals, perhaps lizards warming themselves on the stone? Instead, behind each green dot was a Radiated Wolf Spider. N and I were being watched by tens of spiders. I dislike spiders so quickly packed-up and retreated to the house, eyeing the green dots lining the track.

2024-08-18 21:56:16

Lacknergasse, Wien, Austria

There was a big electrical storm this evening. Bolts of lightening flashed between clouds for hours. As I have spent most of my time indoors over the last two weeks, so to witness this weather event, even from the window, was exhilarating. My recovery from the surgery has been uneven and absolutely nonlinear. I have moments of pure joy, such as when I woke from a nap feeling completely rested, my mind loose but still. But by the afternoon, I miss physical exercise and social contact. I know that I need to ride out this turbulence. Or rather ride with it. NOTE: I received the satellite image after the storm had passed and the stars were out.

2024-08-20 19:28:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

Satellite not known.

2024-08-16 18:53:42

Sasha Engelmann

The rocks of Zaraće, village of Gdinj, island Hvar, Croatia

A school of tiny black fish swirled around the rocks, and island swallows swooped and dived for insects above. I sat on a rocky perch at the edge of the sea, under the fisherman’s chapel, where someone had left a bouquet of olive branches, Tradescantia pallida, yellow cow parsley and long grass. A fisherman walked past me on the rocks and I suspected I had taken his usual spot, but he didn’t ask me to move, and he climbed on further, somewhat awkwardly navigating the steep Karst with its jagged edges and slant into the sea. I meditated on the deep time histories of Hvar - how my memories of Zaraće were so bound up with every edge of these rocks, and how far back in time they had emerged from the ocean floor, pushed up by tectonic and geomorphic processes. As I faintly recorded NOAA-15 at only thirty degrees to the east, the tide was coming in, and by the time I packed up, the sea was waking up the limpets and sleeping snails where my feet had been.

2024-08-17 10:39:33

Sasha Engelmann

Zaraće, village of Gdinj, island Hvar, Croatia

A thin veil hung over the bay this morning, making the sunlight a little bit weaker and more silvery. Me and T had slept in after a hot and sweaty night during which both of us sat up awake at 3am. I squeezed between the bunk beds and tiptoed outside with my radio antenna before any coffee was brewed. As I suspected, leaving out the extension cable meant that I could receive the pass easily and clearly from the rooftop terrace. I hooked the antenna tripod on the edge of a plastic beach chair and held the android phone on my lap, watching the patterns of the mid-morning current in the bay. By the time I was done, I could see the grills starting to smoke to the left and across the water, preparation for a fish lunch.

2024-08-17 18:24:32

Sasha Engelmann

Jadrolinja Ferry between Stari Grad and Split, Croatia

The inside deck of the Jadrolinja ferry from Stari Grad to Split was far too crowded, so me and T sat on the floor of the upper deck. The air rushed around us, but the humidity stuck to our hair and skin. We said goodbye to Hvar for the summer. I said goodbye to my Baba.

2024-08-17 23:02:39

Sasha Engelmann

Jadrolinja Ferry in the Adriatic Sea between Split and Ancona, Croatia

The almost-full moon hung ponderously over the southern horizon of the Adriatic as we made our way slowly across it in an overnight ferry from Split to Ancona (Italy). T and I had hustled on with our car and luggage around 21:30 and by 23:00 we were in the open sea. Languages swum between Croatian, Italian and French as we qued for dinner and wandered around. People had hung hammocks up between stairwells and railings. Others had blown up mattresses on the landings between stairwells, and others were just lying on a thin layer of blanket, exposed to the wind and weather of the sea. As I set up for a 23:01 satellite pass, the air was so humid and sticky- touching the metal railing of the ferry felt like touching liquorice. The darkness of the sea at night felt ominous and limitless.

2024-08-21 22:03:26

Toronto (High Park), Canada

Went for an evening capture today. I was different and super fun! The park was very quiet, and only lit with street lamps. The air was chilly and the sky was clear, I could see some stars and the moon was huge.

2024-08-21 12:28:55

Sasha Engelmann

Quercia delle Checche near Pienza, Italy

The quercia delle Checche, an approximately 300 year old oak tree and Italy’s first ‘green monument’, is full of dense, perfectly shaped leaves and is apparently thriving despite the dry summer. Planted in the 18th century, the oak was one of the few to survive the rapid landscape changes of the Tuscan countryside as the oak woodland was deforested in favour of agriculture. Rumour has it that Napoleon’s troops stopped to rest in its shade. Numerous local weddings, trysts, rituals and gatherings have occurred under and around its branches. Two large horizontal branches have fallen and now lie like giant bones in the yellow grass. Up close, the dry wood of the branches has whorls and shapes that remind me of Kármán vortex streets caused by wind flowing around islands or mountains. I wonder what events caused the wood to ‘flow’ in this way- what memories does it hold?

2024-08-22 17:29:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien

Vienna, Austria

Satellite not known.

2024-08-22 13:01:47

Toronto (High Park), Canada

It's starting to warm up again after a few chilly days in Toronto. I biked to my usual spot in High Park and had a few extra minutes after setting up to read. As I was packing up, a stranger came up to me to ask what I was doing - this happens every time. They are fascinated after I explain the process and I've started sharing the website with everyone who is curious about it.

2024-08-23 09:58:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

Satellite not known.

2024-08-23 11:04:44

Sasha Engelmann

Belvedere Trabucco in Lignano Sabbiadoro, Italy

When I arrived at the Belvedere Trabucco - a wooden pier facing the lagoon north of Ligano Sabbiadoro - I discovered it was full of fishing poles. Some older men and a few teenagers were monitoring the poles and their long, taught fishing lines. One young person re-attached the lure on their line - it looked like a spider or dragonfly. Fixing my radio antenna to the edge of the wooden railing, I fished for signals. The sound of NOAA-19 emerged soon after, and gained in strength quickly, as there was almost nothing between me and the Northern horizon except the lagoon and a thin line of land in the distance. In the greenish water below I could see the characteristic clumps of material called 'mucilagine' in Italy. Though mucilagine has been known for hundreds of years and is caused by a non-toxic microalgae, Gonyaulax, it has increased in quantity with rising Adriatic sea temperatures and it poses a growing problem to small fishing boats and businesses. Apparently, some hotels along the Italian coastline are even sending 'mucilagine weather reports' to tourists and travellers who want updated, semi real-time information on the spread of mucilagine in seawater before arriving at the beach.

2024-08-23 12:47:53

Toronto (High Park), Canada

I was rushing to finish a paragraph of my dissertation so I could hop on my bike and get to my usual spot on time for the pass. I'm starting to get familiar with the speed in which the satellites move through the sky. Now when I'm pointing the antenna at the sky I hear no static, just clear ticks and beeps. The same curious stranger was at the park today - and wished me luck on my capture!

2024-08-24 08:49:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

Satellite not known.

2024-08-25 08:37:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

Satellite not known.

2024-08-24 19:20:36

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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

2024-08-24 12:35:33

Toronto (Sunnybrook Park), Canada

2024-08-25 12:22:03

Toronto (High Park), Canada

The Canadian National Exhibition is on this weekend, an end of summer festival with rides, music, and an international air show including the Royal Air Forces Red Arrows, Canadian Forces Snowbirds and the United States Air Forces F-22 Raptor. I think some of the planes were practicing as I was capturing this pass, buzzing through the sky, flying low and close to the ground. Otherwise, a very typical summer day in Toronto, pretty warm, humid and little cloud coverage.

2024-08-25 18:56:29

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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

2024-08-26 12:02:33

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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

2024-08-26 20:50:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

Satellite not known.

2024-08-27 19:42:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

Satellite not known.

2024-08-27 11:52:02

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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

2024-08-28 10:46:50

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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

2024-08-28 19:30:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

Satellite not known.

2024-08-29 10:31:59

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Today I am presenting in a panel on 'Open Geographies' at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference. I plan to speak briefly about the 'openness' in open-weather. For me, in addition to 'un black-boxing technology' or 'visceralising data' (d'Ignazio and Klein, 2020), the openness in open-weather may be about different dimensions of the ‘commons’. The late queer theorist Lauren Berlant describes a world that is, “intimately touching from near and far and therefore changing what proximity does” (Berlant, 2022: 99). I want to suggest that ‘the common of contact’ between a ground station operator and a satellite is both ‘intimate’ and ‘changing what proximity does’. Figuring this ‘common of contact’ leads to alternative and perhaps more thoroughly open readings of environment-sensing infrastructures and commons. It demonstrates how the effort of holding an antenna to the sky is built on a form of sociality and even desire, manifested in the collecting and caring-for of images otherwise considered faulty. Yet, lest I create a romantic picture of desiring bodies and machines - there is ample boredom, frustration and ambivalence too. Through repeated, modest, noisy contact with the technologies of earth observation, open-weather helps me envision a progressive politics of openness, one built on, in the words of Berlant, “affective infrastructures that admit the work of desire and the work of ambivalence as tactics of communing” (Berlant, 2022: 116).

2024-08-29 19:17:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

Satellite not known.

2024-08-26 20:10:27

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-08-27 19:46:18

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-08-28 10:53:24

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-08-29 09:13:02

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-08-29 10:37:08

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-08-31 19:39:13

Toronto (Sunnybrook Park), Canada

2024-07-13 22:42:00

Duboka, Vis Island, Croatia

2024-07-10 11:46:31

Duboka, Vis, Croatia

Intense heat stops me thinking. I sweat into my teeshirt and instantly regret exposing myself to the unforgiving sun. "Tomorrow", I note to myself, "wait until nightfall".

2024-07-03 21:19:36

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina

I am stood in the backyard of our host's house. Deep greens and reds of a flowering vine frame the midnight blue sky. Today, N and I visited the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide, and then rode a cable car built for the 1984 Winter Olympics to a hilltop overlooking the city. In the evening, we walking along the Miljacka River to the book store 'Buybook Sarajevo' we stumbled on the opening of the BOOKSTAN literature festival. Before we realise that there is a festival, the crowd gathered out side felt familiar. Enjoying the atmosphere, we purchased two white wines and sat on a park bench. As N is at the bar buying a second round, I complement the small dog of an elegant older woman. She tells me that she is a translator of an English language book about the siege written by an author living in the United States. She is here to meet the author, she tells me, and will not stay for the festival as she is already looking forward to returning to her home in the countryside. When I later search for the festival programme online, I find its tagline: “A literary festival where there is neither East nor West, but just humans and their stories”. This evening my memories of working on war crimes investigations in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, mingle with the stories of survivors from the museum displays. As we were entering the last room of the museum, I thought I could hear a video. There was no video, instead an older woman and man speaking in Bosnian. They looked distressed, I think the woman was crying. The couple were being interviewed by a small film crew. The walls of the yard block my view of the Sarajevo below, yet I know that the city I arrived in three days looks different.

2024-07-04 21:05:37

Miholjače, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Two fire flies flash. I watch the coal mine and power plant on the plateaux, my radio antenna balanced on a rock above the road. A hazy red sunset bleeds out into darkness. On a walk this afternoon, the owner of the guest house pointed to the where an underground river was being rerouted to accommodate industry. His tone seemed to express a mixture of depression and despair. He did not mention the coal power station, which is not visible from the house. Now I see it, I imagine it thirstily drinking the river.

2024-07-09 10:12:00

Duboka, Vis, Croatia

Woke surprised by hot the apartment already was. As I set up my antenna on the track leading into the village, an older man and woman came out of their house to offer me local produce. Sweating, declined in stilted English. Perhaps I sounded Spanish as the conversation turned into an exchange of "Mucho calor!"

2024-07-02 21:32:41

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina

It's been raining. I wait for the weather to clear and capture the satellite's transmission in the dark next to Kovači Cemetery. The low stone wall I am sitting on is cold and damp. The cobbled road near me is empty but at its end, where it opens onto a broader street, people gather at the entrance to a mosque. Uneasy about the location, chosen without knowledge of the city because of it is the closest open space to where we are staying, I attempt blend with the night.

2024-07-25 22:53:01

Lacknergasse, Wien

Cool temperature. Still night. There is a thin film of cloud. Earlier, inn the hospital, I read a draft of Wind’s Animacies by Sasha. The article sweeps me up, taking me far from the fluorescent lighting and airless weather of the waiting room. I turn over her question, "what does the wind remember?" I am moved by it, perhaps because I am grappling with how to reorganise or cohere a messy medical history of ill health with the new knowledge that comes with a diagnosis. I find myself caught between wanting to forget the lost days in bed with a pillow tucked under my abdomen, or the sleepless nights and listless days that followed. Could an earlier diagnosis have changed the course of my access to treatment? This is is both too painful and utterly pointless to think about. I want to reorganise my memories into a tidy narrative of endometriosis, cysts and fibroids, rather than the current cluster of unexplained, possibly unrelated symptoms that moved around my body to the extent that I stopped trusting myself as reliable narrator. I am thinking with Sasha's words: is pain is similar to wind? Neither are immaterial or material. Is pain not energetic, “slippery”, “leaky”? Thinking about wind’s memory is an analytic move away from asking “where does the wind come from?” (n.d. Engelmmann) A question that forces an artificial cut into time to arrive at a single origin point. I exercise changing the familiar questions “Where does the pain originate?” or “When did the pain begin?" to “What does my body remember?” This new question requires me to relearn to trust it my body and its complaints. To piece it back together. In a wholly different context, that of the 2016 US presidential election, American essayist and anarchist Rebecca Solnit writes “when the subject is grim, I think of the act of naming as diagnosis.” Diagnosis does not equal a cure, but it is an act of recognition that has the potential to reorganise and make sense of memories.

2024-09-02 21:03:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

There are so many mosquitos in the studio! They bite you even when you are wearing buy spray.

2024-09-02 12:15:45

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

A fine drizzle was carpeting the neighbourhood as I went out with my tape measure Yagi antenna today. I wasn't expecting the rain, so I found a still densely foliated Plane tree to give cover. Later in the day, en route to South London, the rain had started again. I had checked and rechecked the weather report before getting on my bike, and all that was predicted was a lot of cloud. I remembered what my scientist colleague said earlier this summer about the increasing moisture to be expected in a climate-changed Northern Europe based on a wobbling jet stream. Despite the moisture-laden air, the rest of the day was textured with immense relief, new knowledge, and support from my partner T. Two cats offered their emotional energies too.

2024-09-03 11:08:44

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

"Muffin man!" "Moonpie!" I heard in the distance as a black ball of fur careened into the side of my body and I was greeted by the happy face of a small pomeranian mix who promptly sat down against my leg. The wobble of my radio antenna probably registered in the satellite image I was capturing but the company was more than worth it! Muffin Man followed Moonpie, as well as another dog called Star, and I was soon surrounded by small joyful dog energy. I learned that Star was being fostered after having been rescued from perilous conditions, and would soon be given to a family for care and a home. Our conversation attracted another dog owner who came over to get information on a recent incident where an off-collar dog attacked another dog in the park. For some minutes, rumours circulated about who the attacking dog belonged to and what had happened, with speculation that the owner might even have been sent to prison. The moral of the encounter seemed to be that dogs are capable of anything, no matter how cute and lovable they are- yet no matter how hard I looked at Moonpie, I just couldn't imagine him being scary. In the swirl of activity, dog-cuddling and conversation, the satellite passed overhead and crested the southern horizon, and I packed without so much attention to the semi-clouded sky.

2024-09-03 11:19:32

Toronto, Canada

It's one of those September days where the air is cool in the shade and hot in the sun. After a few days of struggling to get good signal, it was encouraging when I heard those very clear ticks and beeps. I did this capture in my backyard with just a short view of the sky.

2024-09-03 20:50:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

Sunny, but not too hot. A manageable heat to get work done in.

2024-09-04 11:07:28

Toronto (High Park), Canada

I'm having a harder time these days tracking the satellites as they pass overhead. With one small movement I can lose a good signal. But I try to stay positive as I redirect the antenna to find the signal again.

2024-09-04 10:55:07

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

"We need to understand weather to understand where and how toxic air is held closer to peoples' lungs" - this is a statement that I wrote years ago as part of a grant application. Today I wondered: how much do I understand about the inter-implicancies of weather and air pollution, at least in the region where I live? I deep-dived into the Copernicus Programme's Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and the freely available air quality forecast plots available at the link below. Out of the four plots I studied most closely - for Dust, PM10, NO2 and Ammonia - I was most surprised by the Ammonia plot, which shows the vast majority of continental Europe covered in what looks like a toxic orange cloud. Ammonia is less publicised as an air pollutant in the media- we more often hear about 'Saharan Dust' or 'Nitrogen dioxide' or 'Ozone'. Yet I learned that ammonia leaks from agricultural practices, livestock waste, and the use of synthetic fertilisers. Moreover it combines in the atmosphere with sulphates and nitrates to form secondary fine particulate matter (PM2.5) which can enter the bloodstream of breathing bodies due to its very small size. Ammonia and PM2.5 are clearly too small or fine to 'show up' in satellite images like those of NOAA-19, but I learned that newly launched satellites, like NASA's PACE satellite, are intended to fill in the gap in knowledge around what aerosols actually do in the atmosphere. For example, according to climate scientist and modeller Gavin Schmidt we don't yet understand how a change in regulatory policy affecting ship fuel (mandating a move away from sulfur-based fuels toward 'cleaner' options) might have had on the climate in 2023. Sulfur can combine with other molecules in the atmosphere to reflect light and change the density of clouds, therefore possibly having a cooling effect, so moving away from such fuel sources is speculated to have had warming effects. The implications of such vast changes in fuel use for the types of aerosols in the atmosphere are immense, and yet it is hard to scale up from particulate to cloud or weather. I studied the satellite image I captured today and wondered about whether dust, perhaps, was blurring the borders of land and sea... Source: https://tinyurl.com/4xcpkaxx

2024-09-04 12:03:01

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-04 19:40:52

Toronto (High Park),

lots of mosquitoes out this evening

2024-09-04 23:28:08

Toronto, Canada

2024-09-05 19:31:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

Despite the daytime heat, the nights are cooler. Only the mosquitoes continue to be a pest. There must have been a mass hatching event as there are so many, espcially in the studio. I think that I am now able to tell part the larger black and white striped ‘common’ mosquito from the smaller brown ‘tiger’ mosquito. With some encouragement, the last of my five scabs 'fell' came off. I pulled at the plastic surgical threads still protruding my my belly button but they wouldn’t budge and later my tummy ached. Once all the wounds are seal, I can swim again. These days, I can mostly move without pain but I am still cautious about twisting or turning too suddenly. I wonder if the doctor will find adhesions when I have my check-up in two weeks. The thin red scars look small on the surface but feel bulbous beneath the skin. In the evening, S from the hospital, WhatsApp'ed me to say that her endometriosis had already returned. The news is disturbing. She already has a new cyst! So, soon? “No one could have known,” she writes.

2024-09-05 19:09:26

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

'Cabbage clubroot'; 'bee leg with pollen sack'; 'cucurbita ts stem' (cucumber stem); 'dryopteris filix-mas' (male fern); T and I pored over dozens of microscope slides rescued from an old science building due to close or be refurbished at Goldsmiths University. T had even rescued a microscope - the older kind with no light for illumination, and only a mirror - that otherwise would have been tossed. Too engrossed to cook dinner, we ordered pizza and kept speculating about the worlds made visible through tiny pieces of glass and magnifying lenses. Based on my undergraduate training in plant biology I thought I could identify the cambium in a slide containing a sliver of wood, but I wasn't sure. In the midst of this I went outside for an early evening NOAA-15 pass and wondered again about scale, patterns, fractals.

2024-09-06 10:29:48

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

For the second day, the weather is damp, grey and dark, with intermittent rain. The park was wet and puddled, but plenty of people were out walking, having coffee and running with dogs. I breifly cuddled with Moonpie as Dave arrived at the park: 'you're one of the only people he runs up to like that, and also lets pet him' Dave said. By the time that sentence was finished, Moonpie was off again, racing to the other corner of the park. I collected some specimens - a leaf of clover, common yarrow and a tiny bump of moss found on the damp brick of the wall outside the house - to explore with the microscope. The 'weather worlds' of these small plants came alive under the lens - the moss danced with long whitish filaments that I learned could be sporophytes, and its stems and leaves bristled below. The yarrow was difficult to bring into focus because of its three dimensionality, but slowly the tips of leaves came into view, and I saw that it was covered in micro droplets. The stem of the clover almost shimmered, and I wondered if this was water coursing within the tissue, or just a quality of the surface.

2024-09-06 19:19:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

It is one month since the operation and being engulfed by the 'closest weather' of my body. Last night I dreamt that I was standing in a brackish pool near the coast, bare foot with a fine mud between my toes. N and S are nearby. The coastline could be West Scotland. N asks if I’ve stood in the pool before. I know that I have, but for reasons I cannot explain, I lie and say that I haven't. Stripy leaches appear from the mud and attach their mouths to my feet. In horror, I freeze, unable to move for fear of stirring up more leaches. N reaches over and helps me jump out of the pool. I wake distressed and go to the next room where N is sleeping. I fall asleep again, only to dream that I am at a surreal hospital check-up.

2024-09-07 10:11:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

V and I, adamant that it was the last day of summer, caught the train in the opposite direction from home to Hallstattsee. The lake was blissful. Its steep sides and deep waters have kept it cool, even after the hottest of summers. This we learned this from an older couple and their two dogs, who joined us on the narrow pebble beach. I took my first dip since the operation. The cold water held me, drawing me down. Despite my caution and an unfamiliar tugging in my abdomen, I dipped under again and again. The feeling was one of release. I extended my body, unfolding and stretching it in ways that I have not since the beginning of August. The lake’s water was cloudy and its stoney bottom, quickly dropped away. With my film camera, I photographed V floating in a starfish position, her peach colour swim suit beautifully offset by the dark greens of the lake and mountain side. In that moment, I think that we both felt a supreme confidence and peace in our bodies.

2024-09-07 12:51:46

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Hello lichen, who and when are you? This morning over breakfast I read a post by my friend Adriana Knouf about project Obxeno which is an automomous, solar-powered apparatus and camera watching lichens in a park around the clock. Though lichens are famously slow growers (some only grow around 1mm / year) one of Obxeno's timelapse videos seems to show a rapid grown of a lichen leaf or thallus, sort of blossoming out of the larger body. A curved piece of bark glowed bright yellow and green on the pavement on my way back from the farmers market. Later in Hackney Downs, I saw many smaller fragments of lichen in the grass, and I couldn't help borrowing two small pieces to put under the microscope at home. As I wandered through the labyrinths, caves, colours and depths of the lichens I brought home, I learned they were, like many lichens, collaborations between a green algae and a fungus. For the (at least) two lichens I was looking at, the lichen-forming fungi were Physciaceae and Teloschistaceae, both apparently relatively common and 'cosmopolitan' according to what I could find online. I read these samples in my living room were 'micro-lichen' and their shapes were foliose (leafy) and leprose (like a powder dusting). Lichens are believed to be some of the oldest organisms on earth (though how to define the limits of their identity as 'singular' organism challenges many of Science's principles). They can grow on almost any surface and they can even live inside solid rock, growing between the grains! The collaboration between the algae and the fungi is beneficial because the algae produce carbohydrates via photosynthesis that are used by the fungi, and the fungi provides a protective environment while also gathering moisture and nutrients. When fungi form partnerships with cyanobacteria in certain species of lichen, the cyanobacteria can even fix Nitrogen from the air. I learned that lichens were sent to the vaccum of space by the European Space Agency and exposed for fifteen days to the vacuum, with its widely fluctuating temperatures and cosmic radiation. After 15 days, the lichens were brought back to earth and were found to be unchanged in their ability to photosynthesize. If a lichen can live without water, and even without air; if it is never only 'one' but 'more than one'; if a lichen may be ancient or renewed each day, then perhaps, from the perspective of a lichen, energy, space and time are things that can be bent, molded, malleable. People like Adriana have said this to me before, but I am finally understanding lichens as both space and time-travellers...

2024-09-08 09:58:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

Tomorrow is Schulstartwoche (the week Austria's public schools reopen after the summer break). On Saturday, the man who I buy apples from at the market, tells me that he remembers the Schulstartwoche being cold and rainy. Today, it was so warm outside we closed the windows to keep the flat cool, only to give into the humidity and reopen them. Weather forecasts suggests that, inline with memories of Schulstartwoche, Monday will being heavy rains, causing the temperature to drop to a chilly 19C.

2024-09-08 12:39:48

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London,

To the southeast, a gap in a towering panorama of clouds looks like a giant lens or a portal, magnifying rays of light. Two men walk by my ground station asking 'is there signal??' and then exclaiming 'you see the storm is picking up!'. Yet the wind does not rise further than a few sharp gusts and the clouds dance past. In my daily micro-weather observations, I look at 'Lumbricus' (an earthworm with its movement muscles), 'Anopheles male E' (a male mosquito) and a fragment of Selaginella sporophylls (also known as the spikemosses or clubmosses). I read that Selaginella are known as the 'fern allies' - I thought this was a nice phrase, if read non-scientifically. Some species of Selaginella are known as the 'resurrection plant' because they can survive complete dehydration, much like the lichens I wrote about yesterday. These moss-like plants roll up into brown balls, but rehydrate and expand when moistened. On this theme of 'resurrection' or 'time-traveling' or bending of temporal/ spatial ideas of life, I am reminded of a passage in the book Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko. It is a scene from the perspective of Tayo, a man of Laguna Indian and Mexican heritage who returns from the war in Vietnam. At dawn, Tayo is watching the life emerging around a small pool filled by a spring in the otherwise bone-dry mountains on the reservation. He observes: "When the shadows were gone, and the cliff rock began to get warm, the frogs came out from their sleeping places in small cracks and niches in the cliff above the pool. They were the colour of the moss near the spring, and their backs were spotted the colour of wet sand. They moved slowly into the sun, blinking their big eyes. He watched them dive into the pool, one by one, with a graceful quiet sound. They swam across the pool to the sunny edge and sat there looking at him, snapping at the tiny insects that swarmed in the shade and grass around the pool. He smiled. They were the rain's children. He had seen it happen many times after a rainstorm. In dried up ponds and in the dry arroyo sands, even as the rain was still falling, they came popping up through the ground, with wet sand still on their backs. Josiah said they could stay buried in the dry sand for many years, waiting for the rain to come again" (Silko, 1977: 87-88).

2024-09-09 06:40:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

Heavy rain and cold. In the Vienna woods, mist hangs dense and low between the trees. Back in the flat, on the phone to my mum, I noticed a red balloon suspended above the rooftops. It appears to be tethered by a long string, implausibly stretching the length of the block before disappearing behind a roof. The string is long and weighs down the balloon, which despite its size must have had significant buoyancy. It looks not much larger than a child’s party balloon, but perhaps this was an illusion of perspective. I wondered if it is a weather balloon come back to Earth, however there is no visible payload. Perhaps it is a child's ambitious experiment?

2024-09-09 11:33:25

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

A low-hanging layer of clouds obscures the sky today, and very little light illuminates the streets and gardens of our neighbourhood. I think about a passage in the recently published 'State of the Climate' report by the American Meteorological Society. It explains that, in 2023, there was more water vapour in the atmosphere than many years past, but also, "Despite this increased moisture aloft, 2023 had the lowest cloud area fraction since records began in 1980 with skies clearer globally. Consequently, the clouds reflected away to space a record small amount of shortwave radiation, but also blocked a record small amount of longwave radiation from leaving Earth. The overall effect was the weakest cooling effect of clouds on record". The report goes on to explain a global 'darkening' due to reduced sea ice and other ice-covered areas - here 'darkening' refers to the increased proportion of earth's surfaces that absorb light, rather than reflect it. At the same time, in the UK and across northern Europe, the changing and 'wobbling' route of the jet stream is bringing cloudier, stormier, wetter weather. As I peer up at the thick grey cloud, the term 'darkening' seems to register with many meteorological and more-than-meteorological affects. I manage to coax enough light from a table lamp into the microscope to see the veins of a fallen, yellow Plane tree leaf.

2024-09-09 12:36:26

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-10 12:14:14

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

This morning a PhD student wrote in an email to me that the "Autumn very much feels like it's arrived!". I agree wholeheartedly- and wonder how many days have gone by without the golden sunlight I have come to expect from London in early September. Instead we are soaked in thin, grey and matte light emitted from low-hanging cloud. As I read onward about 'global darkening' and the 'State of the Climate' as assessed by close to 600 scientists in a report published last month, I read that this 'darkening' (or increased absorption of light by earth's surface) is, "linked to increased plant growth (which causes the absorption of radiation) in other parts of the world" and that "Plants directly responded to the warmth" (State of the Climate, 2023). To describe how plants responded to the warmth, the report continues: "early in the year [2023], the full bloom for the cherry trees in the Arashiyama district of Kyoto, Japan, occurred on the earliest date in the over-1200-year-long record" (State of the Climate, 2023). I find this so fascinating and devastating at the same time: that a 1200 year old cherry tree grove in Japan - the symbol and site of so many romantic films and stories - is a sentinel for plants' reactions to global warming and planetary 'darkening'. Seeing a line like this in a report written by hundreds of scientists also gives me pause. Who chose this example of the Japanese cherry tree grove (as opposed to, say, the effects of warming on forests in the Amazon, or the great forests of the boreal regions)? Was it purely based on record keeping (the cherry tree grove has been maintained for centuries) or is there another set of concerns around cultural landscapes, histories, symbols and aesthetics at play? Back at home, I peer through a sample of lime or 'linden' tree wood in the microscope, in awe of its graphic and formal beauty.

2024-09-10 11:33:04

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-10 12:24:00

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-11 11:08:41

Sasha Engelmann

Burgess Park, London, United Kingdom

Grazie! Grazie! T and I pronounced our happiness at the blue sky when we woke up this morning. The blue is a deep cerulean and small cottonball clouds dotted the horizon. As we ate breakfast we watched the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump that had aired last night in the US, and within minutes my heart raced and my stomach spiralled. Phrases like ‘illegal transgender aliens’ and ‘killing babies at the seventh, eighth and ninth month’ and ‘immigrants eating dogs’ were spat out of Trump’s mouth. I was reminded of a scene in Leslie Marmon Silko’s book Ceremony that depicts a group of evil ‘witches’ from different Native American tribes at a witch ‘conference’ in a cave. Most witches in the room show their power by donning animal skins and making terrifying performances, but one witch claims their power lies in telling a story, and that as they tell it, the story will already begin happening. They begin telling a tale about dark forces releasing energies into the world and this energy arriving in North America in the form of white people who bring weapons, diseases and greed. In other words, white Europeans are figured as the shapes or shadows of the darker evil at work, but in the story they do wreak havoc. The other witches complement the storytelling witch on their power but say they would prefer this story to not unfold - they ask to call the story back. But the witch says it can’t be done, it is already unravelling. As I listened to some of Trump’s language - the crude and demonic shapes he was conjuring - I couldn’t help think of the power of stories, even if they are neither true or realistic. Something is released when these figures or shapes are vocalised. I do not want to give Trump the credit afforded to the storytelling witch in Silko's novel. I do want to think more about the power of plot, story, and fiction in creating the 'capitalist sorcery' (to use a Stengerian phrase) that we are experiencing in great intensity before the current election.

2024-09-14 12:22:00

Constanze Müller

Leipzig, Deutschland

2024-09-14 12:22:00

Florian & Hanna

Leipzig (West), Germany

A cloudy and windy day with some sun coming through the clouds. One of the first colder days after summer.

2024-09-14 12:23:54

Leipzig, Germany

Here: Warm sun, grey skies. Just south of here: Extreme weather events all over Central Europe.

2024-09-16 09:06:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Berlin, Germany

2024-09-14 12:22:00

Leipzig, Germany

It felt magical when a bright-green signal began to cascade down the waterfall display. I turned to Heide, my partner in our Leipzig open-weather workshop, who was next to me. We both made excited, eyebrow-raised faces. Were we imagining things? Was everything set up right? Our laptops responded with reassuring rhythmic tick-tocking and high pitched sounds that danced around our ears. I was surprised how the satellite continued talking with me, even as I played with different heights of the v-dipole antenna and the wild wind whirled around us. Ten minutes passed quickly. Soon I was angling southwards, feeling the radiant sun on my face and seeing other workshop people communing with NOAA-18 across the park while it faded into static.

2024-09-17 08:54:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

2024-09-17 10:58:00

On a train and in my bed, Between Czechia and Austria

Between Czechia and Austria

I wake groggy from the late arrival of my flood delayed train. Out of habit, I open my phone. Brown water fills the screen, punctured by branches, buildings and the fluorescent jackets of emergency workers. I read a quote from the climate scientist, Sonia Seneviratne, saying that "most of the water vapour came from the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea, both of which have grown hotter as a result of human-induced climate breakdown". I share the article in our Signal group. Our intern, LJ, replies that this is a "vivid image". I agree, picturing the Mediterranean falling onto Vienna, in an inversion of sky and sea. It is a literal image of our world turning upside down.

2024-06-18 12:23:59

Augarten, Wien, Austria

It's heating up. I enjoy how the city radiates heat from all directions, loosening my muscles. I embrace the floppy feeling. Yet Vienna is not yet built for sustained summer heat. Its surfaces are mostly sealed, there is too little vegetation, and it does not cool-off enough at night. I am standing in the blazing midday with sun cream and sun glasses but no hat. I am still learning how to live in a country that is a little hotter, a little drier than the North of England where I grew up. A group of young school children pass, all wearing matching caps. I take note. Buy a cap. During the satellite pass I try turning on a feature of the software defined radio programme called Automatic Gain Control or AGC for short. Gain is a property of the antenna, which can be manipulated in the software … and this still confuses me. Usually, I use the programme's waterfall display to manually adjust the gain, however today, keen to improve my understanding of gain and the software, I experiment with turning the two AGC functions on and off, and then both on at the same time. The waterfall display turns from blue to yellow to red. To my ears, the signal to noise ratio sounds worse, however the resulting image looks surprisingly uniform. In my studio, M, shares with me a weather forecast from the ORF, Austria's national public broadcaster. She wants me to know that Saharan Dust is forecast for Friday.

2024-06-17 12:37:54

At home, Wien, Austria

I rush out between Zooms calls to receive this satellite image on the balcony. The weather is warm dry, my mood is light, even joyful. I prop the my phone up on a potted Yuca, so as to get the tomato plants in the frame.

2024-06-16 22:39:42

At home, Wien, Austria

The tat tat tat of toy machine gun drifts up from the otherwise empty street. It is warm, comfortable. When we got home from the holiday the tomato plants were stressed from thirst and had curled their leaves from prevent water loss. After visiting such radically different climates – the dry heat of Istria and the wet cold of Firuli – and after overhearing my sister swap farming anecdotes of a too wet, too cold spring-summer with our host in the agriturismo, I contemplate how local climate is is and the importance of grounding theories of weather knowledge in specific sites.

2024-06-14 21:53:37

Tiere Viere, Dordolla, Italy

The sky is meeting the mountain. Fair weather, finally. Rain was forecast but did not come. The air smells good. It is a crisp, clear night.

2024-06-12 20:04:12

Dordolla, Italy

A musician, Pietro, joins us for the satellite pass. The alpine village of Dordolla is so small, we just needed to walk around for word to get to Pietro that we were at the only bar. There is a light drizzle. N makes a beat to the sound of the satellite, tapping the puddle with his foot. Pietro makes a sound recording. He is a drummer. The air is thick with moisture. The energy of yesterday's electrical storm has dissipated, but the clouds have not broken yet.

2024-06-14 11:36:59

Soph Dyer, Nicola Locatelli

Stefy & C. Market Di Gallizia S. e Valent S. Snc, Moggio di Sotto, Italy

I cannot focus on the meteorological weather as a delivery truck arrives to unload at the supermarket, which carefully crop out of shot. In the moment irritated the moment, but later accept my foolishness of my desire to document the mountains without people, cars and the heavy industry that lines the Fiume Fella river valley.

2024-06-25 12:36:45

Augarten, Wien, Vienna

I thought that I'd overheat but cloud came between me and the sun. It's hot, but not too hot, and the heat is dry. I feel more at peace in my body today. I know that I need to listen to it and respect its limits while it heals. The city building's are no longer cooler inside than out. I am trying to be productive, get work done, but really I want to be lying flat on my bed or dipping in the cool waters of the Danube. How are you Sasha?

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.

2024-09-19 11:19:56

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-19 12:10:06

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-20 11:07:14

Toronto (High Park), Canada

2024-09-21 19:34:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

I stretch the blue plastic gloves over my hands. Harvesting grapes reminds me of Marina Abramovic's performance "Counting the Rice" in which participants count and separate grains of rice for a minimum of six hours. At first, it's a novelty to be outside cutting, sorting, and plopping the grapes into the bucket at my feet. Then the repetition becomes annoying. I even feel a little anger. But I have committed to be here so cannot stop and by the morning break of coffee, Käsebrot and gherkins, I have found peace. My experience is more solitary than that of the other volunteers whose German language chatter I struggle to follow, espcially when it slips into Viennese dialect. The grapes are small weather globes (Wetterkugeln). We remove the brown, mushy ones smelling of vinegar that did not survive Storm Boris's record rains, dumped on the Wachau region only a week ago. We leave the purple-brown ones that smell sweet and have a fuzz of 'good mould' (Edelschimmel). Their sugars index a summer of sun and heat-stress – Europe's warmest summer since records began (Copernicus 2024). Lastly, we pick out the grapes with small black bruises left by hail early in the growing season. These are mostly on the South-facing vines that I am picking. They will not be sweet, the winemaker tells us.

2024-09-21 19:16:12

Imperial California , Imperial county

Imperial county

2024-09-26 12:13:45

Sasha Engelmann

Downs Road, London, United Kingdom

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

2024-09-27 10:22:22

Alabama, United States

2024-09-29 10:46:38

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

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

2024-09-30 17:19:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

"Helene Has Killed More Than 90 People. Here Are Some Of Their Stories" read the New York Times headline. I tried to recall if I had heard of the serial killer. Woman serial killers make headlines as the embodiment of evil – women who choose to take life, rather than reproduce it. I realised that I knew Helene. She had been seen a week ago in the Gulf of Mexico, before making landfall over the Big Bend of Florida's Gulf Coast, churning out death and destruction in her wake. Helene was a hurricane. Her first name was Potential Tropical Cyclone Nine, given to her by United States meteorological service on 23 September 2024. A day later, as she grew in strength and her personhood took shape, they renamed her Helene. In writing about plants, Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer observes that “names are the way we humans build relationships, not only with each other but with the living world” (Kimmerer 2013). My home country, the UK, began naming storms in 2014, following the US which had started giving tropical storms female-only names in the 50s. It took decades of feminist fighting for the US meteorological service to assign storms names coded male too (Skilton 2018). Lately, I have been thinking about the power of naming and names to affect real-world relations. I read a British study that compared named and unnamed storms of similar strength, and found that there were fewer cars on the roads during the named storm. The study's authors reason that this is because of the media event that formed around the named storm, possibly saving lives (Charlton‐Perez 2019). In North American and European nomenclature, storms are named at their geographic origins. If a storm named by the US meteorological service crosses the Atlantic and reaches the UK, it will retain its American name. What if, I wonder, we were to reference a different origin? For example, social, historical or political? In ‘Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)’, Rebecca Solnit argues that to name is to “diagnose” and so to transform our ability to speak about a subject, even articulate our relations to it (Solnit 2018). What if, rather than naming storms after each other, we traced their social origins? One outcome could be that unusually large storms, such as Helene, are named after the extractive industries that make their existence statistically so much more likely. If Hurricane Helene had been introduced to us as Hurricane ExxonMobile or Storm Shell how might our relations to such 'extreme weather' events be changed? To name storms after Big Oil feels as offensive as it is flattening. Yet current naming practices fall short too. It would be apt if, in media coverage, mega storms sounded less 'woman serial killer' and more 'corporate killer' or 'colonial menace'. Could such an expressive exercise help us grasp our role as "weathermakers" (Neimanis 2014), to diagnose the social-political origins of today's weather, and so articulate our relations, our knotty response-abilities to it?

2024-10-03 12:30:08

Sasha Engelmann

Finsbury Square, London, United Kingdom

It is a relatively warm and mild day in London, and people pour out into the streets at lunchtime as I set up for the satellite pass. Yet I am thinking about the wind and it's relationship, provocation (?) or resonance with memory. Writing from the depths of February in Dungeness, Derek Jarman is listening to the wind, observing: "Fragments of memory eddy past and are lost in the dark". The wind is blowing "high in the tower blocks and steeples, down along the river, invading houses and mansions..." He continues: "But the wind does not stop for my thoughts. It whips across the flooded gravel pits drumming up waves on their waters that glint hard and metallic in the night, over the shingle, rustling the dead gorse and skeletal bugloss, running in rivulets through the parched grass - while I sit here in the dark holding a candle that throws my divided shadow across the room and gathers my thoughts to the flame like moths. I have not moved for many hours. Years, a lifetime, eddy past: one, two, three: into the early hours, the clock chimes. The wind is singing now".

2024-10-03 17:41:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

New automatic ground station test location. Today is cold! Or perhaps I am just feeling the cold as I type this because I have to keep a small window open to run the ground station cable indoors. Brrr.

2024-10-03 20:28:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10

2024-09-29 19:35:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

2024-10-01 10:09:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

2024-10-02 06:44:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

2024-10-04 08:44:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

The temperature is hovering around 11 centigrade. Not quite the "baltic" but still bone chilling. It's wet and soggy. Yesterday, I learned the German word for "drizzle" is "Nieselregen". Today, Nieselregen has turned into "it's chucking it down" or depending on your mindset, "lovely weather for ducks!" My favourite word for especially grey wet weather is the Scottish, "dreich". To my ears, it sounds perfectly bleak.

2024-10-04 20:18:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10

The satellite image collected by Automatic Ground Station 10 is framed with the noise and obstructions of a London street at night, a full story of building behind and four story buildings across the street. Yet in the window of signal there is a glimmer of movement, a curve and swirl of cloud that, in the infrared channel, speaks of something moving far away. I am still in awe of the fact that this is possible with an antenna held out of a window.

2024-10-05 18:34:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10

Today's night-time capture from Automatic Ground Station 10, currently in testing phase in London, looks like the 'ectoplasm' of 19th century clairvoyants, a current of veiled matter flowing over the continent.

2024-10-05 12:01:49

Sasha Engelmann

Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom

Today is October 5th, and a national protest for Palestine solidarity in London is underway, slowly moving from Russell Square to Downing Street. Many posters and banners point to the fact that the genocide in Palestine has been going on for one year. There are photographs of victims, messages to Netanyahu and Kier Starmer, and demands for reckoning. Chilling, however, are attempts in the wider media to memorialise this moment in ways that justify Israel's ongoing agression Gaza and Lebanon. Naomi Klein writes in the Guardian today: "What is the line between... memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity? And what does it mean to do so while Israel actively produces more grief on an unfathomable scale, detonating entire apartment blocks in Beirut, inventing new methods of remote-controlled maiming, and sending more than a million Lebanese people fleeing for their lives, even as its pummeling of Gaza continues unabated?" In light of this, the protest feels like more than a public demonstration- it is also a collective remembering, a coherence of what we remember.

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