2025-05-16 11:31:01
Sasha Engelmann
Between Schilling and Queens Buildings, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kindom
United Kindom
NOAA-18
From the cavelike darkness of my university office, my day is textured by a slow livestream of weather from around the world. Yesterday we launched the Year of Weather Map - a collective map of weather created with satellite imagery contributions from DIY satellite ground station operators around the world. Around lunchtime a new series of images over Europe roll in, adding wispy cloud textures over the North Atlantic. Later in the afternoon, an incredibly clear image arrives spanning from the Great Lakes to Central America and featuring a brilliant sun-glint in the Gulf of Mexico. I await with some expectation an image from India but it does not appear in the Archive- suggesting a power cut, wifi failure or other infrastructure issue on the ground. Then on my train ride home it’s there in the archive and map - a ghostly nighttime image with a condensed mass of cotton-ball clouds to the South and the faint coastline of India and Pakistan. All of these weathers layer in slow, meditative fashion on the somewhat glitchy map we have created, the result of five years of network building, tool-making and the design, testing and crafting of small units of hardware.
2024-09-05 19:09:26
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
'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.