2024-11-05 17:48:43
Sasha Engelmann
Zemaljski muzej Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina
NOAA-15
It’s dark, and I am standing in the botanical garden of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. It has been a sunny, cold day. Across the street from where I am standing is the US Embassy, a place whose politics will change in the next 24, or maybe 48 hours, depending on how close the election is. The embassy is measuring the air quality as part of the IQ Air network. The level of pollution is currently 122 on the AQI scale, meaning ‘unhealthy for sensitive groups’. The main pollutant contributing to this unhealthy air is PM2.5, the most deadly of the microscopic particles. In comparison, London’s air today is around 70-80. It feels somewhat prescient that, on the day my home country is voting to elect (or not) a fascist leader, I have been conducting historical research on the Antifašistička Fronta Žena (AFŽ) at the nonprofit organisation and art space called Crvena. I learned about women’s efforts to organise between 1942-1953, largely around issues related to women’s working lives, their capacity to aid in the fight against fascism by taking up all manner of jobs, their need for labour recognition, their literacy, and childcare practices. As Andreja Dugandžić, co-director of Crvena explained to me, the term ‘feminism’ was not so popular at the time as it was seen as a bourgeois idea, but a ‘women’s antifascist front’ was a concrete and inspiring movement for many women in former Yugoslavia. I read magazines like ‘Nova Žena’, poems by women writers, and looked at prints and engravings. Some of it felt very contemporary - expressions of power and voice - while other parts would turn to the domestic, for example ‘how to treat diarrhoea in your baby’ or even an article on 'butchering chickens'. One article was called ‘čudno kuhinje’ (strange cooking) and I look forward to translating it to understand what kind of cooking the AFŽ thought to be strange! I wasn’t able to understand or read everything given my basic Croatian/Serbian /Bosnian, but I absorbed so many themes and images, it will take months to entirely unpack. I am left with the feeling of the Yugoslav women’s antifascist movement as a prideful one. I also felt something resonant between the thematics of the AFŽ and what I have come to understand as ‘cuerpo-territorio’ (body-land) in South American feminisms. Like cuerpo-territorio, the movement of AFŽ was about relations to land, as much as it was about anti-fascist struggle. Sharing some of the poems of 'Nova Žena' with my Mom, she immediately replied with the exclamation that she felt so much pride, like those women did, and that she also wrote poems as a teenager in Belgrade about the pride and struggle ('borba') of Yugoslavia. As I ride the tram back to the hotel, I think of my Mom, who now lives in the 'red state' of Florida, and I reflect, not without a lot of worry, about the political systems she has weathered in her life.
2024-11-04 10:44:11
Sasha Engelmann
Roadside near Raðici, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina
NOAA-18
Turning off a narrow street, we climb a dirt road into hills of farmland. The smell of manure permeates the car as we pass farm equipment and local men that wave kindly at us. I think I hear one of them call out but he doesn’t follow us. The road winds steeply onward and turns against the edge of recently turned fields. Next to two stacks of hay, sandwiched between two different fields, both steaming with manure and dust, we can see curved shapes of stone. At the base of the hill, a plaque in an odd mix of Latin and Cyrillic letters, lines running at odd angles, seems like a warning, but we climb the hill anyway. We are completely alone except for two men driving tractors. There, on the hilltop, is a kind of assembly, a collection of surreal stone figures around two metres tall, arranged at odd angles to each other, resting on stone plinths. Like serpents with eyes or faces in contorted shapes the figures peer wildly and hauntingly into the distance. I notice there are rotting cobs of corn scattered on the grass in places, and I wonder if there are any offerings to these creatures. The site is Nekropola žrtvama fašizma (Necropolis for the Victims of Fascism) or Spomenik na Smrika (Monument on Smrike) designed by Bogdan Bogdanović and it is both monument and underground crypt. This is the site of a great massacre of around 700 Serbian civilians and communists by Ustaše forces during WWII. Of the monument, Bogdanović apparently said: “It is a story of mythical creatures: the ambisbaena is a two-headed serpent that goes by day in one direction and by night in another. It symbolizes the end of time." To me, though, the figures are less serpent-like and more like currents or energies. Leaving Smrike by car, it is not long before we enter a valley shrouded in haze, and it only increases in density as we approach Sarajevo. We notice white smoke plumes pouring out of peoples’ chimneys and large currents of either steam or particulate flooding from thermo electric plants. I remember reading how a combination of local fuel burning in winter and heavy industry is creating an air pollution crisis in this part of Bosnia. The five o’ clock prayer echoes from minarets as the air thickens, spectral timing as voices mingle and seem to repeat across the landscape, and materialise the feeling that the air is a carrier of many things in these valleys, of faith and ghosts and microscopic toxicity. I think about the double headed serpent invoked by Bogdanović and I wonder about the ‘end of time’. T and I both peer hard at the sky, wondering if we are seeing the sickle moon or a strange small arc in the sky. When the air is so thick and unbreathable, do we see and feel time passing more slowly, finding our circadian rhythms numbed, or do we see and feel what lies underground?
2024-11-03 18:39:01
Sasha Engelmann
Petra Kočića Street, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina
NOAA-15
“Gdje je mala sreća, bljesak stakla, lastavičje gnjezdo, iz vrtića dah; gdje je kucaj zipke, što se makla, i na traku sunca zlatni kućni prah?” wrote Ivan Goran Kovačić in the poem Jama or ‘the pit’. It describes village life near the town of Jasenovac in modern day Croatia. In these lines, happiness flows through a ‘window’s glint’ and ‘windborne garden sweet’. It manifests ‘by the threshold, sunshine at my feet’. These lines evoke a bucolic, gentle, rural life. And yet the poem - immediately recognisable from these four lines by anyone borne in the Balkans - is far from a picture of happiness. It narrates what occurred at the town of Jasenovac after Axis forces invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia during WWII, and installed an Independent State of Croatia (NDH) ruled by the nationalist Ustaše militia. Jasenovac became the site of one of the deadliest forced labour and extermination camps of the war. What happened at the camp is disputed, but most evidence suggests that the majority of people imprisoned and executed at Jasenovac were ethnic-Serbs, largely civilians brought there for their collaboration with Partisan rebels. My grandfather, Deda Milan, was one of those anti-fascist Serbs brought to Jasenovac, but luckily he was released after my great grandmother, of Croatian / Hungarian heritage, managed to use her influence to save him. Roma, Jews, and political communists were also targeted. Kovačić’s poem goes on to narrate the horrors of Jasenovac in gruesome detail, and its power in communicating these scenes made it one of the most celebrated anti-war poems of its time. Most children educated in former Yugoslavia (and even, I learn at dinner in Banja Luka, in present day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina) learn this poem in school. This context might help explain why the lines quoted at the beginning of this note - about happiness, gardens and sunny thresholds - are engraved in a plaque inside a large scale monument designed by Bogdan Bogdanović in the 1960s that now stands at the former centre of the Jasenovac camp. Its shape resembles a giant flower with six petals from some angles, but from others, it looks like a pair of wings. The edges of the petals are sharp, and diamond shaped holes allow the sky to shine through, against the heaviness of concrete. As I walked around it at sunset, its form seemed to transform, always asymmetrical. In the landscape around the monument, Bogdanović created mounds to denote the places where buildings of the camp used to stand. The monument was Bogdanović’s attempt to memorialise the history of civilian suffering without reproducing it, toward “termination of the inheritance of hatred that passes from generation to generation". To place lines of poetry depicting ‘sunny thresholds’ or ‘windblowne gardens’ at the heart of this monument is perhaps to use peaceful images - peaceful weathers - to break the ‘inheritance of hatred’ while recognising the importance of careful, watchful memory.
2024-11-01 12:01:36
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
The reports of flash flooding in Valencia fill the front pages of newspapers in London. At lunchtime, the BBC shares the feed of a Spanish news network where a journalist breaks into tears while describing the losses of life, and damage to neighbourhoods. "The worst part..." he says in between attempts to catch his breath "is that our government knew that this was going to happen. They knew this was coming, and they did nothing". Hundreds of people are known to be dead, and some are still missing after days of search and rescue. "There is mud everywhere" an English reporter comments "on everything, on me". In London, the city is covered in low gray cloud, light barely penetrates through. On my way to mail one of the new open-weather automatic ground stations to northern Scotland, I pick up a copy of the Guardian and try to take a picture of its cover near a market on Mare Street in a way that also captures the lack of light, the gray mist, the way even important stories and images of loss seem slightly shadowed, out of focus.
2024-10-31 09:50:53
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
The humidity is 100% today. When T and I wake up, we see condensation on the living room and kitchen windows- as if the flat is sweating. Yet it is not warm, it is strangely cold. Later in the morning, I find myself getting anxious at the amount of assessments I have to review for an external examiner appointment at another university, and for which I need to synthesise feedback to the whole department by the end of tomorrow. To calm down, I spend twelve minutes on the couch after lunch meditating with the help of an app. This meditation is called 'Sense' and at several points, the guiding voices says 'There's no need to go out looking for sounds. Just like a satellite dish, we can simply receive what's coming'. I find myself puzzling at this metaphor while the meditation continues, so much so that I realise I am not following the instructions anymore. Does a satellite dish 'simply receive what's coming'? And is the body anything like a satellite dish? I remember the meditation Soph invented for their students in Eindhoven, called 'Your body is an antenna'. I have always loved this meditation, and find that it makes sense- an antenna can just exist, and it can pick up a wide ranging but also environmentally limited amount of information around. A satellite dish, on the other hand, feels intent on capture, on picking up a television signal. Later in the day, after I have made some headway through the external examining, my body antenna feels less tense, more open. Outside I can hear the beginnings of Halloween, as mobs of small children spill out of houses and make small shrieks of excitement on their way down the street.
2024-10-30 10:05:00
Automatic Ground Station 11 London
London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
Today is humid, over 80%, and this creates blurry lines and fuzzy borders. The sky hangs low over London. In the evening, news of the flash flooding in Spain comes online, and T and I watch with horror as Channel 4 news shows images of people being airlifted from flooded homes, holding tightly to their pets, and cars having been pushed across streets and cities - piled up, water logged.
2024-10-29 10:17:00
Automatic Ground Station 11 London
London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
As I leave for a workshop with a PhD student in Bloomsbury, early this morning, I set up my turnstile on the kitchen windowsill. Making sure its 'reflector' spokes are inside the window, and the cable is taped to the window ledge, I leave the flat. Upon returning many hours later - after cycling over 1.5 hours in total across London, through streets heavy with mist, smog and traffic - the antenna is still there, poised to receive. I wondered, as no one was in the flat when it recorded, whether the plants sensed what was happening. I wondered if the simultaneous recording of Automatic Ground Station 11 on the kitchen table, connected via a thick coiled cable to the turnstile antenna on the window, together with two other Automatic Ground Stations in T's studio (not connected to antennas) changed the conditions of the flat in some way. I enjoyed thinking of the three stations lighting up on cue, all attempting to track and receive radio waves from NOAA-19.
2024-10-28 11:11:12
Sasha Engelmann
Between Biology and Physics departments, Royal Holloway University of London , United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
The Ginko trees make pools of yellow everywhere on campus, from the parking lots behind student dorms, to the small copses between departments. As the day is grey lit and damp, and Heathrow borne planes roar past overhead, invisible through the cloud, the pools of colour are welcome. Later in the afternoon, Soph and I compare 'lighting gell' colours on a role of about 200 samples, ranging from fluorescent magenta to eggshell yellow. The colours come with short descriptions of their intensities and transparencies. Soph asks me to hold up the small rectangular transparent samples against a black and white photograph in a book on my desk, the better to compare how the colour enhances or mutes the detail in the image. It is difficult to make a choice of colour when only one of us can actually see the physical 'gell'. We end up choosing a green called 'half plus green', which is a more transparent version of a green called 'plus green'. Hovering between a bright green and a lemony mint, and around 80% transparent, the green film adds a beautiful intensity to grayscale text and imagery. As I leave campus at 5:30 it is almost pitch black. Students in hooded sweaters walk past in small groups, dorm kitchens are brightly illuminated, and rows of liquor bottles balance precariously on window ledges. As I pass the parking lot into the deep dark of the woods at the bottom of campus, a Ginko leaf catches my attention- it is fanned out against the asphalt, an opaque yellow through which dark textures permeate.
2024-10-27 11:23:20
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
I awoke to a creeping feeling that the plants in my and T's flat were feeling very happy today. Leaves of monstera deliciosa, begonia maculata and weeping willow seemed unusually vibrant and springy from their stems. The lower angle of the sun at this point in the autumn means that the flat is flooded with rays. Throughout the morning, the sun climbed slowly over the three-story houses and the 'Open Doors' Baptist Church directly opposite our second floor windows. Later in the park, a local young family and a couple of mid-20s french women asked about my antenna, and I got to explain the 'magic' of radio twice. It was so bright I had to squint to see their faces. Above, an intersecting set of contrails looked like another, much larger Yagi-Uda, pointing south.
2024-10-27 11:25:00
Automatic Ground Station 11 London
London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
2024-10-26 12:36:11
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
The fallen brown and golden leaves from plane trees are the brightest thing in the park today, as a grey and muted bank of cloud wraps London. I keep thinking of an interview I read with Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer and climatologist who is well known for studying 'Amoc' or what is now known as 'Amoc breakdown'. The article in the Guardian explains: "Amoc, or the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, is a system of ocean currents that brings heat into the northern Atlantic. Warm surface water from the tropics flows north and releases its heat in the subpolar Atlantic, south of Greenland and west of Britan and Ireland. Then it cools and sinks to a depth between 2,000m to 3,000 m before returning south as a cold current. Amoc is one of our planet's largest heat transport systems, moving the equivalent of 50 times the human energy use, and it has a particularly strong impact on the climate in Europe". This description of great waters rising and sinking, and carrying heat across the planet, is captivating. Yet scientists like Rahmstorf suspect Amoc could be slowing down and even about to stop. Apparently "the most ominous sign is the cold blob over the northern Atlantic. The region is the only place in the world that has cooled in the past 20 years or so, while everywhere else on the planet has warmed - a sign of reduced heat transport into the region". There is also "excessive heating along the east coast of North America" which could be another sign of a slowing Amoc current that drifts closer to shore, and the "reduction of salt content of seawater" especially in the "blob region". A less salty 'blob' is harder to sink, and therefore harder to mix into the Amoc cycle. According to Rahmstorf, there is a 50/50 chance that Amoc stops in our current century. The collapse of Amoc will have global effects: the sea level of the Atlantic will rise by half a metre, the tropical rainfall belt will shift south, leading to floods in places not adapted to so much rain, and droughts elsewhere, and less CO2 would be taken up by the oceans, further driving global warming. Rahmstorf explains that all of these changes are poorly modelled by scientists and reported on by the IPCC because they are considered extreme, but at the same time they are probable, and on a timescale that humans alive today may witness. As the satellite image I am capturing loads line by line, I peer into the darkness of the North Atlantic. I think about the word 'Amoc' and how it can also have connotations of 'going astray' or 'running wild'. I wonder whether I can see the 'cold blob' west of Ireland, and what one might see in that part of the ocean in decades to come.
2024-10-24 11:24:20
Sasha Engelmann
Millfields Park, London , United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
A black cloaked, elderly woman steps slowly across the dense, wet grass of Millfields Park in East London. I worry about her feet getting wet, as mine have soaked through already. Though it is nearing 12 noon, the sun casts long shadows against the plane trees, shapes forming and rearranging on the ground.
2024-10-22 11:14:35
Sasha Engelmann
London Bridge, London , United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
2024-10-23 10:50:16
Sasha Engelmann
Eastfield Grass Pitch, Royal Holloway University of London , United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
The department is hosting an 'authors meets critics' session with Henry Wai-Chun Yeung, an eminent economic and human geographer from Singapore, and I am on a panel of respondents. Henry's book is called Theory and Explanation in Geography, and it synthesises vast literatures in the discipline informed by theories such as non-representational theory, actor network theory, assemblage and feminist and postcolonial theories. As I need to formulate something to say, I spend the morning and most of the afternoon buried in this book, thinking about Henry's proposals for theorising. In one chapter, Henry proposes that 'relational' theories in geography need more concreteness, focus on causation, and specificity, so that they can better explain the world. He advocates for what he calls relational ‘geometries’ or ‘relational specificity’ or ‘relational complementarity’. An example of relational geometries is regional union networks and their ways of complementing each other, to gain power and resources. The response I decide to give reflects on what a specific focus on the geometry of relation might do - how does it operate? What does it explain? I have recently been puzzling over the geometry of relations in a paper on the ‘aerial turn’ in geography - I have been observing how, for quite a while now, geographers participating in the ‘aerial turn’ are writing about air in three key modes: i) as something that flows or can be traced, most often on a line ii) as a collection of particles iii) and as a volume. Although these three ‘orientations’ to air are persuasive, and in many ways helpfully explanatory for all kinds of aerial processes, from atmospheric warfare to the relations between breathing bodies and spaces, they produce versions of air and atmosphere that are linear, particular, and volumetric, and they distance other ‘versions’ of air that are more difficult to draw into geometric forms or shapes. I have been wondering how the ‘aerial turn’ is thus reproducing spatial geometries that say more about disciplinary formalism and perhaps modernist aesthetics than anything about air itself. Geographies of air are indeed a very small part of the discipline, but in my hesitation around the ‘relational geometries’ in Henry's book, I wonder if there is something else going on here. I wondered if the proposal to adopt ‘geometries’ felt at odds with the ‘relational irresolutions’ ‘topologies’ and disorientations being developed and theorised for studies of infrastructure by people like Jerry Zee and Aya Nassar. I think also about the outpouring of work on quantum field theory and quantum mechanics in black studies and geographies, for example in new work by Pat Noxolo, and I think it is important to take seriously what a turn to the quantum does in this work, that geometry simply can’t. As important as it is to be specific and practical about spatial relations and how our theories of relation can explain causal effects, I feel that these and other movements in the discipline suggest plural, capacious, perhaps less immediately geometric forms of relation, and yet they are doing so without the vagueness or flattening that might have characterised relational theories of ten-twenty years ago. For the seminar, the room is packed- geographers from across the department are present, as well as people from other departments. Henry gives a presentation on the book and I am impressed with the way he manages to make theory sound exciting and approachable. After me and three of my colleagues have offered responses, we discuss what it means for goegraphers to 'do theory', what kind of theory that might be, and whether the issue is rather than geography is both a social science and a humanities discipline- theory works differently and does not necessarily need to 'explain' in the humanities, as it might do in the social sciences. After the event, the atmosphere of the department is animated. A PhD student comes to my office and speaks for thirty minutes about how excited she was by the seminar. From time to time, I catch a glimpse of the ginko trees outside the window of my office. The golden leaves are glowing in the afternoon sunlight, so that they seem to be projecting light in all directions.
2024-10-21 11:15:17
Sasha Engelmann
Canada Copse, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
"Late nights in black silk in East London / Church bells in the distance / Free bleeding in the autumn rain / Fall in love again and again" sings Caroline Polachek in a somewhat cheesy but also beautiful remix of the Charli XCX song 'Everything is romantic'. The song has been circling around in my head for several days, and I hear it when I leave my flat in the dark at 6:30am this morning, spotting the waning moon in a fuzzy glow above. A tank truck rolls slowly along the edge of the park. A man in a high viz jumpsuit is walking ahead of it, using a pressurised hose to blast aside the golden leaves that paper the asphalt in wet layers. In the early morning moonlight, they look like a chimera - half machine, half person. Though Storm Ashley has not affected the southeast of England, the world feels soaked with water- a ubiquitous saturation.
2024-10-19 12:29:47
Sasha Engelmann
Downs Road, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
The sunlight stretches through the shutters as I prepare a roast vegetable and fish lunch for T and her mom who are on their way back from the airport. I mix purple carrots, magenta-striped beets and lightly gold potatoes with extra virgin olive oil and a mix of spices and herbs - a medley of oregano, peppers, sage and other 'bilke' from my grandmother's village on the island Hvar in Croatia. When the vegetables have roasted, I place three marinated 'John Dory' fish on top of everthing and keep the oven hot for another twenty minutes. As I cut, season and roast, my turnstile antenna leans out the kitchen window. My hands are too oily to hold or point it, so the resulting image is just what the antenna receives from its resting position. At one point, though, I graze the handle with the dishwasher door, and the whole antenna slips out the window and dangles on its cable over the edge- luckily there is a small ledge immediately underneath, otherwise it might have fallen to the steps below!
2024-10-18 12:36:47
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
The day started with low, misty clouds and rose to a golden, clear-skied afternoon. The last few days have been much warmer, even balmy. I noticed the transparency of fallen leaves, shining like small lanterns in the grass.
2024-10-15 13:15:53
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
"You might find me with some tims on, rockin fascinators and clutches / marchin' through these streets my face on double decker buses / London's been all love, from the dancehall to the pub / when we play the O2, or back when subterranea was the club / real Fugees lovers / big up you know them, all my sisters and my brothers!!" spoke Lauryn Hill, reading a poem she had written in the twenty four hours before her performance at the O2 Arena last night. T and I were in seats so far away, on the opposite side of the stadium, that the sound seemed to bounce and refract in odd echoes. But that didn't matter- squeezed into tiny steep seats, all 20,000 people were dancing the whole night. I looked over my shoulder to see several grey-haired ladies singing all the words, while below our row, a group of teenagers managed to dance and livestream at the same time. This morning the energy stayed with me as I got ready for the day, another grey and cold one in London. The park was full of dogs, including an incredibly fast whippet named Ziggy. In several places, the gilled cap of a small mushroom pushed through the blades of damp, freshly mowed grass.
2024-10-14 11:49:15
Sasha Engelmann
Picnic table near Bourne Building, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
Arctic air, icey wind and a cold drizzle- a combination that makes any Monday morning feel especially gloomy. I take shelter under a small tree on a field between the biology and physics departments on the university campus. Part of me questions my decision to even try to catch a satelltie image, as the pass is only 50 degrees at maximum elevation to the west, and it's so freezing outside. I hum Lauryn Hill lyrics to myself as the satellite image loads, the pixels looking fractal like ice. "Possibly speak tongues / Beat drum, Abyssinian, street Baptist / Rap this in fine linen / From the beginning / My practice extending across the atlas / I begat this". The 'atlas' on my screen builds southward, tendrils of cloud extending in blurry motions, like something moving too fast before it can be captured, stilled. Every so often the tree is pushed by the wind and fat droplets shower down. The song ends: "Everything is everything / What is meant to be, will be / After winter, must come spring / Change, it comes eventually".
2024-10-13 11:14:35
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
As I ride the 35 south from Liverpool Street the sun begins to pierce through the matted, slightly hazy sky. A current of ‘Arctic Air’ has flowed across the U.K. this weekend and lowered temperatures at least six degrees. At a performance yesterday afternoon in a roofless Anglican Church in Nunhead Cemetary, the cold entered deep into my lungs and bones. After an evening at the pub, T and I ran to the overground station and realised we had fifteen minutes to wait for the train - it felt like an interminable time in that level of cold. As we entered Tesco to warm up before the train, an older man sitting on the pavement near the streetcorner lost his paper cup in the wind and it spun into the traffic. After I retrieved it for him, he asked if I could buy him a chocolate milkshake. He drank the cold drink in big gulps as me and T ran back to the station for our train.
2024-10-12 11:14:00
Automatic Ground Station London
London, UK
UK
NOAA-18
Today on BBC, Keir Starmer says he is remaining focused on the achievements of his new government, refusing to be distracted by 'side winds'. The phrase gives me pause, as it suggests that recent scandals around campaign donations or staff adjustments are akin to a tangential or minor wind. I think about the associations between wind and chaos, and the way the prime minister must be intent on distinguishing the focus of his government from any hint of entropy or agitation. Yet, if there are 'side winds', what is in the centre or the middle? Is it a storm, like a hurricane? Is it another wind, but one that is constant and measured? At the salon this morning, I was telling my hairdresser about my Mom's experience of Hurricane Milton, and the number of people who texted me about my Mom's safety, having seen Milton's imagery on the news, as well as the rumours and lies that have emerged in its wake, about the government creating and directing the hurricane, or refusing emergency relief. A woman who has just been styled for an upcoming hairdressers convention overhears me, and tells me she is from Idaho. "it's so fascinating what you were saying about everyone focusing on Milton" she says, "because where I'm from, in Idaho, we had the largest and most severe fire in US history earlier this year, and it did not make any headlines. No one was talking about it". I confessed I had not heard about the Idaho fires either, despite being an American, perhaps more attuned to US media than most people in the UK. She had to leave for her taxi before we could finish this conversation - which left me thinking again about 'side winds'.
2024-10-11 12:24:58
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London,
NOAA-18
Of a day like today, Derek Jarman might write, "Crystalline sunlight, all the dark humours blown away by the wind" (1991, 235). As my partner opens the curtains in the morning, the blue of the sky pierces through the growing gaps in tree branches, blue against yellow and light brown. Before lunch I set the automatic ground station up in my flat, leaving the turnstile antenna resting against the open windowsill in the kitchen, and I head out to the park wtih my tape measure Yagi-Uda antenna. Later I enjoy comparing the images: not surprisingly, the automatic station has captured a swathe of the satellite pass to the south (as our kitchen window is south-facing) and lines of interference from the building pulse through it. Out in the park, I receive a good signal for most of the 86 degree pass, enjoying the 'crystalline' sun and the momentary break from the 'dark humours' of recent grey and rainy days.
2024-10-11 11:27:00
Automatic Ground Station London
London, UK
UK
NOAA-18
Tropical Storm Leslie is brewing in the mid-Atlantic. By Monday, it may begin to reach the west coast of Spain, much like where the beautiful curving cyclone visible in today's image is swirling. For now, central Europe is dotted with a few clouds but is otherwise relatively clear. This image from an automatic ground station in my flat was captured by a turnstile antenna leaning on the windowsill, its metal dipoles shining in the noon sunlight.
2024-10-09 18:30:00
Automatic Ground Station London
London, UK
UK
NOAA-15
After having watched Hurricane Milton on various media throughout the day, and thinking about my family in Northern Florida, going to sleep tonight feels like a very difficult thing to do. As I try to distract myself with a book, I can still see the slowly spinning 'arms' of the hurricane, like an after-image.
2024-10-09 12:50:19
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
"Even though it looks beautiful, this is very bad, this will cause a lot of damage" says a forecaster of Hurricane Milton in one of many livestreamed weather reports I consult throughout the day. He repeats this phrase several times, as if he has to convince himself that it is true. Yet he still calls Milton 'healthy' as he describes its current trajectory and form. I learn that Milton has an 'eye' or 'core' that is among the smallest ever recorded - only about 4 miles across - and this is one of the reasons its effects could be so devastating. Another forecaster uses the metaphor of an ice skater doing a spin and hugging their arms closer to their body, therefore spinning faster. A very different set of affects was offered by John Morales, a Puerto-Rico raised, Florida-based meteorologist and weather forecaster for 30+ years, who became emotional on live television yesterday while describing the fact that the pressure in Hurricane Milton had dropped 50 millibars in ten hours. Morales takes a deep, shaky breath and continues 'this is just horrific'. The video circulates widely on social media. As the hurricane moves north, its proximity to the jet stream will cause wind shear, and some of its 'arms' will 'tear to shreds' according to another newscaster. The storm will likely downgrade to a level 3 hurricane by the time it meets land. But this does not mean it will be weaker or cause less damage, as the weaker storm-system will become wider, potentially affecting much more of Florida. The jet stream will not remove enough 'arms' to reduce the storm's strength. The site of landfall remains uncertain, with some forecasts suggesting the beach of Tampa, where the consequences in terms of storm surge and infrastructure would be catastrophic, while others suggesting it may land further south. It is both fascinating and terrifying that less than twelve hours away from 'landing', the landing-site is still unknown. To follow Milton in all of these ways is thus to process an extreme set of affects, prognoses, visualisations and predictions - everything from figure skater metaphors to public displays of despair. I make a special trip to the park for a satellite pass that is quite far to the west of London, over the Atlantic. I try to stabilise my experience of Milton by 'seeing' some of the weather in its proximity, the cloud systems and extra-tropical cyclones that are somehow linked to Milton's energetic core.
2024-10-08 21:56:00
Automatic Ground Station London
London, UK
UK
NOAA-18
I wake up to news of Hurricane Milton, one of the most rapidly intensifying storms ever measured in the Gulf of New Mexico. The category 5 storm is on a path to make landfall in Western Florida by Wednesday evening in EST. My Mom just moved to Florida two months ago - on time for hurricane season. She lives in Gainesville, just north of the projected path of Milton. On various late night phone calls over the last two weeks, she has showed me mountains of debris on her street, still there from Hurricane Helene, which also passed close, but not directly over Gainesville. Later in the day, I am in a team supervision with one of my PhD students, and my co-supervisor, a geomorphologist and quaternary scientist, shares that he was planning on searching NOAA's National Centre's for Environmental Information the other day (researching data for a third year undergraduate course practical) but the NCEI headquarters are in Asheville (Buncombe County) in North Carolina, one of the cities hardest hit by Hurricane Helene in the last few days of September, and they have had a continuous power outage since. My colleague reports that most of the region's electricity substations were flood damaged, as are all the bridges. Initial damage estimates are coming out in the order of $30-45 bn. Out of >100,000 houses in Buncombe County only around 900 have flood insurance. A former NOAA scientist has estimated 40 trillion gallons of water fell. And now Milton has arrived. Normally, the NCEI would offer 'real time' products for tracking weather like Milton, and it is a crucial hub in packaging various forms of satellite, sensor and other data for a wide group of people including farmers, businessmen, insurance companies and weather services around the US. But as of today, none of NCEI's real-time tracking and forecasting features are available - this is a big hole in networks of weather data sharing and communicating. As I hold my turnstile antenna out the window for a satellite pass close to 11pm this evening, I read the prognosis of a Florida based meteorologist, speaking of Milton: "This is nothing short of astronomical... This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce."
2024-10-07 07:57:00
Automatic Ground Station London
London, UK
UK
NOAA-15
In Enemy of the Sun, Samih al-Qasim writes: I may – if you wish – lose my livelihood / I may sell my shirt and bed. / I may work as a stone cutter, / A street sweeper, a porter. / I may clean your stores / Or rummage your garbage for food. / I may lie down hungry, / O enemy of the sun, / But / I shall not compromise / And to the last pulse in my veins / I shall resist. | You may take the last strip of my land, / Feed my youth to prison cells. / You may plunder my heritage. / You may burn my books , my poems / Or feed my flesh to the dogs. / You may spread a web of terror / On the roofs of my village, / O enemy of the sun, / But / I shall not compromise / And to the last pulse in my veins / I shall resist. Samih Al-Qasim, “Enemy of the sun,” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance , Edited by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb (Washington, DC and Dar es Salaam: Drum and Spear Press, 1970).
2024-10-06 11:02:38
Sasha Engelmann
London Bridge, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
On London Bridge, loosely knit groups of people wander by. I notice two families in which the Dad is pointing across the Thames to skyscrapers and offering some words of information or wisdom to his children. They don’t look interested. It’s the kids instead who are interested in me, asking ‘but what is she doing ??’ in voices that implore an answer. A tall man passes very close to my left shoulder and says in passing ‘watch out with that thing’ even though I am standing well to the edge of the bridge and there is tons of empty space to walk. The pass is a bit staticy at times but I have come to expect this from most of London’s bridges - too much happening by land, river and air.
2024-10-05 18:34:00
Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-15
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.
2024-10-04 20:18:00
Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-19
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.
2024-10-03 20:28:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station London
London, UK
UK
NOAA-19
2024-10-03 12:30:08
Sasha Engelmann
Finsbury Square, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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".
2024-09-29 10:46:38
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-09-26 12:13:45
Sasha Engelmann
Downs Road, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-09-11 11:08:41
Sasha Engelmann
Burgess Park, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-09-10 12:14:14
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-09-09 11:33:25
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-09-08 12:39:48
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London,
NOAA-18
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).
2024-09-07 12:51:46
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
+ 1 more photo
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...
2024-09-06 10:29:48
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-09-05 19:09:26
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
+ 1 more photo
'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.
2024-09-04 10:55:07
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
"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
2024-09-03 11:08:44
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
"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.
2024-09-02 12:15:45
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-08-28 10:46:50
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-08-27 11:52:02
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-08-26 12:02:33
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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!'
2024-08-25 18:56:29
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
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.
2024-08-24 19:20:36
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
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.
2024-08-23 11:04:44
Sasha Engelmann
Belvedere Trabucco in Lignano Sabbiadoro, Italy
Italy
NOAA-19
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.
2024-08-21 12:28:55
Sasha Engelmann
Quercia delle Checche near Pienza, Italy
Italy
NOAA-18
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?
2024-08-17 23:02:39
Sasha Engelmann
Jadrolinja Ferry in the Adriatic Sea between Split and Ancona, Croatia
Croatia
NOAA-18
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.
2024-08-17 18:24:32
Sasha Engelmann
Jadrolinja Ferry between Stari Grad and Split, Croatia
Croatia
NOAA-15
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 10:39:33
Sasha Engelmann
Zaraće, village of Gdinj, island Hvar, Croatia
Croatia
NOAA-19
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.
2024-08-16 18:53:42
Sasha Engelmann
The rocks of Zaraće, village of Gdinj, island Hvar, Croatia
Croatia
NOAA-15
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.
2024-08-12 21:29:05
Sasha Engelmann
Zaraće, village of Gdinj, island Hvar, Croatia
Croatia
NOAA-19
As I set up my ground station on the edge of the concrete terrace at my Mom’s house in Zaraće (a small bay in the village of Gdinj, island Hvar, Croatia) I could feel the concrete emanating heat accumulated over the day. The prior evening a small group of us (friends and family) had ventured out to the warm rocks at night to watch for the Perseids - and we saw several meteors, sometimes so numerous they seemed to speak to each other in the sky. One very powerful meteor passed from 90 degrees above us in a long orange streak to the horizon. Gdinj (and Zaraće) is an origin point for my family - one that stretches back for generations on my mother’s side, through the Čurin family who settled in Gdinj, grew lavendar, cultivated olive trees for oil, and fished in the sea. I remember my Deda (grandfather) waking up at dawn to collect the fish of the day from nets that had been laid out by hand the evening before. It wasn't so long ago that the only way to travel from Gdinj, on the top of the island, to Zaraće at the sea, was by mule or donkey along a narrow dirt path. It wasn't so long ago (only last summer) that I came to Gdinj for my Baba Albina's funeral, an event that drew the whole village, and with people driving from as far away as Belgrade. In the local cemetary, mom and I each read a small passage, and my Mom also read a poem by Vesna Parun. It is always intense for me to be (back) here. I want to forget about the practicalities of life - how to get clean water (the water 'cisterns' aren't always the safest to drink from), how to get food, who to go for ‘kavu’ (coffee) with. I want to just lie without a towel or goggles or rock-shoes on the pale, jagged, karst rocks and stare at the sea. Indeed I have spent so many of my summers doing exactly this, I wonder if my small bones are laced with limestone, seawater, algae, olive, lavender.
2024-06-07 13:41:29
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London,
NOAA-18
The sun was rising when I rode my bike through Hackney Downs this morning, coming back home from a club in Dalston. My limbs felt both heavy and light in the very pleasing way that limbs feel when you have been dancing for hours. People were already in the park, or maybe they had been there the whole night. I could see the faint spark of a cigarette in a huddle of bodies between the hedges. I thought about getting my radio antenna and catching a pass at dawn, but sleep was too tempting. Later, at almost 2pm, I re-emerged from my flat and went back to the park. In contrast to the soft, orange-pink glow of the early morning, the early afternoon was warm, hot and dry. As I started the pass, a man in a group of men that normally always stand around a bench at the north-east corner of the park, around thirty-forty metres away from me, yelled "Is that for free internet?!". I could only think to yell back, "No!". As I couldn't explain at such distance, I used my free arm to point to the northern horizon and traced an arc through the sky from North to South. That seemed to help. He yelled again "What are you tracking!!?" and I replied "A satellite!! An image!!". As no members of the group looked like they were going to come any nearer, I walked over to them after the pass was done, and showed them the live-decoded image. They huddled around my computer. I wondered what they might say about the weather, given that the five to six of them are always here at this bench, all day, every day, rain or shine. Instead, they asked me what the weather was going to be like. I said I was not a meteorologist, but the image was showing different patterns of clouds over the Atlantic, maybe coming to the UK. They seemed to like this. One of them said 'nice one mate' and shook my hand in the way men do when they put out their arms, bent at the elbow, with the hand close to the chest. When you close hands you end up getting pulled together in a show of comraderie.
2024-06-06 12:11:30
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
Over these last couple weeks, I sometimes observe the darkness of the landforms in the satellite images, especially in the Infrared Channel, usually on the right side. Though I have not studied infrared radiation scientifically, I know that, in the Infrared channel, the darker the pixels suggest that something is 'warmer' while the lighter pixels suggest 'cooler'. In today's image, even the northernmost part of Norway appears to be relatively dark, emanating and radiating heat against the neutral gray of the Barents Sea. The coastline and interior of the African continent also stands out in the InfraRed channel. Yesterday, a colleague who works in Cambodia studying the lives and labour of brick kiln workers told me about how the workers measure time and seasons by how fast it takes a large ball of clay to dry outside. In some seasons it takes five days, while in other seasons it only takes five hours. Their work rhythms are intimately related to the drying of the clay, and so also the heat and movement of air. In a meeting this morning I was reminded of Michael Taussig's writing on heat. He says, "Heat is a force like color, that sets aside the understanding in place of something less conscious and more overflowing, radiance instead of line, immanence instead of the famous bird's eye view" (Taussig, 2004: 31). As I pored over the 'satellite-eye's view' of today, I wondered about where heat as a 'force' shows up. Does it only show up in the clay ball that tells about heat by how fast it dries? Or does the force somehow also 'show up' in the satellite image, in the darkness and contrast of pixels? Thinking of the ball of clay makes me feel more connected to the idea of heat as 'force', but I keep wondering whether there are ways to use colour ('something less conscious and more overflowing') to demonstrate or express more of heat in the satellite image. In contrast to 'heat maps' where red and dark purple often signify the intensity of heat, how else could colour map heat, how else might it suggest 'immanence' or 'radiance' instead of line?
2024-06-04 09:27:43
Sasha Engelmann
Grassy Field near the Physics Department, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
Today has been about rhythms. I organised and choreographed so many rhythms for myself and others, but the most intense was chairing a meeting with Soph and two Croatian scientists with whom I have been in email contact for months, and whose work I have studied extensively in order to include in a recent article on 'wind's animacies' and dust over the Mediterranean and Adriatic Sea. After so many protracted email exchanges and engaging slowly and carefully with their scientific work these last months, meeting them online was an experience of personality-encounter, joy, Croatian-language exchanges and rapid firing of questions (though I didn't manage to ask all the questions on my list). Later, during a research group seminar on ‘research rhythms’, we read aloud and discussed fragments of writing that suggested different rhythms, whether poetic, scholarly, scalar, material, or musical. The notion of ‘rhythming’ in research and a general tuning to the ‘science of the word’ is examined in an essay called "Rhythm, or On Sylvia Wynter's Science of the Word" by Katherine McKittrick, Frances H. O'Shaughnessy and Kendall Witaszek (2018). Starting from the work of poet and philosopher Aime Césaire, the authors write: “Césaire’s observation—that a creative science reckons with how poetic knowledge “is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge”—calls on the harmonious structures of collaborative thought in order to reconceptualize what it means to be human”. In other words, a 'creative science' suggests that there are ways to speak and enunciate research (including science) that are more truly collaborative and so rhythmic. I was immediately reminded of the interdisciplinary collaboration of the Croatian scientists and their willingness to be in dialogue with me and Soph on the call. McKittrick et al (2018) continue: “Like Césaire, Wynter does not turn away from scientific knowledge and privilege poetic knowledge, but rather shows that science of the word is an articulation of science and poetics together. This provides a “fulfilling knowledge,” one that understands the human in its most actualized form through the “climate of emotion and imagination.”” I love the idea of ‘science of the word’, that through a sensitivity to the craft of writing and ‘making’ words we are enacting a science that can perhaps see through the ‘silences’ of normative Science, which as the authors outline, has been responsible for articulating a version of nature that makes it possible to imagine and enact culture as separate to nature. We can ‘think science and poetics together’ in ‘fulfilling’, actualised and emotional ways. This is where I hope the collaboration and conversation with the scientists is going, though I know it is unfair to presume or predict outcomes. In the mean time, I want to return to their articles with an attention for 'science of the word' and 'narrative devices'.
2024-06-03 12:49:14
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
This Monday was full of grey light and low hanging cloud, and after a morning of open-weather meetings, I found myself sitting in the middle of Hackney Downs, happy to be listening to the sound of a satellite but craving some colour. On my way back from the park, a bright burst of lichen caught my eye. I identified the species (or 'collaboration' between species) as within the family of Teloschistaceae which really refers to a large group of mostly lichen-forming fungi that have a 'cosmopolitan distribution' (meaning that they can be found in most places around the world, much like the pigeon and the orca). Most members of Teloschistaceae are lichens that either live on rock or on bark, but about 40 species are 'lichenicolous' – meaning they are non-lichenised fungi that live on other lichens. Apparently, in Spain, a member of this family of lichen-forming fungi has been included in wine-based decoctions for menstrual issues, and infused in water as a remedy for kidney and tooth ailments. Later in the day, I bought raspberries and blueberries entirely because of how they glowed bright-red and blue-purple in the fruit section of the local market.
2024-08-08 23:17:13
Sasha Engelmann
Lignano Sabbiadoro , Italy
Italy
NOAA-18
Acqua! ventisei. Sabbia! trentasette. (Water! twenty six. Sand! thirty seven). A voice called out the temperature of sea and land on a loudspeaker at the beach of Lignano Sabbiadoro on the Italian coast. I placed my towel on the sand next to a lifeguard station and felt the heat. People were running from their umbrellas to the sea (sometimes carrying small children) as the sand burned underfoot. I debated trying a satellite pass, decided not to in this unlikely location, and finally thought I’d try. Something about being in a swimsuit with the ground station immediately felt weird! My radio antenna got the attention of many, even at a distance - I caught several men with beer-bellies and leathery skin staring at me. Sadly I didn’t catch any signal - I had a big view of the sky, and checked and re-checked my settings, but it was difficult to see the tiny numbers in the android radio software in the sunlight. I decided to try again later, and I ended up catching a pass late at night from the balcony of T’s mom’s apartment. The shadowy form of the boot of Italy appeared in the infrared channel, lighter than the water (and therefore cooler). This puzzled me until I realised that land loses heat faster than water; the sea ‘holds’ it.
2024-06-02 13:03:32
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
My arms and legs are scraped from nettles and bracken after an afternoon at Richmond Park, but I feel so happy to have these reminders of a day among the oaks, elms and white-tailed deer. After I captured a hurried satellite image from the middle of Hackney Downs, my partner and I took a long overground train from Dalson Kingsland to Richmond station, and once in the park, we followed several trails away from the central lake and 'acid grassland' where most people congregate. The park was golden and shimmering in sunlight, and the greenness of everything was 'overwhelming' as my partner put it. Lying on a log in the sun, I opened my eyes to see a hawk making circles overhead, barefly moving a wing-feather. I heard a sound like a sneeze, and looked to the right, spotting a doe with two fawns. Lime green parrots talked excitedly in the branches and zipped from gnarly twig to tree trunk. A spider with a large bulbous abdomen scrambled over my leg.
2024-06-01 11:34:03
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
As I begin the satellite pass, a young group of friends pass by, and one asks whether I am responsible for the pile of soccer balls a few metres away. This is a little funny, as there is an active young boy's soccer game on the field where we are standing, and I doubt I look much like a soccer player with my radio antenna. A young woman in the group yells to ask what I am doing, and after my one-sentence answer, they turn away and proceed to set up their picnic toward the south edge of the field. As I am packing up ten minutes later, though, the woman runs over and asks to see the image. She is joined by another friend. As I show them the enhancements of the image data, she remarks on the jagged coastline of the northern part of Norway, and the western edge of Scotland, wondering aloud whether the coasts are so complex because they receive the wind of the North Atlantic, whereas the east coasts are 'smoother' because they are more sheltered. As she speaks I admire her sparkly turqoise eyeliner and try not to stare. They are especially impressed by the colour infrared image of the highest cloud tops. They joke about how many times I must have explained this to other people in the park, and it's true, I say, I've met more people in the neighbourhood by waving an antenna at the sky than I might have by going to town hall. Half an hour later, I actually do join a Palestine march to Hackney Town Hall, following the echoes of protest chants through grey skies and an unusually cold wind.
2024-05-31 10:32:35
Sasha Engelmann
Burgess Park, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
Today I am striking in solidarity with Palestine together with other UK-based practitioners and organisations. The strike is organised by Mosaic Rooms and Migrants in Culture, specifically calling for groups and individuals engaged in cultural work to withold labour today, May 31st. My academic work as a cultural geographer is part of the cultural milieu in the UK, as I publish open access articles related to artworks, artistic collaborations and networks. Though open-weather is a fragmentary, precariously funded cultural project, it does participate in the cultural sphere. In lieu of a long-winded 'weather note' or working on a new academic article, I am spending the day doing the following: - Building an open access resource library on Palestine Geographies - Emailing my union on moving forward a public statement on Palestine - Engaging with and applying resources on university action by University and College Workers for Palestine
2024-05-30 12:03:48
Sasha Engelmann
East Park, Southampton, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
Wind is the subject of a half-day symposium at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton where I am presenting on behalf of open-weather. I am looking forward to the constellation of academics, scholar-artists, and members of the public who are going to share new work and join the conversation. A scientist called Richard Cornes from the National Oceanography Centre talks about histories of weather observation gleaned from the diaries of French and English scientists who kept careful records of temperature and pressure. An artist named Abelardo Gil-Fournier who has just co-written a book with Jussi Parrika presents his sculptures and experiments in the cinematography of wind. Scholars Maximilian Hepach and Bergit Schneider examine the diaries of John Muir, the drawings of Da Vinci and the paintings of Van Gogh to 'read one elemental media ecology against another', for example reading air through a description of ice in Muir's semi-spiritual field notes. JR Carpenter and Jules Rawlinson perform a sonic, poetry and visual piece called An Island of Sound featuring fossils, nautical charts, wind roses, walruses and other characters. We all stay out late at a local pub chatting and catching up, and I am filled with the nourishment of ideas, new reading recommendations, academic gossip, the sharing of intellectual projects and agendas, and generally feeling like we are all participating in an intellectual project around air, weather and wind. As I am rarely in a room with so many fellow air and wind scholars there is something momentous about this, and I am reminded of the ways that scholars used to travel for days, over hundreds of miles on land, to attend conferences together, to feel like they were taking part in a common project. I am by no means naive to the eliteness and exclusivity of this history, but I remind myself that it is also OK for today to be about the joy of shared and generous participation in overlapping academic work.
2024-05-29 12:11:41
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
I have been thinking a lot about how scholars, artists and others investigating air try to 'substantiate' it in their work. In a chapter on 'Air's substantiations', anthropologist Tim Choy makes an analogy between a scholar/artist/practitioner studying air, and a PM sensor on the roof of a building. He writes, "enclosed machines on rooftops and streets ingest millions of mouthfuls of wind a day, calming it so that the particles it holds can be collected to count, to accumulate enough of the particular for it to register as weight, as substance worth talking about" (2011: 146). Choy continues, "miming this method, I collect the details in a diffuse set of contexts" to "turn the diffuse into something substantive" (2011: 146). This comes after a discussion of the ways in which air invites us to trouble binaries of the particular and the universal in cultural theory, both of which end up reifying solidity and 'ground'. 'Miming' the PM sensor, though, aren't we, as scholars and other practitioners, largely falling into the trap of 'particularising' air, counting particles so that our analyses add up to something worthy of empirical and conceptual attention? As I read across social science and humanities writing on air, I notice how often the 'particle' comes up, even when people are exploring the meso-scales of topics like breath and policy brutality. Is there something also about the outpouring of scholarly and artistic work on the citizen science of air quality that makes us feel we can and should be counting particles, even when that's not what we are doing? What if, in efforts to 'substantiate' air, we paid more attention to the fullness of air's aesthetics, its movements, gradients, vacuums, and porosities... the emptiness in between loosely tethered molecules? Rather than 'mouthfuls' of particles we might be substantiating something closer to texture, impressions, traces.
2024-08-02 22:55:42
Sasha Engelmann
Kottbusser damm, Berlin , Germany
Germany
NOAA-18
Berlin, Friday night, August. I peeked off the ledge of my friend Omid's fourth floor apartment on the Kottbusser damm, and set up my ground station looking East. The traffic 'rush' sounds below mingled with laughs, drunken conversation and sometimes yells or screams. I noticed how the antenna reacted to the side of the building, the almost-midnight radio environment, and to being hand-held - it preferred the balcony ledge. I had travelled all day by train from Vienna after an intense week of work with Soph, a week in which we ate market-fresh pickles, swam in the Danube, worked like crazy on open-weather, and sat together with pangs of uncertainty about the future, both immediate and further afield. From my midnight perch, I sent Soph a hug and some calm energies through the body-temperature air.
2024-07-26 10:48:57
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
After another colder, misty and rainy day yesterday, and intermittent dark and gloomy clouds this week, it is a relief once again to feel some sun. The air is relatively calm, and a high altitude cirrus or haze makes the light a bit silvery. The ground is still moist in places, though elsewhere the grass has dried and turned a light beige. As I walked down the steps of my and T's house, a man on a bike, whose name I later learned is Duane, did a double take, then stopped and said he had seen me many times in Hackney Downs, and wanted to know about my Yagi antenna. We chatted briefly and, though he had to go toward Clapton, he said the next time he saw me in the Downs, he would come over and see what I was doing. We shook hands twice before parting. As I was leaving the Downs after the pass about twenty minutes later, an older man called out to me. He said he lived close to Hackney Downs and had seen me many times with the antenna, and now wanted an explanation. I showed the satellite image I had just live-decoded and he mentioned his own work as an artist. As his hands were trembling, he asked me to type in the open-weather website to the Notes on his phone.
2024-07-23 12:28:13
Sasha Engelmann
Tide Square, North Greenwich , United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
We woke up to dark skies again, but the air remained warm, humid. On my way to Southwark Bridge for a morning appointment it began to drizzle-rain and city-workers clutched their goose-bumped arms. Hours later I unfurled my antenna on the 'Tide River Walk' in North Greenwich, and almost immediately began to hear and receive an air traffic control downlink on a frequency overlapping with that of NOAA-18. A young man agreed to take some photos, and then went back to leaning on the railing, meditating on the water. Charli XCX's 'Brat' bounces through my headphones for most of the afternoon as I ride the overground and express mail some open-weather kit to Berlin. "When you're in the party b-b-bumpin' that beat / 666 with a princess streak..."
2024-07-22 11:37:21
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
It is very windy today - the kind of surprising wind that gusts and blows in corridors. It was a struggle with my Yagi antenna, as it catches the air so easily, and at several points almost took me sideways with it. The tape measure joints swung at odd angles from the wood stick. An older woman and a small, white, curly haired dog were meandering nearby and I waved to say hi. We ended up speaking for most of the satellite pass. After considering my antenna for a few minutes she said: "the satisfaction... it gives satisfaction" and then "it's contact". I completely agreed.
2024-07-21 18:59:29
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
I wake up having had a nightmare, but it is really a memory of a real event that was playing out in my dreams. In the memory, I am seeing one of my PhD students get publicly attacked by a senior professor (who is also someone I respect and in some ways depend on). I run through all the ways I could have acted differently in that moment. I visualise myself standing up in front of the room and hitting back. It plays and plays, until I manage to have breakfast. By lunchtime, though, I am lost in the flow of an article I'm trying to finish before holiday. As a visual contribution to the article, after lunch I experiment with making a satellite image (one that features a current of 'Saharan Dust' moving northward over the Mediterranean) into a 'thaumatrope': an analog, double sided, spinning device that creates an optical 'illusion' of blurred borders, animated shadows, and miscible surfaces. It feels good playing with a satellite image not on a digital screen (as I overwhelmingly do in open-weather) and rather in tactile, DIY form, using a tool that is reminiscent of children's games. For me, the thaumatrope creates a kind of optical 'irritation' of moving forms, nebulous shapes and shadows, and disappearing or fading-out land and sea edges. It also seems to 'agitate' the cartographic orientation devices that we use when we see the coastline of North Africa and the 'boot' of Italy. Writing of images of the monsoon, Harshavardhan Bhat writes, "Satellite images empowered by spectroradiometer science and international coalitions begin to not just inform the science of the state but the imaginary that the monsoon unifies the entity called South Asia as part of a planetary system... This is a gift to political theory as the monsoon then becomes this technology through which the planetary infrastructure of surveillance and governance slowly unfold, silencing the complex work of the air of the monsoon" (2022: 240). Does the thaumatrope help to destabilise the 'unified entity' of the Scirocco or Jugo wind that brings 'Saharan Dust' to Europe? Does seeing a satellite image flicker and blur between channels demonstrate something about the 'slippages' of materials and elements in satellite imagery, inviting us to see beyond the 'optical ontology of pixels'? In contrast to a regional 'event', can we recognise something about the 'complex work of the air'?
2024-07-19 11:37:22
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
It was too hot to be in the sun so I perched on the edge of a pool of shade made by a plane tree. A man in a track suit who is a kind of local figure in the neighbourhood - often seen balancing on post boxes, tall gates and bus benches doing dance moves that resemble Tai Chi, always in a full track suit - walked by, waved and said 'So I expect you're listening to the Gods??' 'Yes sort of!' I replied, hoping he would understand I was joking. 'Nice one!' he replied, and then followed with "I like your glasses!!!'. 'Thanks!' I said, and remembered how I had gotten my sunglasses at the 'Accessorize' shop in Kings Cross station while waiting for a train a few summers ago. Another man in a neat vest, jeans and glasses approached me a few minutes later and quietly asked what I was tracking. After I replied, he exclaimed 'And I thought I had an interesting job!!' 'What's your job?' I asked. He said 'Oh I park cars... BMWs... train driver too'. He went on his way.
2024-07-18 11:51:41
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
I've spent all day writing, and my thoughts are swirling around ideas of memory, wind, history, and the way wind makes 'traces' and 'marks' in satellite imagery. The article I'm editing feels to have its own weather too, one of 'rabid gales', blue vanishings, wind-blown dust, 'pigments and mist' and vast differentials in temperature and pressure, pulling air into all sorts of space and corners.
2024-07-17 10:58:28
Sasha Engelmann
Founder's Field, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
In the field that has been turned in to a parking lot for university graduation services, I link up my v-dipole, dongle and android. A maintenance man or security guard sitting in a blue van looks on with a bemused expression, but mostly he ignores me and talks on the phone. The air is warm for the first time in weeks and it is such a relief from the cold, rainy, at times torrential rain we have had in the U.K. Later in the afternoon I show my satellite image to SB, a physical geographer who specialises in studying past climates through tephra (volcanic ash). He points to the wavy line of the increasingly wobbly jet stream and explains how, with the poles warming faster than the equator, the difference in temperature and pressure that stabilises weather and holds the jet stream north is decreasing, causing the jet stream to curve and bend south more and more, bringing moisture laden air from the Atlantic to Northern Europe - this describes our recent weather experiences. Now that I’ve seen the curve of the jet stream with SB’s help I want to look back to all of the past imagery and try to spot it. Meanwhile, he says, ‘anywhere below 40 degrees (latitude) is burning’. Soph is just back from holiday and describes a level of heat in Croatia over the last week that was at the limit of their physical health. It doesn’t take much for heat to stress London- on my tube journey home, the air is so stifling that people are visibly haggard, some using makeshift fans and others flushed read and eyes closed, waiting for their train.
2024-07-16 12:15:09
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
It poured last night, the kind of rain that quickly overwhelmed London's drainage system and caused pond-sized puddles on street corners and walkways. Somewhat fittingly, T and I were drenched in it while cycling home from a 'psychoanalysis and climate disaster' seminar at a pub in Finsbury Park. The conversation had been circuitous, and the speaker, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, had shared her research about the shift toward spiritual activism and intentional communities in Portugal testing different forms of spirit-informed collectivity. She kept saying that this research, or the research materials themselves, were 'embarrassing'. This was raised in the discussion- what is the root of our embarrassment when we talk about somatic practices or dance forms that give us more awareness of each other, or spiritual practices that give us room for wonder? Someone raised a theory from a source I can't remember that the earth has created beings with fully self-conscious brains - capacities to be embarrassed - in order to self-destruct on a planetary level. No reference was made to the many forms of human awareness and community that have not self-destructed, that are still trying to prevent destruction. I felt uncomfortable raising this point in the midst of so many unfamiliar, intimidating people, and because who am I, a white academic, to be the one to say 'aren't we forgetting indigenous lifeways and laws' when we theorise self-conscious self-destruction? I was reflecting on this during my satellite pass today. In the middle of it, two tall men in black t-shirts and knee-length shorts walked across the field staring at me so I smiled and waved. They came over and started asking questions. I was sitting on the grass holding my antenna upright and listening to the sound of the satellite on my Android phone. They approached very near but stayed standing, so I had to look vertically upward to see their faces. Their tall, looming shapes were outlined against the bright, cloudy sky. As I explained the tape measure Yagi and the passing satellite, one said, 'So are you an artist?' I keep wondering what sparks this question, as I have received it repeatedly over the last six months. Is it the fact that I use the word 'DIY'? Is it that I don't look like the type of person who is doing research or science?
2024-07-15 12:25:50
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
Low-hanging, medium-grey cloud with a light drizzle that grew into light rain as I knelt on the grass. The sound of a car-sized grass mower in the distance. Damp ground. Despite the un-summerlike conditions, the park was full of primary school children running races and exercising. As soon as one group saw me and came over to ask what I was doing, I became a magnet for others. One girl asked if I was 'traveling the world... with that thing [pointing to the antenna]?' I said in some ways, I was, but also, I was just listening to the world. Another small girl simply picked up my antenna and raised it to the sky, winking slyly at her friends, while the accompanying adult said 'you should ask first!'. But I appreciated their forwardness. As they huddled around, I showed them the growing satellite image and pointed to different countries so they could try identifying them. The answer was 'I don't know... ' until it turned out they did know. Among the parents or chaperones, several asked further questions and wanted to know how to follow the project. I had to hurry to pack up in between two waves of visitors to avoid disappointing anyone.
2024-07-14 12:40:13
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
In 1989, Derek Jarman wrote of a day in July: "Lazy high summer. The drowsy bees fall over each other in the scarlet poppies, which shed their petals by noon. Meadow browns and gatekeepers flutter wearily across the shell-pink brambles disputing the nectar with a fast bright tortoiseshell. The bees clamber hungrily up the sour green woodsage. Drifts of mauve rosebay and deep yellow ragwort studded with orange and black burnt caterpillars" (Jarman, 1991: 107). This morning I read an article in the Guardian about the rate and long-term advancement of mass insect death. Based on research on the number of insects killed on the number plates of cars, the study says we have 90% fewer insects in the UK today than we did 100 years ago. During the satellite pass at midday, I note how the recently cut grass of the park has given way to a low layer of clover and dandelions, and how bees fly between the clover, only a couple centimetres above the grass, sometimes bumping into each other and weaving between the higher leaves of grass. Other than the random lazy fly, I don't see any other pollinators. Butterfly populations are especially affected this year, apparently, in part due to the very wet spring-summer that has washed out many of their homes. Derek was already aware of the changing climate in 1989, as he sometimes mentions the warming air and the 'hole in the ozone layer'. I wonder if he knew about mass insect death, though from his descriptions of the cottage garden in Dungeness, he was seemingly at home with a kaleidoscope of insect companions.
2024-07-13 12:52:06
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
Grey, clouded, though lighter than yesterday. I noticed a thin, middle-aged man sat on a bench was watching me with my Yagi antenna. When I set my antenna down at the end of the pass, he walked over. He started with 'Just checking... you were tracking UFOs with that thing?'. I smiled and waved my hand in a 'sort of' gesture. As he turned to walk away I said 'I'm happy to show you what I've got?' and he veered back and sat on the grass near my laptop. We looked at the satellite image together. I pointed at the outlines of France, Spain and North Africa. He exclaimed 'Oh yeah, you're into weather!!' and he added 'I'm into weather too, always have been!'. 'How come?' I asked. He replied 'You can spell Rain, Cloud and Sun with my name... also Oak, Acorn... all the elements!' 'What's your name?' I asked. He replied 'Frances S ...' and a last name that I don't recall that begins with a 'K'. 'All the elements, then!' we laughed. He said 'Well keep lookin out for those UFOs' and I replied 'If I listen to any, I'll let you know!' And off he went, walking fast, south into the park. As I packed up I heard him yell to a man on a bike 'EH!! you have a GOOD DAY!!' As I walked home I thought about which elements I could spell with my name. By counting my middle name (Hildegard) I came up with 'shade', 'shine' 'hail' and 'snail'...
2024-07-12 10:20:14
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs Funfair, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
Low-pressing grey again. A feeling of melancholy. I'm missing Soph's presence on zoom calls and text channels. I go searching for the funfair in the northwest corner of the park. It has not yet been activated, but I can see people walking around inside, checking and testing things. I capture a satellite image with my Yagi antenna and Android phone, kneeling in the yellow grass. After the pass, I circle the perimeter of the fair, and notice that there is a line of trailer vans and mobile homes on the far side, facing the overground train tracks. Laundry is flung on the metal fence that divides the funfair from the park, or on small drying racks set up outside semi-ajar car doors. I hear a man speaking at an elevated volume on the phone. He says something like 'I thought I had 2 points! where are my points!' I realise, then, that the funfair is an entirely mobile operation: all the big machines are transported on two very large, glossy red trucks, but the real 'infrastructure' are the staff who likely follow in their vans and mobile homes. I wonder how many places they go. As I walk back to Downs Road I pass a couple walking their greyhound. As I pass I can hear the woman say to her partner 'Oh yes that's the lady with the...'
2024-07-11 11:35:36
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
As we lift the blinds in the morning, T says 'what does it mean if the sky is blue!? I don't remember...' and we laugh at the fact that we have not seen a sliver of blue for what seems like weeks in the middle of the UK summer. A funfair is being constructed in Hackney Downs: the rides, swings and other contraptions make silhouettes against the blue on one side of the park. A man comes over to speak to me during the satellite pass, and comments 'you know I see people doing all kinds of things in the park - sitting, walking, like them [motions in the distance] but I never seen this!'. Later in the day, as we are cycling home from a pub on Columbia Road, the black outlines of the funfair machines, resting silently in the park, remind us of a horror film.
2024-07-10 12:25:14
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
It is a grey, energy-less, dark-clouded day. My thoughts, however, are with the pale blue skies, swift winds and coastal swamplands of Buenos Aires as I re-read my field notes written during the month of fieldwork I carried out there last spring. As I make my way through my fast cursive handwriting, sometimes having to puzzle at words, I remember how breathlessly I wrote these notes, trying to record and remember everything. It mostly works. As I close-read, I am transported visually and sensually to Villa Inflamable, the community close to the centre of Buenos Aires that is the site of the research I am doing with a team of collaborators in Argentina. My colleague / friend Joaquin had taken me to VI after a morning spent on the rooftop of my other collaborator, Debora, eating pancakes and experimenting with radio antennas. There was not a speck or glimmer of cloud in the sky- and it was a wide open horizon. It took Joaquin and I only 12 minutes to drive from Debora's house to VI. My field notes read: "We arrived in the midst of heavy vehicle traffic - large tank trucks, mostly with Shell on them, entering and leaving the petrochemical facility. We passed to the right of a large sand dune - a sand production facility- there were thick clouds of dust in the air". From the open clarity of Debora's rooftop, it was a different experience being on the ground in VI. We walked around the neighbourhood with Claudio Espinola, a long-term activist and organiser in the community who also helps to ration water to families (the 'running' water is undrinkable, so families get a number of bottles of water per week). VI, like much of Buenos Aires, is on marshland, and we passed many pools of water and algae-covered ponds. The streets had been recently paved, but this had caused water-runoff problems and a man in a car told us he would prefer the dirt road if the sewage would not flood the streets. Later, as Joaquin and I left Claudia and made our way to an air quality monitoring station not far from the community, "We passed a plant that Joaquin suspects is where they began burning medical waste during the pandemic. It looked very old and dilapidated. Joaquin suspects that environmental regulations were relaxed during the pandemic to enable the repurposing of these kinds of incinerators. We also passed a smaller river - maybe 20m wide - that looked like slow-moving cement. There was on oil slick on top. Claudia had compared the river to cement too". I thought about who made the decision to start burning medical waste in an out-of-order incinerator in an already impoverished and environmentally stressed community like VI. I thought about what it takes to turn a river into cement. I also thought about the divergences in the experiences of people in this community and those only a few blocks away, somewhat sheltered from the 'weather' of the petrochemical facility. I thought about the 'weather' of Villa Inflamable, the weather of flammable. In a recent article on perceptions of air in Mumbai, two scholars write: "For the state, flammability is the result of the residents themselves. It is them, and their forms of work, that create fire risks, and so it is they who need to be removed. Residents, on the other hand, attribute causality to the gases that the garbage ecology itself produces. They are acutely aware of how the state has aligned blame in an opportunistic way with them rather than the material hazards of place, poverty and labor" (Tripathy and McFarlane, 2022: 12). From my fieldnotes alone (and without any experience of living in VI) the causality of the environmental toxicity in the neighbourhood is shockingly clear, yet my colleague Debora has written extensively of the 'labour of confusion' produced when residents of VI are told their environment isn't so toxic, or that nothing can be done about it. This is about perception indeed, and it is about whose perceptions are taken to mean 'truth' or 'causality' and whose are seen to trouble the order of things. I spend most of the day co-writing a draft chapter with Debora, returning in my memory to VI, trying to articulate in words the causalities and breathing relations at work there.
2024-07-09 12:01:53
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
The gloomy weather in London persists. Yesterday, upon return home from the Isle of Wight, T and I joked that it felt like the summer was already over- our holiday had lasted two days, and now it is October again. It feels surreal to think that we still have some time in the Adriatic planned for later in the summer. It feels surreal to think of a 'normal' summer at all, at this point. I spend the morning organising open-weather finances in the university finance system called, fittingly, 'Agresso'. I manage to extricate myself from Agresso to go outside for a satellite pass- finding a slow, languid drizzle. Under a tree in the east-side of the park, my Yagi struggles to pick up the signal in the beginning of the pass, as if even the radio spectrum is sluggish, radio waves moving slower than the speed of light through this water-logged air.
2024-07-08 12:50:43
Sasha Engelmann
Ferry from Ryde to Portsmouth, The Solent Channel, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
We made the 12:45 ferry to Portsmouth with one minute to spare, and opted for the 'sun deck' despite the total absence of sunlight. The deck felt more inviting than the humid, dark interior of the boat with airplane-like seats and sullen-looking people. We ate cheese and pickle sandwiches that neither of us liked very much. A NOAA-19 pass began just three minutes after the boat's departure. Though the maximum elevation was only 18 degrees to the west, I decided to try anyway, having never received a satellite image while moving in water! It worked far better than anticipated- I curled the legs of the V dipole antenna tripod around the metal railing, and a few minutes later the signal was ringing-in clearly. I wondered how my trajectory on the boat was affecting the image reception, if at all. A young man who had also come up to the deck asked if he could take a photo of me with his analogue film camera. He had travelled to the Isle of Wight for the weekend to 'see the stars'. Yet he also admitted to being 'very out of it' and having had 'little sleep'. He lamented the rise of Starlink and the other ways we are 'ruining the planet', and didn't say much more. When we approached the port, the clearly audible signal of NOAA-19 cut out sharply for a few seconds, so much so that I briefly wondered whether the satellite had stopped transmitting or glitched for these seconds. My experience of noise is normally a little 'softer', more like a gradient than a cut.
2024-07-07 12:31:03
Sasha Engelmann
Buddle Inn, Niton Undercliff, Niton, Isle of Wight, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
Crawww crawwww the crows spoke as they lifted and tumbled off their roosts along the cliff edge and fell into the strong westerly wind as if it was a blanket, finding shape as a flock seconds later. T and I were several hours in to a hike along the coastal path of the Isle of Wight and the silvery sea was shadowed by elaborate fast moving clouds. The weather forecast had predicted rain and yet we were in the sun most of the day. Our shoes and hands were speckled with the chalk that is characteristic of the island, and our legs happily tired. We learned about the local footpaths and the 'right to roam' across farmland. We also learned about the nettle and bracken that tower several metres high at points along the coastal edge, and send spikes into our ears and our shoes. We learned about some of the locals, too. Earlier in the afternoon, as we paused along the edge of a road to discuss our route, an older man tending a garden asked where we were from and if we needed help. We said we were from London. He said 'no your not!' so we had to explain further. The previous day, in the toilets of a seaside cafe, a bride-to-be looked at T and cried out very loudly and mockingly - 'are you a BOY or a GIRL??!' T found it funny. I ran through angry retaliations in my head for several minutes, then let it go. Back at the cliff, we lay in the tall grass as the crows swirled around us and T did some deep listening. I told T that I felt like falling off the cliff, it felt so tempting to follow the crows.
2024-07-05 12:56:19
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
Last night on BBC weather, the presenter kept comparing current temperatures in the UK to what they 'should be' this time of year. The general trend was toward colder, wetter weather across England, Wales and Scotland. London's average in the first week of July is normally somewhere around 24 degrees C apparently, and it is currently rainy and dark, with a high of 18. As he reported this, the presenter even seemed a bit embarrassed, as if it was an awkward secret he was revealing. I met Muffin Man and a new miniature-Pomeranian rescue, Moonpie, out on the downs in the morning. When I went back out in the early afternoon, a very large, triangular rain cloud approached my ground station from the southwest side of the park, and fat drops began to fall on my antenna. They seemed unusually pendulous. I wondered whether warmer temperatures and the current humid conditions mean that drops grow larger before they fall.
2024-07-04 10:18:03
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
Finally the grey has passed and a crisp wind has blown away most of the low-hanging, misty clouds. The air has a sharp chill, but one that will fade soon, I suspect. I am reminded of Derek Jarman's weather note on June 4th 1989 (from his diaristic book Modern Nature) which, though clearly of another time, place and month, describes today's weather perfectly: "The billowing white flowers along the shore are gone; but the mountainous white clouds in the blue sky and the horses breaking across a silvery sea cheer their memory to the echo. Today wind and sunlight fill the landscape with laughter. An old window opened in the wind and sent the cobwebs flying. The grasses are clapping - even the seagulls loop the loop".
2024-07-03 10:29:29
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
It is another grey, misty and cold-ish day in London. I spend the morning working and take a brief break to capture a satellite image. A curly haired black dog tackles me and rolls around on my laptop as I am mid-pass. His owner looks mortified but as soon as I say it's not a big deal he becomes interested in my antenna, and it turns out he used to be an engineer, working with Radar. We don't speak long. Later in the afternoon, I see the weather from the seventieth floor of the Shard (a sneaky birthday-week adventure with T, who has wanted to go to the top of the Shard for years but is always too anxious of the elevators). We rise sixty floors in what feels like five seconds, our ears popping. At the top, T and I carefully approach the knife-edge, holding on to the metal beams for reassurance. After a few minutes, though, we have our foreheads pressed against the glass gazing in every direction. A stranger offers to take photos of us. Though the view might be more stunning on a sunny day, the changeable clouds and shifting rain are spectacular, and we try to time how long a rainy cloud takes to pass over London. It sort of dissolves rather than making it the whole way. There are only a few other people, and so plenty of space to circle all edges and study all perspectives. Descending, we go on a hunt for an ivy-coloured wall on an old building at Kings College that we could see hidden a few blocks away from St Thomas' street. Once we find the wall, we spend a few minutes admiring the density of the ivy, its even spread and growth over red brick, nearly engulfing the entire building.
2024-07-02 10:41:06
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
The day starts cold, gray and misty. During the satellite pass, I feel chilly in my Mom's flannel-lined denim jacket, jeans and boots. How is this the second of July, I think. In the slow-loading satellite image, the sun glints tantalisingly, catching its own reflection over the Mediterranean. I am wondering where Soph is at the moment, as they left for a two-week holiday on Sunday. I think somewhere in Croatia, soaking up sunrays and salty air. Thinking about it makes my heart hurt, both with happiness that Soph is there on holiday, but also with a feeling of deeply missing the Adriatic and especially the small bay called Zaraca, near the village Gdinj where my Baba grew up on a remote part of the island of Hvar. Is it possible to miss an atmosphere, or a weather pattern? Is it possible to be nostalgic for places, less through their material surfaces and more through their elements? Having spent so many long summers in Zaraca as a child, having climbed the windy road that goes from the bay to the sparsely populated village Gdinj, with its fig trees and olive groves, with its tunnel spiders catching impossible flecks of dew in the dry landscape and epic cumulonimbus clouds dancing over the Karst rock of the mainland, and wtih its slantwise sunlight that remains until the last drop (since the road climbs on a south-facing slope) I feel so entwined with this weather. It is perhaps easy to say on a day like this in London, as I shiver through my trousers in the first week of July. Yet I think there is something beyond the beauty of Hvar and the Adriatic Sea that I am missing so much. Maybe it's a direction I will always turn.
2024-07-01 10:57:13
Sasha Engelmann
Meadow near the Biological Sciences Bee Apiary, Royal Holloway University of London , United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
Bees, flies, ladybugs and other insects buzzed around my ground station, located near to the Biological Sciences bee apiary in a meadow on the campus of Royal Holloway. One long-winged fly, looking like a cross between a grasshopper and a moth, landed on my keyboard. Purple-pink cornflowers and daisies bloomed abundantly in the uncut grass. I remembered Jaime Sebastians' story that he had recorded the sound of a NOAA satellite together with the chirping of crickets or cicadas, and he could 'see' the chirrups in the resulting image. I resolved to return to the apiary one day and attempt a recording of both an orbiting satellite and honeybees.
2024-06-30 18:05:38
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
'So humid' proclaims T as we walk to Hackney Central to catch the overground to Stratford on a rare trip to the Westfield Mall. The air is misty with a light rain, though it is just as warm as it has been under bright sun for the last week or so. On the overground, two Moms are taking a large group of young boys paintballing. We arrive at the Mall hoping to be early enough to evade most crowds, but we find we are not the only people waiting for the Adidas store to open at noon. As soon as the metal gates have been pulled back, throngs of people enter, and it is almost impossible to locate and calmly try on shoes. We persevere in JD, Footlocker and Office before both me and T begin to feel physically unwell from the press of the crowds, the 'hall of mirrors' that is every sports apparel store, the stress of finding our way around, and the ultra loud grime tracks that are booming from every corner (though some lyrics have clearly been redacted for children's ears). We flee after no more than 45 minutes and head home, shoeless.
2024-06-29 12:27:48
Sasha Engelmann
West Hackney Recreation Ground, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
Dalila and I were relaxing on the grass of the garden around the corner from the Stoke Newington Farmer's Market (while I held up my V-Dipole antenna to casually capture a NOAA 18 pass) when a tall man suddenly interrupted us, asking what I was tracking. Within seconds he had laid himself down on the grass between me and D, head towards my laptop, and was asking a flurry of questions. I appreciated his curiosity, but the way he had just placed his body in the middle of our private conversation was annoying. It transpired that he was an academic in the sciences, though I can't remember the exact field, employed by Queen Mary University. When I mentioned later in the conversation that I work at Royal Holloway, he immediately asked "And you live in East London? Why don't you work at Queen Mary?!". I said I would love to have the option of a job at Queen Mary, things weren't that simple! Another tall man came over a few minutes later and asked similar questions, while the first one loaded the open-weather website on his smartphone. Yet as soon as he read the blurb, he exclaimed to his friend "Oh this is not for us... it's a 'feminist experiment'....". I replied actually, it was exactly for them. "I'll have to tie my hair back" said the first man. The second seemed to understand what I had said and backed me up. But at this point my feeling in speaking to them had completely changed- they had now separated me and D, and taken up a long stretch of time, while making remarks like the above. I decided to close my laptop.
2024-06-28 09:06:47
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
Last night I finished 'The Well of Loneliness' by Radclyffe Hall, first published (and then banned because of its lesbian content) in the UK in 1928. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, a woman from a rich family who, in the words of the time, demonstrates "sexual inversion" from an early age. Her life story moves from the rejection of her mother and expulsion from her home in the English Countryside, to driving an ambulance in World War II, to moving to Paris where she can live a little more openly with her partner Mary. To find places where they can be and dance in public, Stephen and Mary visit 'the bars' in Paris where queer people can go without fear of prosecution, yet these places are also full of despair, substance abuse and sadness. At the end of the book, and though it breaks her heart, Stephen pushes Mary away from her, as she sees that Mary could have the possibility of a 'normal' life with a man called Martin. In the last few lines of the book, Stephen, in anguish, pleads to God: "give us also the right to our existence!". I think of how much has changed in the 100 years since the publication of The Well. I can live together with T, I can live an openly queer life, and I can freely access and read this book. Yet the 'pull' of 'normal' has not lost its strength. Society's 'straightening devices' work in new and different ways today, but they still work. Living obliquely or 'slantwise' requires unusual and surprising effort at times. And in an even odder development, queer identities and politics are now being used to 'pinkwash' the actions of corporations or governments committing acts of violence. In many ways, and in Ahmed's terms, society today might be oriented 'to' different things on the surface, but in many ways it is still oriented 'around' the same 'straightening' logic.
2024-06-27 09:35:31
Sasha Engelmann
Between Queens and Schilling Buildings, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
I awoke this morning not having slept because of the heat. T and I had left the bedroom and living room windows open but there was little breeze. In the middle of the night, the bedroom blinds started knocking against the window and I dreamed someone was trying to get in. Foxes screamed (or intensely rejoiced?) at 3am in the garden. In Waterloo station at 7:30am, an old, bearded, probably homeless man stood still with his eyes closed in the middle of the river of city commuters emerging from the tube and walking to the train platforms. I had to cross the current by hopping a few feet at a time through moving bodies in order to speak to him. He had an American accent but I shied away from asking about his origins. He didn't open his eyes when he spoke. By the time I bought him a coffee, he had got another one from someone else. We joked about the double coffee situation before I re-entered the commuter river. When I left he had opened his eyes, gazing straight ahead.
2024-06-26 11:22:27
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
It's a hot, hot, hot day in London. People are bravely tanning on the grass in the park, though I imagine some might be roasting. The moment T and I wake up, we open all the windows in our second floor flat. T says, 'we need a storm'. I had brought out my turnstile antenna because, based on yesterday's image, I wondered if there might be more dust over the Mediterranean, and as the NOAA-18 pass was relatively low elevation (35 degrees to the East) I guessed I would see 'farther' than with my DIY yagi. Was Soph already 'seeing the dust', I wondered? As the pass got started, Nutmeg appeared suddenly, circling my ground station, and I turned around to see Bill and a woman walking toward me. Katherine had been briefed by Bill on my satellite ground station and open-weather, and complemented the project. We agreed that, 'you meet all sorts in this park' and 'you learn so much from chatting to people'. I mentioned my interest in seeing the dust, and Bill asked how many tons of dust actually travel in the air? Millions or trillions of tons? He spoke about an analysis he had seen about how long it takes mountains to erode into the rivers and the sea, and explained how scientists had measured weathering down the Colorado River by stringing a kind of line across it and taking many disparate measurements over time (I think). The takeaway was that it will take many millions of years for the mountains to return to the sea, but it will happen eventually! Bill asked whether my laptop was overheating, and I knelt down to hear the internal fan whirring at a high rate.They stayed a few more minutes before Bill said he needed to take Nutmeg to the shade. Later, remembering Bill's questions about dust, I read that "The Sahara is the largest source of aeolian dust in the world, with annual production rates of about 400-700 x 10^6 tons/year, which is almost half of all aeolian desert inputs to the ocean" (Wikipedia). That's 400,000,000 tons of dust per year. I wonder how much is airborne in any given 'dust' event. Or, phrase differently, how much air suspends the dust?
2024-06-25 11:37:32
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
Today has been sunny and bright, but I've been fighting a sharp headache: taking pain killers, taking breaks and moving slowly, but nothing has worked. The one thing that might 'work' is to stop working. Hence why my weather note ends here.
2024-06-24 18:56:11
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
Hackney Downs was golden and glowing this evening, as the city held on to its heat. My arms and shins throbbed slightly from a fast cycle ride from Bloomsbury. I thought about my meeting with J earlier today. We had sat in Russell Square on an uncomfortable metal table, discussing place-based weather knowledges, hierarchies in academia, performance journals and practitioners, and a possible open-weather automatic ground station in Western Australia. J mentioned many collaborators, institutions and places who I imagined with fictional appearances and atmospheres. As I recorded the satellite pass, reflecting on the possible station in Australia, two people came over to speak to me. They appreciated the measuring tape. Their names were Alex and Tamsin, and Alex kindly took the attached photo (thanks Alex!).
2024-06-23 12:02:01
Sasha Engelmann
St Patrick's Catholic Cemetary, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
On my way to meet H at Leytonstone Library to see Graeme Miller's radio-borne sound work about the M11 link road, I stopped for a satellite pass at St Patrick's Catholic Cemetary. I had wanted to visit this cemetary for a long time, as it is situated on the prime meridian, 0.000 Longitude. Signs ringed the cemetary suggesting activities were heavily regulated - 'No Exercising or Picnics' 'Cemetary Open For Viewing Graves Only' and one sign that said the cemetary was regularly spraid with toxic chemicals for weeds, and people should wash hands after visiting. I initially put off the thought of collecting a satellite image until I had walked into the cemetary and found a quiet place to sit and reflect. I carefully unfurled my radio antenna. I thought of what I would say if someone asked me what I was doing- 'I'm doing a kind of ritual' or 'I'm just listening' or 'I'm performing a seance, I do this at cemetaries '. Though I am not religious, I said a small prayer to request access to the radio spectrum from the cemetary's residents. An hour later, walking a twisting route along the M11 road and holding radio receivers to the sky, the voices of people whose houses had been demolished to make way for the road emerged and disappeared in radio static. H and I learned the story of a woman who loved a five hundred year old Mulberry Tree that was still standing today, though instead of a communal garden, it is now in a Tesco car park. We heard other stories of older people who had to move out of their houses of forty years, and didn't know where they could go. 'Lonely' was repeated by several voices. The M11 road made a constant background hum, an incessant current of noise alongside our attempt to listen.
2024-06-22 11:03:52
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
At the Restore Nature Now march in London today, signs read, 'To Bee or Not to Bee', 'Hey Kier OR Rishi! Bee Radical for Nature!', 'UK Arms Sales Destroy Life and Environment', 'Protect Essex Badgers!' 'I Just Really Like Bugs', 'SOIL not OIL', and 'No Justice, No Peas' (accompanied by a drawing of wailing peas). As the march wound South toward Piccadilly Circus, a burst of cheering led my partner and I to cross to the other side of the current of marching bodies, where we found a 'Dyke March' going in the opposite direction on the other side of the road. Their signs read 'Choose Butch. Choose Femme. Choose a Big Fucking Lesbian', 'Lesbianism is not a choice, it is a Blessing!', 'Dykes Against Occupation', 'Whose got a Wand and a Rabbit?', and 'Dykes For Trans Rights!'. Our allegiance to the XR march was seriously challenged! T said 'OMG, there's Stav B!', (legendary artist and performer who used to host underground nights for queer womxn in east London). We barely resisted jumping the street barrier and carried on in the Restore Nature Now crowd. An couple hours later, after meeting one of my old College friends in a pub near the Thames, we found ourselves on the southside of the river at Southbank Centre, where we stumbled upon a stage where people were gathering for a set of acts on the theme 'Queer C*ntry', part of Chaka Khan's curation of Meltdown Festival. There were just as many cowboy hats as dolly parton wigs. Two older men, dressed in matching pinstripe shirts and blue jeans, out-danced many of the gays. A day like this, of so many frequencies, actions, and parallel mobilisations, felt like a kind of litmus test of London, like pulling three colours out of a paintbox. On a day like this, we give our gratitude to this city.
2024-06-21 12:25:31
Sasha Engelmann
Wildflower Meadow in Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
Walking through Hackney Downs at lunchtime today, in peak park-hour, my Yagi antenna was especially conspicuous. Yet I was excited to set up my ground station in the wildflower meadow which had recently begun to blossom with poppies, daisies, and many other beautiful flowers. As I didn't want to block the small paths that are cut into the meadow, I set up on an area just inside a path, where either a dog or a human or both had trampled the flowers, forming a thick mat of grass and aromatic vegetation. What I didn't properly think through was how this would look to other people coming to the meadow at lunch hour. From the path, it looked like me and my ground station were responsible for the squashed flowers. Also, me being off the path probably suggested I authorised or agreed with such flower-destroying activity. As I couldn't easily move when the pass had started, and I couldn't hide my tall Yagi antennna, I found myself exposed to all possible onlookers, park landscapers, dog walkers, mothers, and faraway judgers. Though I couldn't always see them, I heard people muttering under their breath and to each other about 'people' coming to trample the flowers. I stopped the recording early even though the pass was very high elevation and my yagi was performing great. I debated whether to post any photos at all but then decided not to hide what I did! I hope the ten minutes I spent in the off-path area of the meadow can be forgiven by humans and flowers alike.
2024-06-20 12:37:48
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
As I left the flat with my measuring-tape Yagi for the third time this week, Soph sent me a satellite image captured from Vienna this morning in which a large dust plume is clearly visible over the Mediterranean and Italy. I wondered if my DIY Yagi can pick up the dust so far away from the UK. Looking at the antenna lying on the semi-parched grass of the park, it seemed highly unlikely (how could something made of scrap materials pick up the traces of tiny particles in the atmosphere hundreds of kilometres away?). Yet despite the very weak signal received yesterday, my experience testing the antenna on Tuesday suggested it might be possible. And only thirty seconds after the satellite pass officially started, the signal from NOAA was clearly audible and visible, and only grew in strength over the next one or two minutes, so that by the time I began to angle West the signal sounded crisp. Unlike yesterday, tracking the satellite was easy, or perhaps the signal was strong enough that I didn't need to be so precise. Still, while talking to Bill who came over during the pass and kindly took both documentation photos (thanks Bill!), I did slightly dip the Yagi and noticed a drop in the signal. To my great surprise, I recorded almost fifteen minutes worth of audio, so long that WXtoImg automatically stopped recording when the satellite crested the Southern horizon. The image captures a long stretch of Atlantic weather featuring two mini-cyclones (one north of Iceland, one hovering over the north of France) and only a small part of Western Europe and Africa. The dust is out of the frame, to the East. Yet I wonder if my and Soph's images were georeferenced and composited together, might some swirls of dust be visible across both of our images? A fugitive 'weather between us' in the refractions and reflections of quasi-invisible traveling particles.
2024-06-19 16:48:07
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
This is day two of measuring tape Yagi antenna experiments. I missed all of the 'good' passes in the morning, so I tried for a NOAA-15 pass in the early evening that peaked in elevation at 17 degrees to the East. In contrast to my experience yesterday, where the Yagi effortlessly picked up the signal of NOAA-18 at a max elevation of 45 degrees to the East, this lower elevation pass turned out to be a struggle for the Yagi. I felt either I was not being precise enough with my aiming, or the pass just wasn't high enough for a signal to be well received by the measuring tape components. As I tracked the satellite, I became uncomfortably conscious that I was pointing this conspicuously large antenna almost horizontally over an open field where some young boys were playing football. I hoped I wouldn't be noticed by an anxious parent or onlooker.
2024-06-18 10:14:12
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
My first pass with a homemade, 'tape measure' Yagi antenna! I followed a design described in a YouTube video by India Rocket Girl, though I cross referenced India Rocket Girl's design with other sources for tape measure antennas and DIY dipoles. I also watched around seven YouTube video tutorials on how to solder wires to each other and to metal surfaces as my soldering skills are incredibly rusty. I lacked many of the components that India Rocket Girl uses, but made do with zip ties and metal brackets that I found at the local hardware store. Instead of PVC pipe, I used a long piece of wood that was intended for house moulding. The tape measure was an old heavy duty one that I had in my electronics box. Last night after dinner I started testing a few things, and before I knew it I was knew deep, spread all over the flat (T was away in Italy). I didn't think I had gotten it right, and I was convinced I would need to re-solder, but when I set up this morning, connected the antenna to my dongle and lifted the giant Yagi off the ground, pointing north, the signal was immediately strong! I tracked the satellite to a maximum elevation of 45 degrees to the East and then down to the Southern horizon. Toward the end of the pass a couple approached me from behind and were almost as excited as I was about the tape measure design and the image of the Mediterranean forming on my screen. Shortly after they left, Martin rode over on his bike and kindly took the photos of me shared here, very grateful for documentation of this DIY moment! More testing to follow soon...
2024-06-17 13:17:03
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
After what has seemed like weeks of rain, cold and relative darkness, today was a dramatic shift into sun and warmth. As I set up my ground station on Hackney Downs, a little grey dog around thirty metres away came sprinting over and jumped into my body, making contact with my face! One of its teeth even slightly knocked one of mine. It was a blur of curly fur for around thirty seconds during which I could hardly see my hands or antenna, and then it ran off again. I saw it go back to its owner, and then spot a sunbather on the grass that it could love-attack. Later, as I was packing up, a gorgeous Romanian sheepdog came over and sat down next to my laptop. This meant the woman accompanying him came over, and we ended up speaking for around ten minutes about satellites, data modes and encrypted / unencrypted data. I asked for some photos of 'Wookie' and she happily obliged and consented for the photos to be uploaded to the open-weather archive, on Wookie's behalf. As I left the field, more people had arrived and were cautiously undressing into swimsuits, checking the sky to see if it was really worth it. I went to the grocery store and bought portobellos, salad, cucumber, sweet potato and mochi.
2024-06-16 11:39:50
Sasha Engelmann
Intersection of Rue de Serbie and Rue du Croissant, Brussels, Belgium
Belgium
NOAA-19
Camped out at a long table at a corner cafe, and feeling quite sleepy after a late night, five of us spoke for hours about our former lives, the legacy of communism in Bulgaria and the Balkans, developments in AI, and the politics of queer spaces. I set up my ground station at a cafe table on the streetcorner and was soon the subject of many looks and glances, though people were more hesitant to approach than the evening before. When Sofie arrived and began expressing enthusiasm about what I was doing and laughing at the situation, a small throng suddenly materialised around the ground station, including a man and a young boy, and an older man who gave me a small paper card that advertised 'La Constructorium Maya': "vise à construire une pyramide astronomique, un centre de démonstration des sciences et techniques, Précolombiennes à San Marcos (Lac Atitlan) au Guatamala". The man also insisted on showing us a photo of the Lake Atitlan, which was a pearl blue surrounded by deep green hills. Yet when I search for the website on the card I find what appears to be a french organisation that researches in the materials of building construction. Ten minutes through the pass, though we were still receiving a surprising signal given the five story surrounding buildings, rain began to cover my laptop and we went back inside. I placed my open laptop upside down on the brunch table so it could dry itself out. The following hours of the afternoon was a grey, dark, rainy mist until the sky suddenly cleared and sun poured out as Sofie and I left a bookshop where we had gone to a beautiful reading of a novel featuring vampires, a gay couple, a theatre festival and a skateboarding evangelist.
2024-06-15 21:43:18
Sasha Engelmann
Outside L'Athénée bar, Ixelles, Brussels, Belgium
Belgium
NOAA-18
Sofie ran toward me in hall of the Gare du Midi in Brussels, and as soon as our bodies met we realised we were wearing almost the same thing: double denim, white trainers, a simple t-shirt. The next few minutes were a complete blur of overwhelming emotions, extreme happiness and my cheeks hurting from smiling too much. A group of us who had met at the Schloss Solitude art residency in Stuttgart, Germany during the Covid-19 pandemic had staged a reunion in Brussels, where Sofie lives. We spent the rest of the day talking at each other at hyper speed, visiting the exhibition of Belgian architect and feminist Simone Guillissen-Hoa, eating Congolese food in Ixelles, during which most of us ordered whole-fishes and plantain, speaking about life and loss in l'Athénée, and helping each other remember the many stories and moments we shared in the residency. Our experience of Schloss Solitude - a 17th century castle near a baroque forest - was particularly unusual as it happened during the second and third 'waves' of the Covid pandemic. We found ourselves - 35 artists from around the world - stranded in a castle on the top of a hill, affected by a rigorous German curfew and travel ban on movement between regions, let alone countries. Yet our 'castle of crossed destinies' ended up being some of the most memorable months of our lives, with experiments in collective living, workshops and teach-ins, dance classes, countless forest walks and excursions, mushrooms trips, meals and the making of what is now a family. When I went outside of l'Athénée to capture an image from NOAA-18, the night was late but there was still a thin light, and Sofie, Olivia and George came out with me. I spoke to a group of strangers who were immediatley interested in the radio antenna and satellite image, and we laughed in a semi photo shoot with the four of us. I wondered if the radio-borne satellite image, however noisy due to the tall surrounding buildings and angles of the city, registered the frequencies of our joy.
2024-06-14 12:14:18
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
As sudden rains wash through London today, I share the cover of a Plane tree with a Deliveroo driver, an older man with a cane, and a couple of young people playing hookie from school. We form an unlikely bunch, me crouching over my laptop to protect it from stray drops and angling my antenna to the East, and the others either on their phones or sneaking glances at me and at the sky to assess when the rain will stop. We don't speak. In the relative silence, my thoughts continue to be jarred by news of events in Argentina, received in part through Democracy Now, and in part through intermittent texts and updates from two of my close collaborators (on a community air-sensing project) in Buenos Aires. The news media (specifically the Guardian) reports in characteristic language that "Argentina’s Senate narrowly voted to approve the first set of harsh austerity measures proposed by President Javier Miliei... Police used pepper spray, water cannon and teargas against the huge crowds while demonstrators set two overturned cars ablaze and threw molotov cocktails". I think about the generic-ness of this reporting, how little it actually says about the events occurring. Or, conversely, how much it says about how often similar events are occurring. A think tank in Oslo has just released a report that states that there were more armed conflicts in 2023 than in any year since World War II. From Buenos Aires, J writes a text explaining Milei's proposed legislation, that follows months of violent executive orders: "They're changing the retirement age for women and getting rid of a retirement pensions moratorium, making it impossible for informal workers to retire. Plus, they're giving foreign extractive companies the right to litigate in foreign tribunals. These companies get access to natural resources over everyone else, even the indigenous people of Argentina, who have lived in harmony with nature long before the nation state existed. It's really tough, especially in the middle of a years-long recession and economic crisis, with poverty rising to a staggering 55%". D shares that some students from her university have been unfairly imprisoned last night, not far from her house. She tells of an audio message from the mother of one of the students who has been allowed to visit the prison, and it reveals that seven women are on the floor [of the cell] since yesterday, including the students'. 'A form of torture' D adds. All of this as Milei prepares to travel to the G7 summit, a guest of Giorgia Meloni. All of this as 50,000 new fires have been reported in Argentina the past several days, despite the winter season. I spend the rest of my day thinking about Aya Nassar's question: "we hold our breath. Where do we go from here?" (2024: 3).
2024-06-13 12:25:27
Sasha Engelmann
Founder's Field, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
On the train to the university campus this morning, I think: what might it mean to ‘queer’ air, and our relations to it? Several scholars I read and admire have recently gestured to air’s queerness. Nerea Calvillo writes about queering as a practice that is useful when we consider airborne things like pollen. Nerea writes, “Because if air is commonly pictured as an inanimate (and often toxic) gaseous entity, queering it brings to the fore the whole world of animate and invisible entities that are part of it” (2023: 240). Queering air “brings desire, multispecies reproduction and interactions, excess, and ambiguity” to the fore (2023: 241). Nerea thus figures queering air as a tactic of honouring air’s multiplicity and deviancy. Talkign about multiplicity: later in the day I am standing on tiptoes attaching an antenna to a football post while an airplane approaches Heathrow airport, flying very low over the university campus, and appearing in the corner of one of the documentation images. Minutes later, I am listening to the Russian satellite Meteor MN2-3 drown-out the weaker signal of NOAA-18. The electromagnetic trace of the Russian satellite is clearly visible in the gradations of static in the Southern portion of the image I capture from NOAA. Even later, I am “close reading close breathing” the work of poet Julianna Spahr, cited in the writing of queer theorist Lauren Berlant (2022: 101). An excerpt from Spahr’s poem ‘This connection of everyone with lungs’ goes as follows: as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space of the neighbourhoods nearby and the space of the cities in and out Earlier this week I cited Stephen Connor’s writing on the ‘spaces of observation’ created by scientists to treat air as an object, as a volume that could be controlled. Spahr’s poem offers a very different diagram of air to space, and I would argue this is a queer one. The word ‘air’ is never mentioned in the poem, yet ‘breathes the space’ arises several times. Air is an anterior, a semi-nothingness that nevertheless infrastructures lungs and spaces. Though the poem intersects scales from the space around the hand to the space of neighbourhoods and cities nearby, it doesn’t do so by ‘nesting’ scales in the way we often see in popular media and culture, where the ‘body’ is placed in the ‘local’ and this sits inside the ‘urban’. Instead, reading the poem (that spans several pages) is an interstitial experience where breath is hinged to space and space is in turn hinged to different and plural scales, from the intimate to the planetary. This is an "affective scene [that] focuses on receiving and metabolizing the world while unraveling its presumed solidity" (Berlant, 2022: 97). This is perhaps a "queer reboot of the common" (Berlant, 2022: 99) that comes about through the queering of air.
2024-06-12 12:36:57
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
Watching the satellite image load on my screen around lunchtime, it is hard for me to identify bodies of land, the characteristic sharp edge of France or the icy fingers of Norway. I am not sure if I can make out the fingerprint that is Iceland in the North Atlantic, normally so disinguishable. With my 'orientation devices' missing, I am lost to dis/orientation in the swirls of water vapour, the speckles of reflective cloud-light and the nondescript grey pressing down on me from above. Later in the day, I am reading Mel Chen's piece 'Feminisms in the Air' and in the very last sentence Chen introduces a term I have not heard before, 'melancholic pragmatism'. They write, “Out of the desperation and melancholic pragmatism of this moment, at stake are a series of questions about the “about” of feminisms whose imaginations promise something in the end” (2020: 29). I follow the footnote to read more about 'melancholic pragmatism', and find the following: ““Melancholic pragmatism” is a phrase that emerged in my conversation with philosopher and activist Alisa Bierria on October 17, 2020, about melancholies that do not end in what can be a strangely idealistic form of lossful nihilism, or that are perpetually delayed or denied, but are permitted to exist, registering layers of complexity and acceptance of inevitable complicity and incompletion” (2020: 29). I can relate to this definition of melancholic pragmatism, as it feels like the affective texture of what remains in many of my friends and family members after experiencing the winter of 2024 and the collective witnessing of war crimes in Palestine, Sudan and elsewhere. I imagine that Chen, writing in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, might have been feeling a slightly different melancholy, with different layers of 'complicity and incompletion' but nevertheless I think there are similarities, not least of which is the sense that neither nihilism or denial are workable options. Instead, we permit our ethical and moral melancholies to exist, we permit the impenetrable grey skies to press down, and we permit the understanding of a year of climate catastrophe that is only beginning to show how much of an anomaly it truly is. As my workday draws to a close around 7pm I fantastise about writing Chen an email to ask: what is your melancholy layering now? what are you permitting?
2024-06-11 12:49:55
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
Today I am reflecting on volumes of air. In the book 'The matter of air: science and art of the ethereal', Stephen Connor recounts some of the seventeenth century scientific experiments that sought to examine air. He writes: "To study an object, one must pick it out from its surroundings, and concentrate it in one place. How was one to make of the air such an object? How was the air to be picked out of its surroundings, when air was ambience itself? How was the air to be brought before one, when it was of necessity and at all times about?" (Connor, 2010: 17). To 'pick something out' from its surroundings, to 'concentrate it' and to bring it 'before one' is to orient toward it. Yet this act of orientation proves tricky when the thing one seeks to 'pick out' is 'at all times about'. Connor continues: "What if, rather than trying to roll the air up into a ball that one could look at from the outside, one were to produce a space of observation - an air-lock - within the very space of the air?" (2010: 17). Thus, in lieu of condensing air, one might work to enclose it, to create a space in which air is 'locked'. I think of all of the times I have seen air get 'locked' and I think of Robert Boyle and his Enlightenment contemporaries, trying ceaselessly to get air into glass spheres, the better to isolate, contain and observe it. I think of all the 'holds' (Sharpe, 2016) in which humans were locked in ever-dwindling air, yet whose stories are rarely considered in narratives of Enlightenment science or scholarly histories of architecture, space and volume. Could Boyle have conceived of the consequences of volumetric air? Could he have examined the vacuums he created in so many glass spheres as caught up with, rather than removed from, vacuums of airelessness for vast numbers of humans in his time and hundreds of years beyond it? As 'volumetric thinking' is put to work in Gaza every day through the use of aerial weapons from white phosphorous to CS-gas, I wonder, with Aya Nassar: "What if we linger in the gaps between fragments and shards? Is there anything there? Not in the wreckage and debris - we know that well, too well - but in the space of making dust when it is not yet the aftermath?" (2024: 3).
2024-06-10 10:09:56
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
The sunlight comes sideways today. There are low-hanging, grey and dark blue clouds circling above, and I leave the flat for the park a few moments after rain has stopped, feeling daring with my uncovered laptop. A flash of sun comes from the horizon as a gap in the sky opens for a few seconds and closes again. I can tell the moment when the sun has come out for just long enough to lure a whole hoard of dog owners and dogs outside, yet as soon as they reach the field the darkness falls again. I am in the park just long enough to see Martin who rides over on his bike, and we briefly speak about his plans to build a satellite ground station. As I work at my desk for the rest of the day, I am surprised by the slantwise light, searching through the corners of our kitchen and living room, making the whole place seem a little off-kilter, making my admin tasks feel a little surreal. I find myself turning on and off the desk lamp and living room light, unable to find optimal emailing conditions. One clap of thunder booms across the city just after lunchtime, answered by a far away siren.
2024-06-09 12:04:33
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
Pockets of deep cerulean blue shown through grey and white cloud this Sunday morning. I stole a few minutes to capture the satellite image before heading out to a local pub for a roast with my partner and one of her ex-partners who is staying with us for the weekend. As the pass was ending, a man named Paul rode over to me on his bike, and asked what I was tracking. He was suprised that the answer was satellites, as he had expected wildlife. After I asked Paul to take a photo of me (two of which are attached, thanks Paul!) he said he could show me a photo of him. The photo was of Paul next to a train with the lettering Dr Paul Stephenson on the side. 'In my dreams!' joked Paul. Later in the day I looked up the train, and found out that Dr Paul Stephenson is a well known civil rights campaigner in the UK who organised the 1960s Bristol bus boycott which overturned a ban on people from ethnic minorities working on buses in the city. Dr Stephenson's campaigns were instrumental in paving the way for the first Race Relations Act in 1965, and in 1992, he also helped set up the Bristol Black Archives Partnership, which protects and promotes the history of African-Caribbean people. Great Western Rail apparently has a programme called the 'Great Westerners' where people can be nominated to have trains named after them, as a mark of respect to contributions to UK society. I had not heard of this practice of dedicating trains, and this made me wonder whether airplanes or satellites are ever dedicated in this way. Soph and I had recently wrote a short text that includes a vignette of a woman who asks to have her name attached to a powerful storm, and it becomes Storm Babette. I had assumed that 'In my dreams' referred to the 'Dr' part of the name, but I realised maybe it was about having your name on infrastructure, or being recognised as a 'great westerner'...
2024-06-08 11:46:39
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
The air is warm but skies are grey, which has been a regular theme these last few weeks in London. A man named Rowan walked barefoot across the grassy field and introduced himself by saying "I think you can guess the question I'm going to ask you". We spoke for almost the duration of the pass, and he kindly took the attached photo of me. As I was explaining NOAA-18's Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer and how it scans Earth's surface in six spectral bands, but only two of these six are represented in the APT image appearing on my screen, I remembered an article sent to me and Soph by Bill Liles (NQ6Z) that tells the story of Virginia Norwood, sometimes called the 'Mother of Landsat', who designed the Multispectral Scanner (MSS) on board the first Landsat satellite (Landsat-1) launched in 1972. Virginia famously worked with a team to invent a scanning instrument that used a mirror moving between two 'bumpers' at a rate that allowed precise scanning of Earth's surface. According to the article in the MIT technology review, Virginia worked hard to convince NASA and other scientists of the precision of the scanner, and many were sceptical of what they called the 'banging mirror' and how it would work in space. Learning of this history, and specifically the working of the MSS, made me wonder about the relationships between the MSS scanner and the AVHRR of the NOAA fleet. My guess is that early scanning instrument knowledge of the 60s and 70s was shared across NASA and NOAA teams, since these organisations are so entangled with each other and with defense operations. I do also know from previous research that the Automatic Picture Transmission common to most NOAA satellites was first tested in 1963 on TIROS-8, almost a decade before the MSS instrument was launched on the first Landsat satellite. The experimental APT transmissions from TIROS-8 used data from 'a five-channel scanning radiometer', but TIROS-8 also carried two TV cameras (images from these cameras were either transmitted directly to US ground stations when the satellite was in range, or stored on a tape recorder until transmission). A key difference between NOAA and Landsat programmes was purpose- since its formation in 1970, NOAA operated a fleet of TIROS-type weather satellites that were intended for meteorological uses, and so were relatively low resolution. According to NASA, the innovation of Landsat was to produce higher resolution terrestrial images of earth that could be useful to understand crop distribution or even geology, and would supplement the very high resolution of land captured from airplanes. Yet Landsat has further historical relations to NOAA. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Landsat Programme, "In 1979, President of the United States Jimmy Carter's Presidential Directive 54 transferred Landsat operations from NASA to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)". Under NOAA's tenure of the Landsat programme, prices for Landsat data soared, as NOAA sought to recover costs from users. This unfortunately led to a massive decrease in Landsat data, except for very powerful and resourceful companies like those in the fossil fuel industry (though we also know that the US government gave special access to satellite imagery for fossil fuel corporations at different points in history). Much like the three still-active NOAA satellites have recently been contracted to Parsons Corporation, the Landsat programme was also temporarily privatised. "This occurred in 1985 when the Earth Observation Satellite Company (EOSAT), a partnership of Hughes Aircraft Company and RCA, was selected by NOAA to operate the Landsat system with a ten-year contract" (Wikipedia). The transition to private maintenance was not smooth, and funds were very short, so in 1989 NOAA directed the shutdown of Landsat 4 and 5. The shutdown was averted by the US Congress, which shifted policy and found emergency funding for the Landsat programme, bringing it back under the control of the government and opening Landsat data once again for widespread use. This was a well timed rescue, since Landsat 6 failed during launch and crashed in the Indian Ocean. Like NOAA-15, 18 and 19, satellites that have remained active long passed their intended lifespans, there are similar stories in Landsat. According to a 2012 article by NASA, "Despite all of the ups and downs, Landsat 5 and 7 operated far beyond their designed lives. The Thematic Mapper (TM) on Landsat 5 only recently gave out after 27 years of imaging; around the same time as TM shut down, operators managed to turn the Multispectral Scanner System (MSS) back on after years of dormancy. Landsat 7 continues its work as well, 13 years after launch". Across NOAA and Landsat, then, there are some common stories of instrumentation, orbital patterns, attempts at privatisation and the longevity of the satellites themselves. As we prepare for the decomissioning of the three still-active analogue NOAA satellites, I'd like to go deeper into the interconnected histories of satellite programmes, scanning-instrument types and the different sorts of 'publics' they were intended to serve.
2024-05-28 12:24:53
Sasha Engelmann
Downs Road, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
My senses are dulled and my body aches in a dull, persistent way that reminds me eerily of Covid. For most of the day I struggle with clouded focus and a heaviness in all of my limbs. Two lateral flow tests come back negative. I get worked up in an online committee meeting and sweat through my shirt as I wait for my 'raised hand' to be summoned. Soph wonders if I am fighting a (non-Covid) virus, and I remember the way my colleague was coughing in the office when we met on Friday. Yet what I am feeling is nothing like a 'common' cold or flu. On the way to the local health food store, we happen upon a baby fox hiding among sand bags next to a construction site. Passing me, my partner, and the fox, a man says this particular fox had been 'dropped' into his back garden by fox-parents some weeks ago and the fox's family would bring food until the little one was strong enough to jump out. What had it done, I wonder, to deserve such gentle entrapment? It peers up to us, seeming both mildly frightened and defiant. At the health food store, 'East of Eden', I browse a wall of herbal remedies, powders and cures. They have names like 'organic dog blood', 'raw moon' and 'bread nut'. I am surprised not to read 'fox tail'. I don't know what to choose and I end up with dark chocolate and bananas. I wait for my body to give me more signs - a sore throat? a fever? The full-body ache is both everywhere and nowhere, showing no signs of sharpening or waning.
2024-05-27 12:36:10
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
King of Hearts lying listlessly in the grass, crumpled from hands, wind and rain, and ripped (possibly burned?) on one of its edges. A woman and a dog walk past, and the dog makes a wide circle, looking at me inquisitively. "You must get many such looks of suspicion!" jokes the woman. A corner of Svalbard - Spitsbergen - appears at the top of the satellite image as I manage to capture the transmission from the 'High North', much earlier than usual, by standing on my tiptoes and stretching the antenna above my head and at a semi-parallel angle with the ground. I generally avoid such acrobatics as I usually run out of my flat and set up my station only moments before the pass starts, missing the noise from the North. My t-shirt threatens to come out of my denim jeans. For some weeks, a tent has been quietly living under the shade of the vines next to the bike parking area where Downs Road meets the park, and today there is a piece of laminated A4 paper saying '7 day notice'. The notice looks ridiculous strapped to the fabric of the tent with a black zip tie. The absurdity of the notice and the underlying violence it represents reminds me of D Asher Ghertner's (2020) work exploring how contemporary architectures of space and atmosphere "draw from colonial logics of bodily sequestration from outside threats". In other words, we are not just 'living' and 'breathing' the last several centuries of colonialism, extraction and exploitation building up as heat and toxicity in the air (as suggested by Denise Ferreira da Silva), we are also living and breathing "durable spatial dispositions governing how atmospheres are felt, arranged, and imagined". In other words, we are living and breathing ways of engineering and creating air/space that can be traced to the racialisation of the lungs of bodies of colour, the architectures of 'hilltop sanitoriums' where the wealthy could breathe 'clean air', and the personal technology of the air pollution mask, which has a very long history that far predates covid-19 or recent air pollution debates (Ghertner, 2020). Attempts at 'climates of enclosure' that work differently, like that of the streetcorner tent, and that engineer airspaces for those in crisis, are 'given notice' precisely because of this history.
2024-05-26 12:50:04
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
The pass started with an experience of signal flooding: Meteor MN2-3 drowned out the signal of NOAA-18 in a powerful broadcast many times the bandwidth of the analogue NOAA satellite. I could spot the Russian satellite by the characteristic 'surge' of energy that suddenly appeared around 137.9125 MHz, also the downlink frequency of NOAA-18. Only a few minutes later, I found myself speaking of another kind of flood with Ria and Philip, two Jehovah's witnesses who visited my ground station. We had a wonderful conversation about 'seeing' the satellite through radio waves and the types of clouds forming (of which Ria could identify many), and when I mentioned NOAA, Ria immediately connected the name to the Noah who predicted the great flood. I was immediately reminded of the words of Daisy Hildyard when she wrote a response to my and Soph's first open-weather performance, 'Open Work, Second Body'. Daisy begins with the story of Noah's ark as remembered by Proust: "Noah could never have had so a clear view of the world, wrote Proust, as when he gazed upon it from within his ark, sealed though it was, and when darkness was all over the Earth". Later, she describes, "that feeling that isolation and solitude can illuminate if not irradiate a feeling of the outside world". As it was for Ria, for Daisy, "it's hard not to see a gesture toward the old story of the ark that floats alone above the world it came from, a story that was also about making sense of strange weather and predicting or creating futures... a story about how different bodies weather the environment differently". As I leave the park, Ria asks if I can email her the satellite image, and of course I say yes. I think about the image as another kind of ark, floating between my laptop and Ria's, though perhaps on a journey that, by virtue of our conversation, is slightly less lonely.
2024-05-25 13:01:26
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
In a new book called 'The Nerves and their Endings: essays on crisis and response', Jessica Gaitán Johannesson writes, "For those who haven't yet experienced climate collapse in our own bodies, a history not yet written into us, the feeling [of] it arrives in the shape of shadows, an atmospheric wrongness, and harrowing predictions" (Johanesson, 2022: 6). When Johannesson refers to 'those of us who haven't yet experienced climate collapse in our own bodies' she invokes a double meaning. Those who haven't yet experienced climate collapse in a bodily way might refer to the privileged, largely global north 'us' who have yet to experience the world-endings of global heating in an immediate, visceral sense. However, since Jessica opens the book with a vignette from a hospital ward where she was treated for anorexia in her 20s, this phrase may also refer to 'those of us who haven't experienced climate collapse in our own bodies - i.e. an illness like that of an eating disorder' that is fundamentally an illness of control, but also one in which agency (the 'cause') is heavily blurred by the 'slow violence' of gradual but persistent self-harm, diet culture, fashion imagery, 'health magazines', enforced gender binaries, parents and friends too scared or busy to say anything, and the exposures of growing up in capitalism. Johanesson makes the point that by the time one ends up in a hospital ward because every day, for a long time, one has chosen death over life, the advertisers, celebrities, coaches and early childhood events are long gone- you are all that is left, and there may not be much of you left. By the time we cross 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, the 16th century colonisers of Africa and the Americas, the architects of 'development' and 'aid', and the engineers of late liberal capital, are long gone. I do think the analogy has its limits. But I wonder, with Johanesson: might it be that those who have reached the brink of inexistence (by their own means) and come back, who have responded to the harms of contemporary society by so severely harming themselves, and then returned, have something to say about 'climate collapse'? Might they see a bit further than most through 'the shape of shadows' the 'atmospheric wrongness' and the 'harrowing predictions' ? And might the tools of recovery be relevant - tools that require one, every day, long after one might be 'recovered' (as recovery 'never ends'), to consciously 'choose the world'; teachings that one is not 'in control', no matter how much control one may have demonstrated by not eating for days; and the insight that unless the world around us is nourished, we will fail to nourish ourselves.
2024-05-24 09:10:47
Sasha Engelmann
Founder's Field, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
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".
2024-05-23 11:45:30
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-05-22 11:58:09
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-05-21 10:58:24
Sasha Engelmann
Brunswick Square Gardens, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-05-20 12:22:50
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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?
2024-05-19 12:36:44
Sasha Engelmann
Private field near Leigh Woods, Bristol, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-05-18 09:51:04
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-05-17 10:03:25
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-05-16 11:34:21
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-05-15 10:29:49
Sasha Engelmann
Founder's Field, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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?
2024-05-14 10:41:48
Sasha Engelmann
Mint Street Park, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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"
2024-05-13 12:10:02
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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?
2024-05-12 12:23:03
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-05-11 12:36:42
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-05-10 11:31:05
Sasha Engelmann
Burgess Park, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-05-09 11:44:18
Sasha Engelmann
Founder's Field, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-05-08 10:16:19
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-05-07 17:57:11
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
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.
2024-05-06 10:42:23
Sasha Engelmann
Downs Road, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-05-05 10:51:28
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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...'
2024-05-04 11:04:28
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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?
2024-05-03 12:34:52
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-05-02 08:38:36
Sasha Engelmann
Myddelton Square Gardens, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
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.
2024-05-01 11:41:15
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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).
2024-04-30 11:34:06
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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...
2024-04-29 18:02:25
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
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.
2024-04-28 12:01:18
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-27 12:13:44
Sasha Engelmann
Beach of the River Thames near Trig Lane Stairs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-26 12:22:18
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-25 12:35:37
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-24 18:32:05
Sasha Engelmann
Shoreditch Park, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-15
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.
2024-04-23 12:58:47
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-22 13:11:32
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-21 11:44:23
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-20 10:34:06
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-04-19 12:08:53
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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!'
2024-04-18 12:20:59
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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'.
2024-04-17 12:35:19
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-16 12:46:32
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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!
2024-04-15 12:58:25
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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
2024-04-14 11:30:08
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-13 11:42:23
Sasha Engelmann
Saint Paul's Church Garden and Labyrinth, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-12 11:57:27
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-11 10:07:28
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-10 11:00:03
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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'.
2024-04-09 12:36:32
Sasha Engelmann
Downs Road, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
+ 1 more photo
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.
2024-04-08 12:45:57
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-07 11:36:53
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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'
2024-04-06 13:10:09
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.”
2024-04-05 11:42:53
Sasha Engelmann
Clapton Pond, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
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.
2024-04-04 10:29:25
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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.
2024-04-03 10:42:32
Sasha Engelmann
London Bridge, over the River Thames, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
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'.
2024-03-31 10:38:31
Sasha Engelmann
Via Giovanni da Udine, Latisana, Italy
Italy
NOAA-19
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.
2024-03-30 11:19:06
Sasha Engelmann
Playground at the Area di Servizio, Novara Sud, Italy
Italy
NOAA-18
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.
2024-03-29 10:06:28
Sasha Engelmann
Courmayeur, Aosta Valley, Italy
Italy
NOAA-19
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!
2024-03-28 11:42:10
Sasha Engelmann
Aire de Châteauvillain, France
France
NOAA-18
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.
2024-03-27 09:26:58
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
The last twenty four hours have been rainy in a nonstop, relentless kind of way. Today, shadows chase each other across the grass of the park as clouds give way to bright sun. My observations of shadows were interrupted by a squeeling bundle of dogs leaping by. One of the owners got upset that his dog had nipped another. For the next few minutes the park echoed with loud cry: 'Bruce!! that's THREE dogs today!!!'
2024-03-26 19:32:35
Sasha Engelmann
Downs Road, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
The sound of the satellite, low and noisy over the nighttime horizon, mixed with the sizzling of a frittata and the slicing of salad leaves.
2024-03-25 11:17:59
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
The grass in Hackney Downs has been freshly mowed either last night or this morning, and the smell is all-pervasive and enveloping, and feels even more potent given the relatively low wind. I could hear snippets of conversations across the downs (a dog walker asking another dog walker: 'poodle?!' 'no, labradoodle!'). A man walked nearby and when I smiled, he asked in an eastern european accent 'what is it'? When I replied, he asked 'are you a meteorologist'? I was surprised by my hestitation in answering, though I eventually confirmed 'no'.
2024-03-24 11:30:45
Sasha Engelmann
Springfield Park, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
I realised as I left the flat today that I was wearing all-blue: old blue denim jeans from Uniqlo, a faded blue denim jacket with a warm lining that was my Mom's and has always smelled faintly of cigarettes, a striped navy blue jumper from my partner, royal blue socks, and a blue backpack and antenna bag. In Springfield Park in North Clapton I set up my ground station in a pool of daisies. A young couple asked me if I would take photos of them with their new baby. After I did so I asked for the favour in return, ending up with about twenty very skewed photos of me crouching over my ground station. When I explained what I was doing, the man who took the photos remembered seeing a string of Starlink satellites, which for him was 'weird' and 'frightening'. We had a brief chat about satellite resistance before they continued on their stroll.
2024-03-23 11:44:08
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
The temperature dropped by at least five degrees and a cold wind is sweeping over London. I was excited to 'see the wind' from above in the cloud fronts over the North Atlantic, but my laptop died within two minutes. In the sliver of an image that I managed to capture the white fingers of Iceland are just about visible. I remembered a conversation I overheard in a hair salon earlier this week about someone's upcoming trip to Iceland. They said 'we're going now as it's so volcanic, it might not be safe soon... then again, it's such a big destination, I'm sure 'they' will figure it out'
2024-03-22 11:59:02
Sasha Engelmann
Downs Road, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
A weather system tremulous and noisy between walls
2024-03-21 12:10:23
Sasha Engelmann
Russell Square, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
On my bike ride to central London this morning, I noticed a cherry tree in full pink bloom in the courtyard of a church, and several magnolias in either late bloom or already dropping their oversized white petals. Yesterday was the spring equinox, but it feels like the singularity of spring happened some time ago. In Russell Square there were cordoned-off gatherings of bright yellow daffodils (though I wondered why it was necessary to ring these with black spokes and wire).
2024-03-20 09:12:20
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
I perched my ground station on a forked tree trunk that lies on the grass in Hackney Downs. The bark and most of the trunk is wet but, unlike fallen trees that I've seen in forests, it doesn't feel like its decomposing. I wondered whether this tree has been preserved in some way, or whether its decomposition is slowed by the relative bareness of its surroundings.
2024-03-19 09:23:53
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
In today's satellite image, the the rivers Garonne and Dardogne are very prominent, carving a dark line into the west coast of France and joining into a delta meeting the Atlantic. In the High North, Lake Onega is a pale white, suggesting it is entirely frozen.
2024-03-18 09:35:45
Sasha Engelmann
, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-19
Last night, while sitting in the corner of the park on a bench under a streetlamp, an older, long-beareded man on a bike stopped, circled around, and told me I was 'too far into the park'. He advised me to go to the edge of Downs road to be safe, and added 'you are my daughter too'. This encounter stayed with me as I went back to the park this morning for a satellite pass, and looked at the distance between the bench and the streetcorner – a matter of metres – but in the dark, perhaps much more than that.
2024-03-17 11:17:21
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
A gentle rain fell for the first half of the morning but conveniently began to let up before I headed outside to the park. The grass felt warm somehow, even though it was slick and waterlogged. As I stood with my antenna in the usual field, reflecting on the horizon, a jogger passed close by and in the space of twenty seconds we had a brief exchange. As he ran off he remarked 'the things you can do in the local park!'
2024-03-16 11:29:32
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
The sun came brightly through our windows this morning. Hackney Downs was brimming with activity, including the usual small persons' soccer practice on the open field. I set up a good distance away from the soccer, but still two balls came my way, kicked high into the air by players whose fluorescent jerseys came down over their knees.
2024-03-15 11:42:52
Sasha Engelmann
Greville Court Park and Playground, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
An animated wind is bending tree branches, ripping petals off magnolia trees and making waves in the deep green grass that has sprung up in parks, squares and pavement-free soil around Hackney. En route to a pharmacy, I stopped in a small park in between the Greville and Rogate estates. A tower block, wrapped in blue fabric, was being constructed (or refurbished) at the far side of the park, sending drilling and hammering sounds into the wind.
2024-03-14 11:55:01
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18