Broadcast

This is the farthest south towards Antarctica my body would go, although I didn't really put that together at the time I was receiving this image.

London is all glare and reflection today as a very low cloud-mist settles over the city.

This day was sunny and clear, which was very rare to see during my trip through the Southern Ocean.

The sheen of street signs, asphalt, vans, and buses makes everything more obviously aggressive and frantic.

The second mate has told be this is the grayest, stormiest research cruise he's ever been on.

As I cycle to south London after dark, a white Prius pulls out in front of my bike, so close I have to skid to a halt.

But this particular morning broke clear and bright and while it got a bit dark midday the afternoon was sunny again which offered a shadow of the ship onto the pancake ice.

When the driver looks over his shoulder, and sees me braking and motioning my fright, he hardly blinks as he merges into the centre of the road.

Later, at what would be considered night but is in fact still light, the people of the ship would all pour out onto the decks to see the last glorious iceberg patch we would end up having passed through.

The tops of tall buildings are drowned in cloud so it feels like we are living in a reduced space, the ceiling coming down.

The remainder of the time at sea would be in open ocean.

I am reminded of the fictional city Ravicka in Renee Gladman's novel Event Factory.

This is an image taken from the porthole next to my desk on the RVIB Nathaniel B.

Ravicka is a city of smoggy, ‘yellow air’ that, “vibrates around the foreigner in the street” (Gladman, 2010: 41).

Palmer on the day I imaged the weather.

Edges and borders shape-shift as the city appears to rearrange itself, or, as the main character observes, “the singing structure eludes me” (Gladman, 2010: 93).

Typically the weather decks on the ship are closed during storms like this, but I was allowed outside to take my satellite reading.

Today, in Gaza, a house was flattened in the packed Nuseirat refugee camp, while two separate strikes targeted local workers securing aid convoys.

It was so windy I had to hold onto the antenna and my computer the entire time.

US officials claim they have a 'jurisdictional dispute' with the ICJ and reject its call for arrest of Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant; another 'structure' that continues to elude.

to / desire / the world / as it is / not as / it was / falling / feather / attaches / to new life The third poem in CA Conrad's book 'Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return' makes me forget to breathe while I read it over coffee.

Whether by icy air or circulation of blood, the act of going out for a satellite pass at lunchtime managed to break a mild migraine - my first ever, I think - that had been ongoing for the last twenty four hours despite many painkillers, salves, and hours lying down.

for a moment / when the hammer / approached we thought / is that thing coming this way I think of the many 'hammers' still falling on Gaza, on Syria and Lebanon, and of the metaphor of a meteor strike as world ending event, when we already have so many- we are the fractal / drop to hear / our own / harmonics / in the muffled / underground / hum of seeds

By the time my brain and vision had relaxed from the pain enough for my senses to be alert to detail in the world, the sun had fallen.

The sky was a thin, eggshell blue when T and I woke up this morning.

I haunted the park at night, peering into blue-lit windows and noticing the ways streetlights highlighted the elegant curves of plane tree branches from below.

Two cats, a ginger and a spotted black one, were playing hide and seek in the overgrown grass of the back garden.

A faint oval-shaped pink cloud hovered over one hill of the park like an omen.

For a few hours, perhaps three or four, the sun shone in London, but the night came so quickly that every flat on the street had lamps turned on by three.

Two dogs tossed and tumbled in the dark, their paws vying for dominance and their teeth glowing.

I spent most of the day writing and thinking about projects sent to me by a network of friends and collaborators from whom I had solicited 'new and exciting work in the geohumanities beyond the US / UK'.

They were eerily quiet except for their panting breaths.

My friend Cecilie sent me a link to a project called The Conference of the Birds, a transdisciplinary, socially engaged arts collaboration named after the 12th century epic poem by Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar.

A person pushing a baby stroller walked briskly along a lit path with a tied up Christmas tree slung across their back.

Focused on the loss of birds in the High North, the project involves community based exhibitions and events in Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and North-Russia.

"You look like the old man from Back to the Future" T says to me as I head out to capture a satellite image in still-raging Storm Darragh.

Reading the conference programme, I learned that one of the participants is a twenty five year old person who left home at 17 to learn birdsong and learn to survive alone in the forest.

"You mean Christopher Lloyd?!" I ask and she smiles a yes.

Apparently they can now sing the songs of 130 different species of birds, and they continue to live outside of human dwellings.

I wonder about the resemblance as I walk to the middle of the park and set up a makeshift shelter for my laptop with one of the umbrellas borrowed from the communal umbrella area near the entrance of our building.

In their profile photo, they are pictured shoulder up, with bright blond hair in dredlocks, and a small black bird on their shoulder, to which their face is turned in affection.

No matter which umbrella I chance to grasp, I always end up with a wire poking through torn Rayon, like a featherless wing.

News came over the weekend that the Assad regime has fallen in Syria.

To keep the umbrella firmly over my laptop, and thus to protect it from random sprays of rain seeming to come from all directions and nowhere, I stood on the handle with one foot while shakily steering the antenna.

We see scenes of thousands of people celebrating in the streets, crying and cheering.

When sharp unexpected gusts threatened to carry the umbrella away from my exposed keyboard I had to lean my entire weight on top.

On Democracy Now, an interviewee refuses to 'analyse' the political moment, saying that analysis needs to be suspended while the feeling of this moment resonates.

There were a surprising number of people in the park with their dogs, so these antics were in full view.

As I look ahead to the final sprint of a writing project, for which I will be submerged in books and my laptop the whole weekend, I am inspired by the collections of geographical thinking and arts practice that I pull out of the towering pile of books on my desk's side-table.

A chocolate Labrador came bouncing over.

I read of 'volcanic polyphonies', 'magmatic languages', 'fluvial hydropoetics', 'sand saltations', 'geo-mimicry' and 'reclaiming energy flows'.

Normally I am happy to play with dogs while holding my antenna, but this one threatened to collapse my entire delicate balance in the wind.

I think about the ways in which, across scholarship and creative practice, artists and writers are amplifying the animacies and memories of the elements, from Sotaventine rivers in Mexico, to tidal islands in Scotland, to the humid 'warm fronts' of Southeast Asia.

"You nosey dog!"" I heard a woman's voice say before the wind drowned her out.

In the satellite image that I capture today from Hackney Downs, I wonder about the repeated patterns and rehearsals of clouds in the North Atlantic, and consider these patterns as another form of air's 'working memory...

When I finally got to the end of the pass and started packing up, my fingers were so icy cold they fumbled, and somehow I managed to get a slab of mud on my trackpad.

a memory of energy' (Szerszynski, 2019).

Later at Cafe Oto I saw the great poet, ritualist, mystic and queer icon CA Conrad read their poems.

The satellite image starts in darkness.

For almost fifty years, CA has travelled by car across the US, writing poems and inventing somatic rituals.

Absent of any rays of light from our nearest star, the top left hand corner of the image is almost pure black.

One of their rituals involved leaving tear off paper notes on notice boards across Philadelphia inviting people to call a number and leave a message for Elvis.

I think of NOAA-18 and its near-infrared sensors trying to capture any stray photons as the satellite crosses the Arctic circle and the Nordic countries.

Several people would call each day, some multiple times.

The darkness feels vast, like what I imagine the deep space around Earth must feel like.

Another ritual involved them bathing their body in the sounds of extinct species.

While planting a willow tree named Hildegard at the Stave Hill ecological park in South London on my lunch break yesterday, I dug into deep, black layers of topsoil.

Later they started working with the sounds of coyotes, crows and foxes: "We've got to learn to love the world we have, not the one we lost" they said.

Rebeka, keeper of Stave Hill, had inherited a mountain of rubble deposited from war-ruined buildings, as well as imported trash, on which the eco park was established in the 1980s.

I was moved by all of their poems, but one in a new pamphlet (created in collaboration with Jacken Elswyth, a queer banjo player) resonated especially well today.

She asked all of the schoolchildren from nearby schools to bring worms to the hill, and over the decades, the worms got to work.

It ends: "I've got the wind I say / with both hands".

The deep, dark mulch that I dug into yesterday is the intergenerational inheritance and gift of these worms, and the soil that my almost seven year old willow tree will grow into.

This weather note was written by Weitao Wang, PhD student in the Geography department at Royal Holloway University, currently doing a fantastic project on the 'The geopower of air and fire: a cultural geography of fiery rituals in China'.

Hildegard joins around ten other willows of ‘diverse varieties’ planted in a new willow coppice near Russia Dock Woodland and the Globe Pond.

“It’s a typical day in the UK, partly cloudy day, a bit windy, and not too cold.

As Rebeka explained to me, over the decades, these small twig-like willow trees will sprout from their bases, and their bendy branches will be sustainably harvested to build fences and other infrastructure around Stave Hill, another gift for the future.

As it’s the first time for me to participate, I feel a sort of transit in terms of the ‘body-(satellite)-weather’ relation.

I've been testing open-weather Automatic Ground Stations all week, and as we are still seeing some unusual patterns and distortions in the images, I brave Hackney Downs long after sunset tonight with AGS 12 and my Yagi-Uda antenna.

At the beginning, I found myself disconnect with the weather (and satellite) because I had no idea of where it would come from and where it would go.

It is wet and cool but not freezing.

However, as time moved on, I felt my body gradually coordinate with the satellite movement in the sky as I listened to the noises in the signal.

Today the pressure on my home weather station (given to me by Soph on my birthday last weekend) reads 1024 hPa, and points toward the symbol at one pole of the barometer that says 'clear bright sky'.

At the end, the signal slowly faded with noise, which made me wonder whether my direction was still correct and thus feel out of sync again with the satellite".

This feels at odds with the low-hanging cloud that I feel all around Hackney, but it is true that the weather is stable, and it doesn't feel like a storm is brewing, yet.

"The weather images produced on the screen reminded me of the previous remote sensing course I had took before, where the date collection process was more detached, abstract and rational because we were just sitting in front of the computer, clicking, and typing.

In a recent article on 'Clouding knowledge in the Anthropocene', Kate Lewis Hood proposes a "cumulative reading - where cumulative shares an etymological root with cumulus, a type of cloud (OED, 'cumulate') - that shifts from clear skies to fog, between atmospheric transparency and opacity" (2018: 83).

However, today’s outdoor data acquiring seems to invite me to be closer to the real-time weather dynamics.”

Exploring poetry including The Weather by Lisa Robertson and Drift by Caroline Bergvall, Lewis Hood suggests that "such experimental practices enable a shift from asking whether to read or interpret in a certain way to engaging with the weather system of a text: its unpredictable changes and complex patterns" (2018: 185).

I found myself at the Southwark Reuse and Recycling Centre shortly before 11am this morning.

If today's weather system in London was a text, it might read like this passage from Robertson's The Weather: Our skies are inventions, durations, discoveries, quotas, forgeries, fine and grand.

I have been fascinated by this place for a while- it is a series of gigantic warehouses where one can bring any kind of object, from clothes to appliances to batteries to cleaning equipment to stones and plates to furniture, in any condition, and after putting each item in the right place, the team at the Centre takes care of sorting, testing and repurposing.

Fine and grand.

Clothes and linens are sent to local charities, appliances are tested and re-used if possible, batteries and old phones are recycled and household items of all kinds are either repurposed or ground down into their raw materials to make new things.

Fresh and bright.

As I pulled up in a cab with a bunch of stuff from my old flat in the trunk, an older man with long gray hair was manning the entrance, and assessed me and my things before allowing me entry, like a guardian or gnome giving way to a magical place.

Heavenly and bright.

I took my time sorting my things into different corners of the warehouse, and was amazed at everything else that was there, from phones that looked like they were last used in the 90s, to very nice bags of clothing.

The day pours out space, a light red roominess, bright and fresh.

In various corners and levels of the cavernous space, I could see staff moving around.

Bright and oft.

As there was a satellite pass shortly after I left the centre, I found a corner of a nearby housing estate- one with at least three tower blocks of dozens of stories each- and propped my laptop on a mossy wall.

Bright and fresh.

Later I noticed how odd the concrete infrastructure of the estate was.

Sparkling and wet.

There were multiple sharply angled concrete features built into the walkway in between the tower blocks.

Clamour and tint.

Their shape and star-like structure, and simultaneous brutalist aesthetic, reminded me of some of the socialist monuments I had seen in Croatia and Bosnia while on fieldwork earlier this month.

(Robertson, 2001: 10)

The crisp blue sky opened above the estate, and magnified the concrete edges.

Captured this satellite pass from a helicopter landing site on a ridge of the Santa.

Went out to the Venice Pier to capture a satellite pass on Thanksgiving.

Monica mountains with the San Fernando Valley to the north and the Pacific to the south.

From the image it looks like blue skies for the entire California coast.

From the overlook you could see small patches of light precipitation.

The pier was busy with sport fishermen.

I was visited by a curious crow and a grizzled hiker.

One approached me and asked me if I was looking for aliens.

The hiker had more questions.

The aliens he was referring to, however, were not extraterrestrials.

After another round of Automatic Ground Station testing late last night, I saw that there would be a NOAA-15 pass around 7:50am today.

He was suggesting that immigrants were coming ashore via boats at night.

Carrying the AGS in a tote bag, and my turnstile antenna in another, I found a spot on the largest field in the park, as the sun searched above the horizon toward an array of small cottonball clouds.

We I explained that the NOAA-19 satellite was harmlessly taking our photo, he suggested we all give it the finger.

A man was in the middle of the field before me, pacing up and down with a flip phone in his hand.

Sarah Josepha Hale had been campaigning for decades that the US celebrate Thanksgiving.

The grass was damp and water-logged.

In 1863 she finally convinced Abraham Lincoln to make the last Thursday in November a national holiday.

A few schoolchildren hurrying along the park's main path looked over and pointed in my direction.

In the midst of the Civil War, it was intended to find common ground and unify the country.

As storm Bert leaves I take the opportunity to test my mobile rig consisting of electrical wire in a joiner, a short coax, RTL-SDR and a Samsung Galaxy S6.

Many Americans express anxiety at sitting down with relatives and navigating the inevitable awkward conversations.

With no rain and a light breeze I was quite happy wandering around and aiming it roughly.

Sometimes I wonder if I am the "crazy uncle" at the table.

I did not expect it to work so well after reading up on the 137MHz antenna variants and the precice calculations, pass filters and leaky coax.

The air bit my fingers as I held onto the metal handle of my turnstile antenna in the pool of darkness that is Hackney Downs at night.

I feel a dangerously numb to news of extreme weather.

A police siren rang out in the distance and a high-speed chase progressed, two police cars tailing another car around two sides of the park.

Yesterday, as I read a long and moving article about drought hit farming communities in South Africa, Storm Bert inundated costal towns in the UK.

Suddenly a faint neon light appeared to bounce and leap toward me, revealing itself to be a small bulldog wearing a glow-in-the-dark collar.

Is numbness what happens when, to quote deputy first minister of Wales Huw Irranca-Davies, the feeling is “here we go again.

NOAA-15 circled overhead, scanning the outlines of North Africa, Italy and Croatia until I lost the transmission in the blurriness of the Arctic.

These traumatic weather incidents are a pattern of our weather”?

Overnight, mountains of plane tree leaves have amassed on sidewalks, against walls and fences.

I went to the Lois Ewen Overlook in the Santa Monica Mountains hoping to maximize my capture length, but missed the first few minutes of the satellite pass.

Leaves paper walls, cars and bike sheds.

At the beginning we were in complete fog-out with a visibility of maybe 20 meters.

While Storm Bert has resulted in mass-rearrangements of leaves in London, elsewhere in the UK roads have been flooded, and thousands of people were without power.

By the time I took photos there was better visibility.

Although relatively minor compared to these other events, the leaf-mountains feel oddly dramatic in today's calm, blue sky weather.

The day before was the first precipitation of the year, though not even 1 cm.

Photographs don't do them justice- they are space-invaders, yellow-brown fillers of unused corners and parking spaces, where the westerly wind carried and dropped them.

Slightly more rain in a few days.

Storm Bert - the 'named storm' that was brewing on the Atlantic when I last contributed to the Archive on Thursday - is sweeping the UK this weekend.

Los Angeles is rare in that it has a mountain range that bisects the city.

"More than 200 flood alerts put in place and three men die on roads as wild weather crosses country" reports the Guardian this morning.

The COP 29 negotiations ended today.

The flood alerts are due to the rapid melting of ice and snow across the north of England and Scotland, as the storm brought milder temperatures.

Experts assess that $1 trillion/year is needed to assist developing countries as they address climate impacts and build a low-carbon infrastructure.

Indeed today in London, it is shockingly warm, around 17 degrees- a huge jump from previous days.

The countries agreeed to $300 million.

The Met Office has issued yellow warnings for rain and wind across large swathes of the country into Sunday, and this is felt in London, with gusts battering houses, trees and infrastructure.

The Trump presidency vows to withdraw from the Paris agreement - again.

As I braved the park with my turnstile antenna, I noticed how a mountain of plane tree leaves had been pushed against the fence near the train tracks, drowning two bikes and the fence itself.

Took another satellite capture from the bluffs over-looking the Pacific Ocean.

In the middle of Hackney Downs, the force of the wind meant that people walked with their heads down, hoods pulled over their faces.

Over the last couple of days a "bomb cyclone" formed and is making landfall in the Pacific Northwest.

My laptop flung wildly left and right as I tried to track the satellite pass.

The name comes from how fast the storm developed.

The turbulence reminded me of a day back in 2021 when Soph and I went out to Burgess Park to capture an image of Storm Eunice- against the advice of the Met Office- and I had to kneel on my laptop to keep it from flying away.

Heavy rains and strong winds have hit Washington state already.

The blustery conditions affected the satellite image I captured today, as I struggled to keep hold of the antenna.

A few lives were lost to falling trees.

Oddly, although the Guardian headlines its reports with various numbers of injuries and deaths across England and Wales, reading further into the reporting, a phrase consistently repeats: 'It was not clear whether the incident was linked to the storm'.

From the image you can see a tail of the cyclone that might bring some precipitation to Southern California in the next few days.

Today's test of an Automatic Ground Station involves me carrying the AGS in a tote bag to keep it dry and away from dogs, and tracking the satellite with my Yagi-Uda antenna.

While recording the pass a construction worker came over for a chat.

The results show a diagonal current of squigly lines in channel b - lines we think might have something to do with a recent update to the code in the AGS system that attempted to produce clearer images, but might have introduced other noise signatures.

He asked if I was recording aliens.

The air is still freezing, and I regret not bringing gloves and a woolly hat.

I later pulled up a hotspot, decoded the wav file and showed him the image.

A freezing night in the park, with a clear, faintly star-lit sky.

He then asked me if the world is really round or flat.

As I return to Hackney Downs long after sunset to test the open-weather Automatic Ground Stations, I am getting better at recognising night-time park activity.

I guess sometimes it is however you want to see it.

Though many people warned me of entering the park at night, I am growing to feel more safe.

It has rained, it has snowed, and the crevices and corners of London are thoroughly drenched in semi-freezing moisture.

Perhaps its something about holding a tall pole with a metal object attached at the end.

This is testing the infrastructures of the city, a city that one might expect could have weathered many cold winters in its time.

I've also realised that, while daytime park activity happens on the fields, with dogs galloping and racing around each other, night-time park life stays close to pathways and the deeper shadows of trees.

Yet, one of my best friends, K, who was over for a spontaneous Monday dinner last night, told me and T of her crumbling, disintegrating roof in Dalston.

I have rarely seen another person walk directly across the largest field, where I stood this evening.

The roof has been leaking for months, and mould has been growing along the walls and in corners.

As I watch the BBC weather report later in the evening, I learn that the beginnings of a 'possibly named storm' are brewing in the North Atlantic.

She had stopped paying rent after her umpteenth attempt to ask the landlord for repairs, failed.

I wonder and try to anticipate what the name of this storm will be.

Within weeks of her stopping payment, the landlord had workers visit the flat, and they claimed to have 'fixed' the issue.

It was 8am, but the sun hadn't properly risen over Hackney.

But yesterday, when she got home after dinner, she texted me photos and videos of the rain coming straight down onto her floor.

As stream of uniformed children ran across it diagonally, somehow in an evenly spaced line, sleepily on their way to the primary school on the opposite corner.

A long curving crack in the ceiling gave me shivers- as if the whole roof was going to collapse.

In five minutes I was smothered by a black terrier, trounced on by a visla, and I had to separate an Australian shepherd from the previous two, while their owners called vainly in the distance.

Luckily, K left to stay at her girlfriend's place.

Perhaps my status as a single dog-less human in the middle of the largest field meant I was a good one to mess with!

I couldn't help but think how many people in London are feeling similar exposures to the rain, the cold.

As I was testing an Automatic Ground Station outside for the first time, using a battery pack and my phone as a hotspot, I was anxious that one of the dogs would sit or step on the delicate cables or pee on the station itself, open as it is to the air because of the need for heat vents.

How many walls are being eaten from the inside out, by the creep of humidity and the mould that thrives in it?

Luckily only one dog leg brushed the AGS, and in a few minutes more, they had raced off.

I tested the AGS in the park late at night today.

The satellite image collected by the station was oddly grainy, and I resolved to try again later tonight, after 9pm.

I didn't want to 'expose' the AGS in the park, less because of weather, wind or rain, and more because a number of people have had phones stolen in the park recently.

It's cloudy and cold, but no longer freezing.

As the AGS is so conspicuous with its glowing light, I hid it in a tote bag.

It's also Monday yet, I mistakenly checked the satellite pass times for Sunday.

For the antenna, I wrapped the legs of an rtl-sdr v-diple around the top of a PVC pipe.

My displaced weekend feeling is because N and I have taken off work.

Standing in the middle of the dark field, holding the pole to the sky, I felt a little like a fictional character enacting some magical ritual.

We decided to only last week.

The moon rose against the silhouetted plane trees and the outlines of bodies crossed under lamp posts.

The idea is to spend a day outside the heavy weather that has characterised this year.

Most avoided the dark, open grass.

So far, we have gone swimming and eaten omelettes with pickles.

Went to capture a satellite pass from the Venice Pier.

Later, we plan to cook a roast and watch an episode of Self-portrait in a Coffee-Pot.

Beautiful blue skies.

In other words, cultivate our own fragile high pressure system.

The pier is covered with tourists, fishermen and many spectators watching the 40 plus surfers on both sides of the pier.

If its strong enough, maybe it'll even persist into the week, this indoor sunshine.

A number of people approached me curious about what trouble I was into.

In a short essay titled 'The sound of temperature rising' in the edited book 'Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear' (Irene Revell and Sarah Shin), Christine Sun Kim writes of an artwork she made while pregnant with her first child, and while watching the devastation of Trump's first term as president.

There was a family with three small children from Italy, a pair of senior citizens and a guy named Sidney.

She elaborates, "Persistent droughts, floods and storms were marking the effects of climate change and a warming world.

All were dazzled with the antenna and the concept.

I felt these different kinds of rising temperatures intertwining, and used an open-ended musical notation to capture the feeling.

To complete the magic trick I used my phone as a hotspot and decoded the wav file live.

When I draw musical staff lines, I use four lines instead of the standard five, which references how staff bars would be signed in American Sign Language (ASL) as four fingers pulled across the front of the body.

The audience was impressed.

Like my other mural and billboard works, I want the scale to actively impose Deaf people's existence and culture into the everyday lives of hearing people".

Two weeks after the election the news is full of the latest on the cabinet picks for the next administration - an anti-vaxer in charge of health, a former oil executive to regulate fracking, and an alleged sex-trafficker to run the justice department.

Kim's drawing is evocative - four lines curve from the bottom of the page to the top right, and musical notes dance on either end.

I wish I believed in magic.

The line 'the sound of temperature rising' hovers above.

I finish writing the talk at the same time as my phone alarm rings, reminding me to leave the relative warmth of our studio to receive NOAA-18's transmission.

Today, as I think about the multiplicity of weather during a satellite pass in Hackney Downs, and reflect on how much of the 'sound of temperature rising' is felt in our bodies, our lungs and other organs, Kim's artwork and words resonate powerfully.

The satellite will pass 77º overhead.

Around halfway through the satellite pass, as the image creeps down my screen and the deep darkness of the Arctic circle gives way to a few pieces of lighter cloud and land, the satellite almost over London, a football player comes trotting over.

It always feels like a waste to not catch such a 'good' pass, so I pack my ground station bag make the short cycle to the edge of the Augarten park.

He finds my tape measure Yagi antenna interesting, commenting, 'I never would have thought a tape measure could be so useful!'.

I have learned to stay outside the its impressive brick perimeter wall, so as to avoid confrontation with Austrian rules-based culture.

When I point to my screen, he drops his chest and body to the field so fast it startles me, and for a moment he has his face a couple inches way from the slow-loading image.

In the past year, multiple gardeners have told me that I need permission to have an antenna in the park and my German is not good enough to argue.

I become self-conscious of the layer of dust on my laptop which, combined with the glaring sunlight of the afternoon, makes the satellite image challenging to make out.

The satellite is above the horizon when I hit record.

Yet he hops up as quickly as he went down, and satisfied with his understanding, jogs away.

I use the 10 minutes of bleep-bleeps to think about what I will say tonight.

Grey skies, newly biting cold.

The talk is written, but I want to begin with a pause to think of Gaza, our former classmates, friends and colleagues in the Middle East, and to hold in our minds those whose names we will never know but whose existence is resistance to Israel's genocidal drive.

My attempt at recording a satellite pass for several weeks.

The architectural exhibition that the talk is a response to is a installation of Breathe Earth Collective's archive.

I forgot the radio frequency extension able and used a wobbly USB converter… which caused SDR++ to freeze multiple times.

Material samples, organic matter, salt, copper pipes and more fill the gallery space, each exhibit labelled with a small paper number as part of archeological dig or forensic scene.

Next time I will pack different kit.

This anarchic yet indexed presentation and the earthy smell of decay in the gallery reminded me of the book 'M Archive: After the end of the world' by American writer and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in particular her description of an 'Archive of Dirt'.

As the sun gets lower in the winter sky, the plants in our flat receive more light, and today they seem to be basking in it.

The book is dedicated "to the purveyors of our bright black future".

The flat almost feels like a greenhouse with fronds and stems poking out of all corners.

Tonight I will read for Gaza the following poem: they came with sugar not of sugarcane sweetness not of cotton but of air they came with cakes not funneled down to grease with layers like clouds they came every day like it was their birthday or yours one or both that was when they first came and then they came with salt with water and blood to wash you they came with spit and sand to shine you they came with cleansing first in mind and woke your soul with it next time they come i hope they bring soil and green soothe for the roots i hope they bring dirt and depth and plant us in it we could sure use the grounding for remembering earth' Alexis Pauline Gumbs, 2018

One of our bushy plants is even growing a new orange flower from between two leaves.

It is a brilliantly sunny day in London and the sky is a deep, clear blue.

A finger of dust reaches from Tunis to the Balearic Sea, another from Misrata into the Mediterranean.

A lonely cloud skirts the horizon to the east.

During the satellite pass, a group of dog walkers notices me and my antenna, and while they stay on the far side of the field, I overhear the older woman in the group tell the others - 'yes yes...

As I set up for the satellite pass in the park, I think of a poem I have just tried to translate from Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian.

she does the weather'.

It is called 'Pjesma žena' or 'woman's song' and it was written by Ana Matanja who is described as 'seljanka iz Ledenica' or 'villager from Ledenica'.

Later, as I await the phone call of a doctor, the passing of the light feels slow and sluggish.

The first lines go like this: Crna noćca svud pritisla Nigde bjela dana, U kuhinju stoji žena Ćvrste prikevana To je bilo prošlog ljeta A sad toga nije The poem- from the archive of the Antifašistička Fronta Žena in Sarajevo - describes a scene in which the 'The black night fell / no daylight anywhere / A woman is standing in the kitchen / Tightly chained / That was last summer / And now it is no longer' (loosely translated by me).

I bury myself in email hoping to move it along.

It goes on to make a call to arms and to the voices of women who form that AFŽ to protect their rights, including those of voting.

A radio antenna arrives in the mail, from Florida.

The author - Matanja - is a villager, but 'Ledenica' literally translates as 'icicle' or 'icebox'.

It comes in a rectangular box covered almost halfway down one end with rainbow 'first class' stamps, each individually advocating for breast cancer awareness.

This, combined with the scene of the first lines, gives this poem of activism and mobilisation a sense of the dark, the cold, and the surreal.

For the first two hours of the morning, Soph, Lizzie, Dan and I discuss ways to 'animate' material in the Public Archive spatially, textually and visually.

As I attempt to catch the last fragments of signal from NOAA-18 over the southern horizon by standing on my tiptoes, two dog walkers approach and ask what I am doing.

Later I test three 'automatic ground stations' in various corners of my flat, and watch them boot-up to a new version (v1.1.4) of the programme they are running.

I explain, and we chat about my tape measure Yagi antenna briefly.

Around 11:30 I catch a NOAA-18 pass from Hackney Downs, happy once again to be back in the park with my tape measure Yagi-Uda antenna.

As they are leaving, the man of the couple turns around and says: 'It's not who you know, it's what you know!'

Though I do lots of university work as well, catching up on the various crises and urgent demands in my inbox, today is a day mostly 'weathered' by open-weather.

I’m really struggling to get images.

Looking out over the Pacific Ocean on another beautiful day.

I have SLIGHTLY better luck with a dipole.

City crews are busy behind me trying to stabilize the bluffs from their relentless slide towards the ocean.

I tried a random wire to see if that helped but not really.

Multimillion-dollar homeowners are in denial of the inevitable, attempting to resist the forces of nature.

I’m working on building a QFH but it’s complicated.

It has been nearly a week since the election.

I’ll keep at it.

Trying to find my tribe.

A NOAA-15 satellite pass at only 21 degrees to the west was not the strongest option for an image of the Adriatic, but I wanted to capture one last satellite image while nearby to this sea.

Spent most of my Saturday with Climate Strike LA.

Standing at the corner of a balcony reachable from T's childhood room, I fished for signals in the quiet Sunday morning.

This morning it was a zoom meeting with Human Rights Watch.

I could hear the squeak of laundry lines being pulled in, and the occasional shutter being lifted, but otherwise it was calm, near-silent.

Concerned, but feeling the energy.

The sky lifted into a clear blue and I felt a little cold in the wool jumper that T's mom had given me when she last visited in London.

We too shall resist.

I emerged from an overgrown path, full of fallen birch branches and reeds, onto a small sandy bluff above the bank of the Tagliamento.

In the wake of last week's national election I've been trying to find silver linings among the chaos and wild projections over what the next four years will bring.

The river ran a cool green-blue that changed shades as clouds periodically covered the winter sun.

My email feed has been flooded with requests from environmental/social justice NGOs.

It was chilly but not cold.

Apparently membership and donations increased during the last time this happened.

The sound of farm equipment echoed over the opposite riverbank and a single engine plane passed by overhead.

In blue California there are pockets of red.

This weekend, the village of Latisana is celebrating the festival of San Martino.

Beverly Hills High School needed to institute new regulations to tone down celebrations by teens.

As T's mom tells us, traditionally this festival marked the time when farmers (il contadini) had sold their autumn harvests and had some spending money.

Monday is the beginning of the next climate conference - COP 29.

They would celebrate as lavishly as they could.

The tone of the conference will pivot widely on the election results.

Most women were married around this time, when their families could afford to purchase cloth, lace and housewares for dowries.

Curious to see what, if any, strategies arise.

I sat on a mushroom-speckled birch log and watched the slow moving water.

Hopped up on my roof this morning to capture NOAA 15.

A strikingly blue bird - perhaps an Eurasian Blue Tit - landed on a branch near the beach and darted away.

Seems as if some power lines interfered with the end of the pass.

A small flock of pigeons skidded to the water’s edge, dipped their beaks in the river for a split second, and took off again.

Thankfully it is morning now, and the sun is shining on the Maljicka River in Sarajevo.

They returned at least five times in the same configuration.

I woke around 1am last night in tears, thinking of all of the places I have seen so far on this trip in the Balkans, and the way my family history is so inscribed in this landscape, a landscape that has felt so much pain.

Yesterday, as T and I returned to Italy from Rijeka, last week seemed like a blur- a blur that felt very similar to the smog-fog of Sarajevo and its surrounding villages.

I thought about the memories the landscape holds, that monuments to anti-fascist resistance or tombs of fallen fighters, or memorials to the more recent Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, only manage to represent partially.

At some distance to the Balkans, I can now visualise the histories, weathers, archives and monuments that I visited in the last week with a little more sharpness and clarity, like the circuitous and sandy curves of the Tagliamento.

Upon properly waking, the news of the US election was shocking, but somehow dulled by the intensity of the last few days.

It’s dark, and I am standing in the botanical garden of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.

I almost found it darkly humorous, that in the week I am spending engaging with my family’s history, and the very concrete, serious struggle of anti-fascism, a movement for which my great grandfather risked everything, a fascist has been elected to power in my birth country.

It has been a sunny, cold day.

As the news sunk in later in the day, the dark humour faded and despair set in.

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.

I kept the despair at bay by throwing myself head first into the story of Sarajevo womens’ resistance to authoritarian power, and their role in the communist movement.

The embassy is measuring the air quality as part of the IQ Air network.

T and I drove to see a monument to Sarajevo victims of the national liberation war at Vraća Park, on the west of the city.

The level of pollution is currently 122 on the AQI scale, meaning ‘unhealthy for sensitive groups’.

The park itself is not well maintained, with trash and graffiti everywhere, and much of the original stone architecture crumbling.

The main pollutant contributing to this unhealthy air is PM2.5, the most deadly of the microscopic particles.

However, at the far end of the park, stands a monument to ‘Women Fighters’ by Sarajevo sculptor Alija Kučukalić.

In comparison, London’s air today is around 70-80.

The sculpture is a 2-3 metre tall figure of a woman, from the torso up, wearing a sharp jacket, and gazing to the sky, arms open in a cactus shape and fists clenched.

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.

She has a long braid that flows down her back, and her face turns upward.

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.

An early sketch for the sculpture that I found online shows a female figure with an agonising face - indeed the original title of the work was “Stratišta” (Executions).

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.

While the sculpture is meant to be representative of all fallen women victims and fighters, many believe the sculpture depicts Radojka Lakić, a female leader of the Sarajevo underground communist resistance who was executed at Vraća in September 1941.

I read magazines like ‘Nova Žena’, poems by women writers, and looked at prints and engravings.

The sculpture is in poor condition, emblematised by the fact that the right arm has been sawed off.

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'.

Yet, even with only one arm raised, the figure is striking - a reminder of the immense strength of resistance, and the cost of truly fighting fascism.

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!

As the sun rises over the western US, the national election is in full swing.

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.

Regardless of the outcome, about half of the US adult population agrees with a candidate who thinks the climate crisis is a hoax played by the Chinese government.

I am left with the feeling of the Yugoslav women’s antifascist movement as a prideful one.

As president he pulled the US out of the Paris Accord and promises to resurrect the coal industry.

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.

Two days before the election he stated that the cool weather in Pennsylvania was "evidence".

Like cuerpo-territorio, the movement of AFŽ was about relations to land, as much as it was about anti-fascist struggle.

Looking out upon the calm Pacific Ocean hasn't done much to calm my nerves - yet.

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.

Turning off a narrow street, we climb a dirt road into hills of farmland.

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.

The smell of manure permeates the car as we pass farm equipment and local men that wave kindly at us.

The Red Rock Conservation Area, just outside of Las Vegas, has been a work in progress for over 500 million years.

I think I hear one of them call out but he doesn’t follow us.

It has seen oceans, sand dunes, the formation and dissolution of supercontinents, mass extinctions, indigenous peoples and more.

The road winds steeply onward and turns against the edge of recently turned fields.

Midway through the satellite capture sudden strong winds blew away my notes (later retrieved) and nearly capsized my laptop from a precarious railing (I should make better choices in the future).

Next to two stacks of hay, sandwiched between two different fields, both steaming with manure and dust, we can see curved shapes of stone.

I was stabilizing my computer against the wind with one hand, tracking a satellite with the other and trying to convince some humanities academics from Chico State that the extraterrestrial I was following was benign - all in preparation for my audition at the 3-ring Circus.

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.

On the time log of Red Rock Canyon us humans will be nothing more than a minor footnote.

We are completely alone except for two men driving tractors.

What mark shall we leave on the geologic record?

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.

“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’.

Like serpents with eyes or faces in contorted shapes the figures peer wildly and hauntingly into the distance.

It describes village life near the town of Jasenovac in modern day Croatia.

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.

In these lines, happiness flows through a ‘window’s glint’ and ‘windborne garden sweet’.

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.

It manifests ‘by the threshold, sunshine at my feet’.

This is the site of a great massacre of around 700 Serbian civilians and communists by Ustaše forces during WWII.

These lines evoke a bucolic, gentle, rural life.

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.

And yet the poem - immediately recognisable from these four lines by anyone borne in the Balkans - is far from a picture of happiness.

It symbolizes the end of time." To me, though, the figures are less serpent-like and more like currents or energies.

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.

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.

Jasenovac became the site of one of the deadliest forced labour and extermination camps of the war.

We notice white smoke plumes pouring out of peoples’ chimneys and large currents of either steam or particulate flooding from thermo electric plants.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Roma, Jews, and political communists were also targeted.

I think about the double headed serpent invoked by Bogdanović and I wonder about the ‘end of time’.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

8am on a Saturday morning outside the Strat casino in Las Vegas is pretty quiet.

Its shape resembles a giant flower with six petals from some angles, but from others, it looks like a pair of wings.

Few cars, but a disheveled man with many tattoos asked me if I was communicating with aliens.

The edges of the petals are sharp, and diamond shaped holes allow the sky to shine through, against the heaviness of concrete.

When I told him I was receiving an image from a passing NOAA satellite, he seemed interested - but not enough for a conversation.

As I walked around it at sunset, its form seemed to transform, always asymmetrical.

On my way to my nephew's wedding I pulled over near the Colorado River for a satellite capture.

In the landscape around the monument, Bogdanović created mounds to denote the places where buildings of the camp used to stand.

There has been controversy regarding who gets to use the Colorado River water.

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".

California has gotten the lion's share mostly, but the quantity has been declining for several decades and sometimes it doesn't reach Mexico.

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.

The best of plans get ruined when there isn't enough water.

The reports of flash flooding in Valencia fill the front pages of newspapers in London.

All the best wishes to Chris and Heather.

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 humidity is 100% today.

"The worst part..." he says in between attempts to catch his breath "is that our government knew that this was going to happen.

When T and I wake up, we see condensation on the living room and kitchen windows- as if the flat is sweating.

They knew this was coming, and they did nothing".

Yet it is not warm, it is strangely cold.

Hundreds of people are known to be dead, and some are still missing after days of search and rescue.

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.

"There is mud everywhere" an English reporter comments "on everything, on me".

To calm down, I spend twelve minutes on the couch after lunch meditating with the help of an app.

In London, the city is covered in low gray cloud, light barely penetrates through.

This meditation is called 'Sense' and at several points, the guiding voices says 'There's no need to go out looking for sounds.

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.

Just like a satellite dish, we can simply receive what's coming'.

The Ginko trees make pools of yellow everywhere on campus, from the parking lots behind student dorms, to the small copses between departments.

I find myself puzzling at this metaphor while the meditation continues, so much so that I realise I am not following the instructions anymore.

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.

Does a satellite dish 'simply receive what's coming'?

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.

And is the body anything like a satellite dish?

The colours come with short descriptions of their intensities and transparencies.

I remember the meditation Soph invented for their students in Eindhoven, called 'Your body is an antenna'.

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.

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.

It is difficult to make a choice of colour when only one of us can actually see the physical 'gell'.

A satellite dish, on the other hand, feels intent on capture, on picking up a television signal.

We end up choosing a green called 'half plus green', which is a more transparent version of a green called 'plus green'.

Later in the day, after I have made some headway through the external examining, my body antenna feels less tense, more open.

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.

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.

As I leave campus at 5:30 it is almost pitch black.

I awoke to a creeping feeling that the plants in my and T's flat were feeling very happy today.

Students in hooded sweaters walk past in small groups, dorm kitchens are brightly illuminated, and rows of liquor bottles balance precariously on window ledges.

Leaves of monstera deliciosa, begonia maculata and weeping willow seemed unusually vibrant and springy from their stems.

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.

The lower angle of the sun at this point in the autumn means that the flat is flooded with rays.

In a late morning pass overlooking the Pacific from some neighborhood bluffs.

Throughout the morning, the sun climbed slowly over the three-story houses and the 'Open Doors' Baptist Church directly opposite our second floor windows.

A thin layer of stratocumulus clouds add a calming effect to the Fall and a little more than a week before the US election.

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.

Hardly a mention of the climate crisis amid fictitious tales about Haitian immigrants and praise of Nazi generals.

It was so bright I had to squint to see their faces.

Crossing my fingers for a favorable forecast.

Above, an intersecting set of contrails looked like another, much larger Yagi-Uda, pointing south.

A black cloaked, elderly woman steps slowly across the dense, wet grass of Millfields Park in East London.

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 worry about her feet getting wet, as mine have soaked through already.

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'.

Though it is nearing 12 noon, the sun casts long shadows against the plane trees, shapes forming and rearranging on the ground.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Then it cools and sinks to a depth between 2,000m to 3,000 m before returning south as a cold current.

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.

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".

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.

This description of great waters rising and sinking, and carrying heat across the planet, is captivating.

He advocates for what he calls relational ‘geometries’ or ‘relational specificity’ or ‘relational complementarity’.

Yet scientists like Rahmstorf suspect Amoc could be slowing down and even about to stop.

An example of relational geometries is regional union networks and their ways of complementing each other, to gain power and resources.

Apparently "the most ominous sign is the cold blob over the northern Atlantic.

The response I decide to give reflects on what a specific focus on the geometry of relation might do - how does it operate?

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".

What does it explain?

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".

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.

A less salty 'blob' is harder to sink, and therefore harder to mix into the Amoc cycle.

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.

According to Rahmstorf, there is a 50/50 chance that Amoc stops in our current century.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As the satellite image I am capturing loads line by line, I peer into the darkness of the North Atlantic.

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.

I think about the word 'Amoc' and how it can also have connotations of 'going astray' or 'running wild'.

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.

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.

For the seminar, the room is packed- geographers from across the department are present, as well as people from other departments.

"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'.

Henry gives a presentation on the book and I am impressed with the way he manages to make theory sound exciting and approachable.

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.

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.

A tank truck rolls slowly along the edge of the park.

After the event, the atmosphere of the department is animated.

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.

A PhD student comes to my office and speaks for thirty minutes about how excited she was by the seminar.

In the early morning moonlight, they look like a chimera - half machine, half person.

From time to time, I catch a glimpse of the ginko trees outside the window of my office.

Though Storm Ashley has not affected the southeast of England, the world feels soaked with water- a ubiquitous saturation.

The golden leaves are glowing in the afternoon sunlight, so that they seem to be projecting light in all directions.

Standing on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean you could feel the anticipation.

Cloudy with spots of sunlight breaking through.

Light rain had started and the winds of the incoming storm were beginning.

Potential for thunderstorms later in the day.

Over 50 years I have spent many hours looking out, working through dilemmas, contemplating, searching for perspective.

Pleasant view across Seneca Lake.

Today was like no other.

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.

Hilary had been down graded to a tropical storm by the morning.

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.

She tracked east of Los Angeles and ended up closing down Death Valley with historic floods.

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.

The day started with low, misty clouds and rose to a golden, clear-skied afternoon.

As I cut, season and roast, my turnstile antenna leans out the kitchen window.

The last few days have been much warmer, even balmy.

My hands are too oily to hold or point it, so the resulting image is just what the antenna receives from its resting position.

I noticed the transparency of fallen leaves, shining like small lanterns in the grass.

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!

"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.

Arctic air, icey wind and a cold drizzle- a combination that makes any Monday morning feel especially gloomy.

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.

I take shelter under a small tree on a field between the biology and physics departments on the university campus.

But that didn't matter- squeezed into tiny steep seats, all 20,000 people were dancing the whole night.

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 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.

I hum Lauryn Hill lyrics to myself as the satellite image loads, the pixels looking fractal like ice.

This morning the energy stayed with me as I got ready for the day, another grey and cold one in London.

"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 park was full of dogs, including an incredibly fast whippet named Ziggy.

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.

In several places, the gilled cap of a small mushroom pushed through the blades of damp, freshly mowed grass.

Every so often the tree is pushed by the wind and fat droplets shower down.

From the docks of William and Hobart Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York the weather was humid, but pleasant, from the shores of Seneca Lake.

The song ends: "Everything is everything / What is meant to be, will be / After winter, must come spring / Change, it comes eventually".

Powerful thunderstorms were developing for later in the day.

Of a day like today, Derek Jarman might write, "Crystalline sunlight, all the dark humours blown away by the wind" (1991, 235).

As I ride the 35 south from Liverpool Street the sun begins to pierce through the matted, slightly hazy sky.

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.

A current of ‘Arctic Air’ has flowed across the U.K.

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.

this weekend and lowered temperatures at least six degrees.

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.

At a performance yesterday afternoon in a roofless Anglican Church in Nunhead Cemetary, the cold entered deep into my lungs and bones.

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.

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.

Representative Michele Rayner, Democratic Florida State representative calls in to Democracy Now.

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.

As the sun rises on a night that saw the landfall of Hurricane Milton, she describes the situation in St Petersburg, Florida, where there is no power, where there has been large amounts of flooding, 120 mhp winds and failures to infrastucture, including cranes collapsing into buildings.

After I retrieved it for him, he asked if I could buy him a chocolate milkshake.

"I don't even know what my own home looks like right now" she says, "I can't get there".

He drank the cold drink in big gulps as me and T ran back to the station for our train.

She describes gridlock on the highways and price gouging of hotels, flights and Airbnb accommodation in safer areas of the state.

"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.

Her voice breaks up and the 'call dropping' sound happens several times.

He repeats this phrase several times, as if he has to convince himself that it is true.

Amy asks her about the misinformation being propagated about the government withholding FEMA funding, or government officials taking peoples homes, and even that the US government is 'controlling the weather'.

Yet he still calls Milton 'healthy' as he describes its current trajectory and form.

These are lies with life and death consequences, Amy comments.

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.

It is possible to hear Rayner say "people have lost so much...

Another forecaster uses the metaphor of an ice skater doing a spin and hugging their arms closer to their body, therefore spinning faster.

people need help" before the call drops again.

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.

Meanwhile videos of trees propelled sideways, people walking through knee deep water, and couches floating down sidewalks rolls on the screen.

Morales takes a deep, shaky breath and continues 'this is just horrific'.

On London Bridge, loosely knit groups of people wander by.

The video circulates widely on social media.

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.

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.

They don’t look interested.

The storm will likely downgrade to a level 3 hurricane by the time it meets land.

It’s the kids instead who are interested in me, asking ‘but what is she doing ??’ in voices that implore an answer.

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.

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 jet stream will not remove enough 'arms' to reduce the storm's strength.

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.

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.

Today is October 5th, and a national protest for Palestine solidarity in London is underway, slowly moving from Russell Square to Downing Street.

It is both fascinating and terrifying that less than twelve hours away from 'landing', the landing-site is still unknown.

Many posters and banners point to the fact that the genocide in Palestine has been going on for one year.

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.

There are photographs of victims, messages to Netanyahu and Kier Starmer, and demands for reckoning.

I make a special trip to the park for a satellite pass that is quite far to the west of London, over the Atlantic.

Chilling, however, are attempts in the wider media to memorialise this moment in ways that justify Israel's ongoing agression Gaza and Lebanon.

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.

Naomi Klein writes in the Guardian today: "What is the line between...

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.

memorialization and weaponization?

Yet I am thinking about the wind and it's relationship, provocation (?) or resonance with memory.

What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity?

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".

And what does it mean to do so while Israel actively produces more grief on an unfathomable scale, detonating entire apartment blocks in Beirut, inventing new methods of remote-controlled maiming, and sending more than a million Lebanese people fleeing for their lives, even as its pummeling of Gaza continues unabated?" In light of this, the protest feels like more than a public demonstration- it is also a collective remembering, a coherence of what we remember.

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.

Today we put on the heating in our flat for the first time this autumn.

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.

The air temperature has dropped significantly over the last week, and there is an 'edge' or 'bite' to the weather outside.

I have not moved for many hours.

At dinner on Friday night with a very good friend, we all agreed to change our duvets to the heavier 'winter' version.

Years, a lifetime, eddy past: one, two, three: into the early hours, the clock chimes.

This collective decision made me think of squirrels and other forest creatures adding leaves and twigs to their nests for warmth.

The wind is singing now".

I tested a new antenna in the frosty park this morning - a copper, weatherised V-dipole made by a radio amateur supplier in Florida.

A rolling family of storms passed over Hackney today - one body after the next.

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.

Alternating floods of sunlight and dark shadows passed through the flat, a changing scenography to breakfast, PhD student supervisions and emails.

A woman walking two chihuahuas smiled at me.

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.

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.

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.

The wind has been squally, like my body.

By the end of the pass the sun was shining and an orb-like cloud receded into the distance.

I woke tired.

I thought that I'd overheat but cloud came between me and the sun.

To reclaim my body, I swim one kilometre at the local pool.

It's hot, but not too hot, and the heat is dry.

The full sensory experience of swimming focuses me on breath and rhythm, in ways other sport cannot.

I feel more at peace in my body today.

I feel my muscles and enjoy imagining the small exercised-induced testosterone boost.

I know that I need to listen to it and respect its limits while it heals.

I feel back inside my body, home.

The city building's are no longer cooler inside than out.

I cannot focus on the meteorological weather as a delivery truck arrives to unload at the supermarket, which carefully crop out of shot.

I am trying to be productive, get work done, but really I want to be lying flat on my bed or dipping in the cool waters of the Danube.

In the moment irritated the moment, but later accept my foolishness of my desire to document the mountains without people, cars and the heavy industry that lines the Fiume Fella river valley.

How are you Sasha?

The sky is meeting the mountain.

A musician, Pietro, joins us for the satellite pass.

Fair weather, finally.

The alpine village of Dordolla is so small, we just needed to walk around for word to get to Pietro that we were at the only bar.

Rain was forecast but did not come.

There is a light drizzle.

The air smells good.

N makes a beat to the sound of the satellite, tapping the puddle with his foot.

It is a crisp, clear night.

Pietro makes a sound recording.

The tat tat tat of toy machine gun drifts up from the otherwise empty street.

He is a drummer.

It is warm, comfortable.

The air is thick with moisture.

When we got home from the holiday the tomato plants were stressed from thirst and had curled their leaves from prevent water loss.

The energy of yesterday's electrical storm has dissipated, but the clouds have not broken yet.

After visiting such radically different climates – the dry heat of Istria and the wet cold of Firuli – and after overhearing my sister swap farming anecdotes of a too wet, too cold spring-summer with our host in the agriturismo, I contemplate how local climate is is and the importance of grounding theories of weather knowledge in specific sites.

I rush out between Zooms calls to receive this satellite image on the balcony.

It's heating up.

The weather is warm dry, my mood is light, even joyful.

I enjoy how the city radiates heat from all directions, loosening my muscles.

I prop the my phone up on a potted Yuca, so as to get the tomato plants in the frame.

I embrace the floppy feeling.

I wake groggy from the late arrival of my flood delayed train.

Yet Vienna is not yet built for sustained summer heat.

Out of habit, I open my phone and load the news.

Its surfaces are mostly sealed, there is too little vegetation, and it does not cool-off enough at night.

Brown water fills the screen, punctured by branches, submerged buildings, and the fluorescent jackets of emergency workers.

I am standing in the blazing midday with sun cream and sun glasses but no hat.

A climate scientist in Switzerland, Sonia Seneviratne, is quoted as saying that "most of the water vapour came from the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea, both of which have grown hotter as a result of human-induced climate breakdown".

I am still learning how to live in a country that is a little hotter, a little drier than the North of England where I grew up.

I share the article in our Signal group.

A group of young school children pass, all wearing matching caps.

Our intern, LJ, replies that this is a "vivid image".

I take note.

I agree, picturing the Mediterranean falling onto Vienna, in a Hollywood-like special effects inversion of sky and sea.

Buy a cap.

A literal image of our world turning upside down.

During the satellite pass I try turning on a feature of the software defined radio programme called Automatic Gain Control or AGC for short.

It felt magical when a bright-green signal began to cascade down the waterfall display.

Gain is a property of the antenna, which can be manipulated in the software … and this still confuses me.

I turned to Heide, my partner in our Leipzig open-weather workshop, who was next to me.

Usually, I use the programme's waterfall display to manually adjust the gain, however today, keen to improve my understanding of gain and the software, I experiment with turning the two AGC functions on and off, and then both on at the same time.

We both made excited, eyebrow-raised faces.

The waterfall display turns from blue to yellow to red.

Were we imagining things?

To my ears, the signal to noise ratio sounds worse, however the resulting image looks surprisingly uniform.

Was everything set up right?

In my studio, M, shares with me a weather forecast from the ORF, Austria's national public broadcaster.

Our laptops responded with reassuring rhythmic tick-tocking and high pitched sounds that danced around our ears.

She wants me to know that Saharan Dust is forecast for Friday.

I was surprised how the satellite continued talking with me, even as I played with different heights of the v-dipole antenna and the wild wind whirled around us.

Here: Warm sun, grey skies.

Ten minutes passed quickly.

Just south of here: Extreme weather events all over Central Europe.

Soon I was angling southwards, feeling the radiant sun on my face and seeing other workshop people communing with NOAA-18 across the park while it faded into static.

Grazie!

A cloudy and windy day with some sun coming through the clouds.

Grazie!

One of the first colder days after summer.

T and I pronounced our happiness at the blue sky when we woke up this morning.

This morning a PhD student wrote in an email to me that the "Autumn very much feels like it's arrived!".

The blue is a deep cerulean and small cottonball clouds dotted the horizon.

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.

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.

Instead we are soaked in thin, grey and matte light emitted from low-hanging cloud.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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'.

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.

Seeing a line like this in a report written by hundreds of scientists also gives me pause.

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.

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)?

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.

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?

But the witch says it can’t be done, it is already unravelling.

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.

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.

A low-hanging layer of clouds obscures the sky today, and very little light illuminates the streets and gardens of our neighbourhood.

Something is released when these figures or shapes are vocalised.

I think about a passage in the recently published 'State of the Climate' report by the American Meteorological Society.

I do not want to give Trump the credit afforded to the storytelling witch in Silko's novel.

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.

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.

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.

To the southeast, a gap in a towering panorama of clouds looks like a giant lens or a portal, magnifying rays of light.

The overall effect was the weakest cooling effect of clouds on record".

Two men walk by my ground station asking 'is there signal??' and then exclaiming 'you see the storm is picking up!'.

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.

Yet the wind does not rise further than a few sharp gusts and the clouds dance past.

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.

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).

As I peer up at the thick grey cloud, the term 'darkening' seems to register with many meteorological and more-than-meteorological affects.

I read that Selaginella are known as the 'fern allies' - I thought this was a nice phrase, if read non-scientifically.

I manage to coax enough light from a table lamp into the microscope to see the veins of a fallen, yellow Plane tree leaf.

Some species of Selaginella are known as the 'resurrection plant' because they can survive complete dehydration, much like the lichens I wrote about yesterday.

Hello lichen, who and when are you?

These moss-like plants roll up into brown balls, but rehydrate and expand when moistened.

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.

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.

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.

It is a scene from the perspective of Tayo, a man of Laguna Indian and Mexican heritage who returns from the war in Vietnam.

A curved piece of bark glowed bright yellow and green on the pavement on my way back from the farmers market.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They were the colour of the moss near the spring, and their backs were spotted the colour of wet sand.

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.

They moved slowly into the sun, blinking their big eyes.

I read these samples in my living room were 'micro-lichen' and their shapes were foliose (leafy) and leprose (like a powder dusting).

He watched them dive into the pool, one by one, with a graceful quiet sound.

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 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.

They can grow on almost any surface and they can even live inside solid rock, growing between the grains!

He smiled.

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.

They were the rain's children.

When fungi form partnerships with cyanobacteria in certain species of lichen, the cyanobacteria can even fix Nitrogen from the air.

He had seen it happen many times after a rainstorm.

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.

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.

After 15 days, the lichens were brought back to earth and were found to be unchanged in their ability to photosynthesize.

Josiah said they could stay buried in the dry sand for many years, waiting for the rain to come again" (Silko, 1977: 87-88).

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.

For the second day, the weather is damp, grey and dark, with intermittent rain.

People like Adriana have said this to me before, but I am finally understanding lichens as both space and time-travellers...

The park was wet and puddled, but plenty of people were out walking, having coffee and running with dogs.

'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.

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.

T had even rescued a microscope - the older kind with no light for illumination, and only a mirror - that otherwise would have been tossed.

By the time that sentence was finished, Moonpie was off again, racing to the other corner of the park.

Too engrossed to cook dinner, we ordered pizza and kept speculating about the worlds made visible through tiny pieces of glass and magnifying lenses.

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.

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.

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.

In the midst of this I went outside for an early evening NOAA-15 pass and wondered again about scale, patterns, fractals.

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.

lots of mosquitoes out this evening

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.

"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.

I'm having a harder time these days tracking the satellites as they pass overhead.

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?

With one small movement I can lose a good signal.

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.

But I try to stay positive as I redirect the antenna to find the signal again.

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.

It's one of those September days where the air is cool in the shade and hot in the sun.

Ammonia is less publicised as an air pollutant in the media- we more often hear about 'Saharan Dust' or 'Nitrogen dioxide' or 'Ozone'.

After a few days of struggling to get good signal, it was encouraging when I heard those very clear ticks and beeps.

Yet I learned that ammonia leaks from agricultural practices, livestock waste, and the use of synthetic fertilisers.

I did this capture in my backyard with just a short view of the sky.

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.

"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.

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.

The wobble of my radio antenna probably registered in the satellite image I was capturing but the company was more than worth it!

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.

Muffin Man followed Moonpie, as well as another dog called Star, and I was soon surrounded by small joyful dog energy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I studied the satellite image I captured today and wondered about whether dust, perhaps, was blurring the borders of land and sea...

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.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/4xcpkaxx

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.

A fine drizzle was carpeting the neighbourhood as I went out with my tape measure Yagi antenna today.

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.

I wasn't expecting the rain, so I found a still densely foliated Plane tree to give cover.

Cool temperature.

Later in the day, en route to South London, the rain had started again.

Still night.

I had checked and rechecked the weather report before getting on my bike, and all that was predicted was a lot of cloud.

There is a thin film 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.

Earlier, inn the hospital, I read a draft of Wind’s Animacies by Sasha.

Despite the moisture-laden air, the rest of the day was textured with immense relief, new knowledge, and support from my partner T.

The article sweeps me up, taking me far from the fluorescent lighting and airless weather of the waiting room.

Two cats offered their emotional energies too.

I turn over her question, "what does the wind remember?" I am moved by it, perhaps because I am grappling with how to reorganise or cohere a messy medical history of ill health with the new knowledge that comes with a diagnosis.

It's been raining.

I find myself caught between wanting to forget the lost days in bed with a pillow tucked under my abdomen, or the sleepless nights and listless days that followed.

I wait for the weather to clear and capture the satellite's transmission in the dark next to Kovači Cemetery.

Could an earlier diagnosis have changed the course of my access to treatment?

The low stone wall I am sitting on is cold and damp.

This is is both too painful and utterly pointless to think about.

The cobbled road near me is empty but at its end, where it opens onto a broader street, people gather at the entrance to a mosque.

I want to reorganise my memories into a tidy narrative of endometriosis, cysts and fibroids, rather than the current cluster of unexplained, possibly unrelated symptoms that moved around my body to the extent that I stopped trusting myself as reliable narrator.

Uneasy about the location, chosen without knowledge of the city because of it is the closest open space to where we are staying, I attempt blend with the night.

I am thinking with Sasha's words: is pain is similar to wind?

Woke surprised by hot the apartment already was.

Neither are immaterial or material.

As I set up my antenna on the track leading into the village, an older man and woman came out of their house to offer me local produce.

Is pain not energetic, “slippery”, “leaky”?

Sweating, declined in stilted English.

Thinking about wind’s memory is an analytic move away from asking “where does the wind come from?” (n.d.

Perhaps I sounded Spanish as the conversation turned into an exchange of "Mucho calor!"

Engelmmann) A question that forces an artificial cut into time to arrive at a single origin point.

Two fire flies flash.

I exercise changing the familiar questions “Where does the pain originate?” or “When did the pain begin?" to “What does my body remember?” This new question requires me to relearn to trust it my body and its complaints.

I watch the coal mine and power plant on the plateaux, my radio antenna balanced on a rock above the road.

To piece it back together.

A hazy red sunset bleeds out into darkness.

In a wholly different context, that of the 2016 US presidential election, American essayist and anarchist Rebecca Solnit writes “when the subject is grim, I think of the act of naming as diagnosis.” Diagnosis does not equal a cure, but it is an act of recognition that has the potential to reorganise and make sense of memories.

On a walk this afternoon, the owner of the guest house pointed to the where an underground river was being rerouted to accommodate industry.

I am stood in the backyard of our host's house.

His tone seemed to express a mixture of depression and despair.

Deep greens and reds of a flowering vine frame the midnight blue sky.

He did not mention the coal power station, which is not visible from the house.

Today, N and I visited the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide, and then rode a cable car built for the 1984 Winter Olympics to a hilltop overlooking the city.

Now I see it, I imagine it thirstily drinking the river.

In the evening, we walking along the Miljacka River to the book store 'Buybook Sarajevo' we stumbled on the opening of the BOOKSTAN literature festival.

Intense heat stops me thinking.

Before we realise that there is a festival, the crowd gathered out side felt familiar.

I sweat into my teeshirt and instantly regret exposing myself to the unforgiving sun.

Enjoying the atmosphere, we purchased two white wines and sat on a park bench.

"Tomorrow", I note to myself, "wait until nightfall".

As N is at the bar buying a second round, I complement the small dog of an elegant older woman.

Today I am presenting in a panel on 'Open Geographies' at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference.

She tells me that she is a translator of an English language book about the siege written by an author living in the United States.

I plan to speak briefly about the 'openness' in open-weather.

She is here to meet the author, she tells me, and will not stay for the festival as she is already looking forward to returning to her home in the countryside.

For me, in addition to 'un black-boxing technology' or 'visceralising data' (d'Ignazio and Klein, 2020), the openness in open-weather may be about different dimensions of the ‘commons’.

When I later search for the festival programme online, I find its tagline: “A literary festival where there is neither East nor West, but just humans and their stories”.

The late queer theorist Lauren Berlant describes a world that is, “intimately touching from near and far and therefore changing what proximity does” (Berlant, 2022: 99).

This evening my memories of working on war crimes investigations in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, mingle with the stories of survivors from the museum displays.

I want to suggest that ‘the common of contact’ between a ground station operator and a satellite is both ‘intimate’ and ‘changing what proximity does’.

As we were entering the last room of the museum, I thought I could hear a video.

Figuring this ‘common of contact’ leads to alternative and perhaps more thoroughly open readings of environment-sensing infrastructures and commons.

There was no video, instead an older woman and man speaking in Bosnian.

It demonstrates how the effort of holding an antenna to the sky is built on a form of sociality and even desire, manifested in the collecting and caring-for of images otherwise considered faulty.

They looked distressed, I think the woman was crying.

Yet, lest I create a romantic picture of desiring bodies and machines - there is ample boredom, frustration and ambivalence too.

The couple were being interviewed by a small film crew.

Through repeated, modest, noisy contact with the technologies of earth observation, open-weather helps me envision a progressive politics of openness, one built on, in the words of Berlant, “affective infrastructures that admit the work of desire and the work of ambivalence as tactics of communing” (Berlant, 2022: 116).

The walls of the yard block my view of the Sarajevo below, yet I know that the city I arrived in three days looks different.

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.

Another windy day, with gusts coming from both the south and west across Hackney Downs.

The sky is veiled with light cloud and contrails, and things feel grounded, heavy but not placid.

Tree branches and pieces of bark have been peeled off trees and lie on the pavement or grass.

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'.

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.

A man is driving around the park with a large tank of water on the back of a truck, watering trees.

When the dipoles bent down at odd angles, lines of noise permeated the audio recording.

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.

I realised today that I had never fully explored the fact that antennas could be malleable- able to move and bend with the wind.

As he drives by me, he smiles and gives me a thumbs up from the car window.

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?

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'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.

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!'.

I awoke to a flood of sunlight in the apartment, though the colder air temperatures persisted.

He jumped down from his bench and started asking questions- had he seen me before in the park?

My head and body ached and I wondered about residual tiredness or a travel bug.

was I from America?

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.

how do I like Hackney?

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 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 find positions where the antenna would slice through the air rather than be buffeted like a kite, but often gusts came from unexpected directions.

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...

It was not stormy, but unusually unpleasant, especially with the recent memory of sun-drenched beaches and warmer air.

'meditating with your satellites'.

The Canadian National Exhibition is on this weekend, an end of summer festival with rides, music, and an international air show including the Royal Air Forces Red Arrows, Canadian Forces Snowbirds and the United States Air Forces F-22 Raptor.

We shook hands and he called out after me 'Have a great day!!' and something like 'good American!'

I think some of the planes were practicing as I was capturing this pass, buzzing through the sky, flying low and close to the ground.

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.

Otherwise, a very typical summer day in Toronto, pretty warm, humid and little cloud coverage.

The previous evening, a thick red and orange layer of particles coated the horizon.

I was rushing to finish a paragraph of my dissertation so I could hop on my bike and get to my usual spot on time for the pass.

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.

I'm starting to get familiar with the speed in which the satellites move through the sky.

Normally, while swimming one can see the coastline of the lagoon and even as far as Trieste, but the haze completely occluded our vision.

Now when I'm pointing the antenna at the sky I hear no static, just clear ticks and beeps.

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 same curious stranger was at the park today - and wished me luck on my capture!

The airplane journey was cloud-free until we reached the agricultural flatlands of Germany, when a few cotton ball clouds appeared.

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.

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.

Some older men and a few teenagers were monitoring the poles and their long, taught fishing lines.

We descended through the middle layer but spent another thirty minutes circling above and within the lower layer before landing.

One young person re-attached the lure on their line - it looked like a spider or dragonfly.

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.

Fixing my radio antenna to the edge of the wooden railing, I fished for signals.

The rain came and went for the rest of the day.

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.

I chose a lucky rain-break to head out to Hackney Downs with my yagi antenna for an evening pass.

In the greenish water below I could see the characteristic clumps of material called 'mucilagine' in Italy.

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.

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.

I thought about Soph and urged Soph's cells and molecules to keep binding, smoothing, healing.

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.

It's starting to warm up again after a few chilly days in Toronto.

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.

I biked to my usual spot in High Park and had a few extra minutes after setting up to read.

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.

As I was packing up, a stranger came up to me to ask what I was doing - this happens every time.

Rumour has it that Napoleon’s troops stopped to rest in its shade.

They are fascinated after I explain the process and I've started sharing the website with everyone who is curious about it.

Numerous local weddings, trysts, rituals and gatherings have occurred under and around its branches.

Went for an evening capture today.

Two large horizontal branches have fallen and now lie like giant bones in the yellow grass.

I was different and super fun!

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.

The park was very quiet, and only lit with street lamps.

I wonder what events caused the wood to ‘flow’ in this way- what memories does it hold?

The air was chilly and the sky was clear, I could see some stars and the moon was huge.

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 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).

The air rushed around us, but the humidity stuck to our hair and skin.

T and I had hustled on with our car and luggage around 21:30 and by 23:00 we were in the open sea.

We said goodbye to Hvar for the summer.

Languages swum between Croatian, Italian and French as we qued for dinner and wandered around.

I said goodbye to my Baba.

People had hung hammocks up between stairwells and railings.

A thin veil hung over the bay this morning, making the sunlight a little bit weaker and more silvery.

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.

Me and T had slept in after a hot and sweaty night during which both of us sat up awake at 3am.

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.

I squeezed between the bunk beds and tiptoed outside with my radio antenna before any coffee was brewed.

The darkness of the sea at night felt ominous and limitless.

As I suspected, leaving out the extension cable meant that I could receive the pass easily and clearly from the rooftop terrace.

A school of tiny black fish swirled around the rocks, and island swallows swooped and dived for insects above.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There was a big electrical storm this evening.

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.

Bolts of lightening flashed between clouds for hours.

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.

As I have spent most of my time indoors over the last two weeks, so to witness this weather event, even from the window, was exhilarating.

A soupy night.

My recovery from the surgery has been uneven and absolutely nonlinear.

Warm and still.

I have moments of pure joy, such as when I woke from a nap feeling completely rested, my mind loose but still.

Older men on park benches smoke and watched as I point my antenna.

But by the afternoon, I missed physical exercise and social contact.

My phone crashes multiple times.

I know that I need to ride out this turbulence.

I focus on the long beans handing from the tree in front of me.

Or rather ride with it.

The last kids of the day shouted in the park, two whizz around on scooters with LED lights in their wheels.

NOTE: I received the satellite image after the storm had passed and the stars were out.

I try to ignore the men’s gaze and relax into the warmth of the night.

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.

Mottled cloud mellowed the sun and a breeze prevented the air from feeling too close.

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.

On the balcony it is dark, grasshoppers sing.

One very powerful meteor passed from 90 degrees above us in a long orange streak to the horizon.

The tomatoes are recovering from a lack of water while N and I were on holiday.

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.

The crop is about on third ripe.

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.

Despite the stress of returning to medical admin and heavy weather between me and N, it’s been a good first day back at work.

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.

Sasha and I spoke for more than three hours.

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.

The feeling of pressure on my chest is easing.

In the local cemetary, mom and I each read a small passage, and my Mom also read a poem by Vesna Parun.

I will make the most of the cool night and sleep early.

It is always intense for me to be (back) here.

"I wonder if climate change can be measured in hot tracks?" you reply in response to my photo.

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.

N and I are waiting with perhaps a hundred other passengers at a small railway station outside Split.

I want to just lie without a towel or goggles or rock-shoes on the pale, jagged, karst rocks and stare at the sea.

The reason, we are told by a cheery Austrian train guard, is that the railway tracks are too hot for the train to proceed.

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.

We must wait for them to cool.

There are even more Mauve Singers in the bay, too many to swim without being vigilant.

It is more of a novelty than an inconvenience to be stranded in the warm night with strangers.

N and I collect white plastic rubbed smooth by the Mediterranean and bring it back up to the village in bags.

Assured by the guard that the train will not leave anytime soon, I made a dash to a local store to buy extra water and two ice creams.

Our host is distressed and moved to apologise by the sight of so much plastic.

The small shop is filled with fellow passengers.

He is an older man possibly no longer unable to make the steep 25 minute hike down to the water.

The atmosphere is convivial if a little restless as we wait for the shop attendant to finish slicing ham for a local customer.

He mentions the heat and then "the Albanians".

I return feeling victorious, carrying the ice creams, the train has not left and will not leave another two hours.

N is confused and thinks that Albanian tourists have been littering in the bay, as opposed to racialised ocean currents carrying the trash from the Albanian coastline.

I am getting better at staying cool headed in the heat.

His misunderstanding lightens my mood.

Blue skies, a few clouds.

temperatures dropped today, the air was mild but the wind was super chilly.

A gentle wind brought some relief.

sunny, hot, humid.

Today was hotter than yesterday.

second capture of the day!

Our host said that he installed the air conditioning unit the day we arrived.

sunny, hot, humid.

He complained many times about the heat.

second capture of the day!

It was a reassuring to know, as a Northener, that I was not the only on struggling.

It was a really sticky and humid morning in Toronto.

Yet it was disconcerting to know that the heat was new.

My partner (Rory) and I cycled to High Park to capture two back to back satellites.

It has not always been this way.

I suspect I am getting disoriented halfway through my captures so we marked north and south with a tape measure so I could follow it without having to check my phone's compass.

N and I waited until the relative cool of the night to receive a satellite pass.

Fuelled on just coffee this morning, we enjoyed the sunshine in between satellite passes.

We walked down to a track leading away from the village.

Went to a lookout today, the same spot I saw the eclipse a few months ago.

Using a head torch, I checked for snakes.

Thought I could get a clearer image, I'm starting to think I am getting a bit disoriented with my directions, I'll have to think of some solutions.

To my relief, I found a grass hopper laying eggs and a stray cat.

Big grey clouds were rolling as I was setting up, and an hour after the satellite passed, there was a thunder and lightning storm!

Towards the end of the pass, curious to know what other animals might be near, I looked around for more eyeshine.

I biked up a few blocks from my home, up a steep hill to a park I had never been to before.

My survey revealed many small green dots.

Lot's of kids playing, and runners around the park.

I approached, expecting to find small animals, perhaps lizards warming themselves on the stone?

Grey skies, very humid!

Instead, behind each green dot was a Radiated Wolf Spider.

I biked to the edge of Toronto, on Lake Ontario this evening.

N and I were being watched by tens of spiders.

I am trying different city parks to see where might be the best place to capture.

I dislike spiders so quickly packed-up and retreated to the house, eyeing the green dots lining the track.

It's been fun to cycle around the city to scope out potential sites.

The weather in Toronto was beautiful today, the air was a bit humid and there was no cloud coverage.

The Toronto beaches aren't very accessible, I have to cross a large highway on a very narrow bridge.

The satellite passed exactly as the sun was setting, and the sky was turning pink and orange.

But the sunset over the bridge on my way back home was really beautiful.

This was my first capture in Toronto, so the image came out a bit noisy, but I as thrilled to see that I had captured the Great Lakes and Hudson's Bay!

Clear skies for my on-the-lake capture, very humid, and I got a lot of questions from folks on their evening stroll.

My goal is to capture The Canadian Arctic which begins at the North end of Hudson's Bay.

The sun was rising when I rode my bike through Hackney Downs this morning, coming back home from a club in Dalston.

This time of year, the sea ice has melted and we can see an ice free Hudson's Bay!

My limbs felt both heavy and light in the very pleasing way that limbs feel when you have been dancing for hours.

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.

People were already in the park, or maybe they had been there the whole night.

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'.

I could see the faint spark of a cigarette in a huddle of bodies between the hedges.

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.

I thought about getting my radio antenna and catching a pass at dawn, but sleep was too tempting.

The coastline and interior of the African continent also stands out in the InfraRed channel.

Later, at almost 2pm, I re-emerged from my flat and went back to the park.

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 contrast to the soft, orange-pink glow of the early morning, the early afternoon was warm, hot and dry.

In some seasons it takes five days, while in other seasons it only takes five hours.

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?!".

Their work rhythms are intimately related to the drying of the clay, and so also the heat and movement of air.

I could only think to yell back, "No!".

In a meeting this morning I was reminded of Michael Taussig's writing on heat.

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.

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).

That seemed to help.

As I pored over the 'satellite-eye's view' of today, I wondered about where heat as a 'force' shows up.

He yelled again "What are you tracking!!?" and I replied "A satellite!!

Does it only show up in the clay ball that tells about heat by how fast it dries?

An image!!".

Or does the force somehow also 'show up' in the satellite image, in the darkness and contrast of pixels?

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.

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.

They huddled around my computer.

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?

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.

Today has been about rhythms.

Instead, they asked me what the weather was going to be like.

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.

I said I was not a meteorologist, but the image was showing different patterns of clouds over the Atlantic, maybe coming to the UK.

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).

They seemed to like this.

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.

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.

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.

When you close hands you end up getting pulled together in a show of comraderie.

O'Shaughnessy and Kendall Witaszek (2018).

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.

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”.

On my way back from the park, a bright burst of lichen caught my eye.

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 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We can ‘think science and poetics together’ in ‘fulfilling’, actualised and emotional ways.

Acqua!

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.

ventisei.

In the mean time, I want to return to their articles with an attention for 'science of the word' and 'narrative devices'.

Sabbia!

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.

trentasette.

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.

(Water!

The park was golden and shimmering in sunlight, and the greenness of everything was 'overwhelming' as my partner put it.

twenty six.

Lying on a log in the sun, I opened my eyes to see a hawk making circles overhead, barefly moving a wing-feather.

Sand!

I heard a sound like a sneeze, and looked to the right, spotting a doe with two fawns.

thirty seven).

Lime green parrots talked excitedly in the branches and zipped from gnarly twig to tree trunk.

A voice called out the temperature of sea and land on a loudspeaker at the beach of Lignano Sabbiadoro on the Italian coast.

A spider with a large bulbous abdomen scrambled over my leg.

I placed my towel on the sand next to a lifeguard station and felt the heat.

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.

People were running from their umbrellas to the sea (sometimes carrying small children) as the sand burned underfoot.

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.

I debated trying a satellite pass, decided not to in this unlikely location, and finally thought I’d try.

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.

Something about being in a swimsuit with the ground station immediately felt weird!

As I am packing up ten minutes later, though, the woman runs over and asks to see the image.

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.

She is joined by another friend.

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.

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.

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.

As she speaks I admire her sparkly turqoise eyeliner and try not to stare.

The shadowy form of the boot of Italy appeared in the infrared channel, lighter than the water (and therefore cooler).

They are especially impressed by the colour infrared image of the highest cloud tops.

This puzzled me until I realised that land loses heat faster than water; the sea ‘holds’ it.

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.

Today I am striking in solidarity with Palestine together with other UK-based practitioners and organisations.

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.

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.

Wind is the subject of a half-day symposium at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton where I am presenting on behalf of open-weather.

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.

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.

Though open-weather is a fragmentary, precariously funded cultural project, it does participate in the cultural sphere.

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.

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

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.

I have been thinking a lot about how scholars, artists and others investigating air try to 'substantiate' it in their work.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Choy continues, "miming this method, I collect the details in a diffuse set of contexts" to "turn the diffuse into something substantive" (2011: 146).

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.

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'.

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.

'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?

I am on holiday with my sister, Ray, and her partner Ben.

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.

When we check into our Airbnb the host, a women a little younger than our mother, apologies for our "bad luck" with the wet weather.

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?

We engage in pleasantries about how unpredictable the summer has been, and wet and warm the spring was.

What if, in efforts to 'substantiate' air, we paid more attention to the fullness of air's aesthetics, its movements, gradients, vacuums, and porosities...

"We are not looking after Mother Earth", our host concludes.

the emptiness in between loosely tethered molecules?

Her tone is serious.

Rather than 'mouthfuls' of particles we might be substantiating something closer to texture, impressions, traces.

I think I detect fear, but cannot be sure.

Still, mild, mottled clouds.

We say that "we do not mind", that "we will swim anyway", because "we are from the North".

Clear air.

Berlin, Friday night, August.

By contrast, there is so much to write about the turbulent, changeable weather of last week.

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.

And, yet, I know that I cannot because some weathers are ineffable, and there have been so many, in too few days.

The traffic 'rush' sounds below mingled with laughs, drunken conversation and sometimes yells or screams.

Together, Sasha, we altered each.

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.

My hormones were so low (by chance) and I was grieving how my body will be changed by the operation next week.

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.

You tried to lower the waves of adrenaline and cortisol with empathy, touch and grounding words.

From my midnight perch, I sent Soph a hug and some calm energies through the body-temperature air.

It worked, to a point.

Warm wind, residual heat.

We were what M Murphy, co-director of the Environmental Data Justice Lab at Tornoto University, calls "endocrine participating" (Murphy 2024).

U-Bahn, aeroplanes, kids on the beach, gravel under our feet.

Yet the estrogen and progesterone in my body refused to join in, staying so low that my sleep was disturbed and recall foggy.

Long shadows where the city meets the landscape.

You felt so steady and strong, but I know that you too were tired and running on empty.

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.

Our boundaries felt dangerously porous.

The air is relatively calm, and a high altitude cirrus or haze makes the light a bit silvery.

Yet, in clear breach of feminist protocol, we worked.

The ground is still moist in places, though elsewhere the grass has dried and turned a light beige.

We worked on this project: carefully dismantling and debugging 3D-printed prototypes, testing digital interfaces, and making logistical plans for when and how to send hardware to far away locations.

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 also swam and drank too many Weißer Spritzers.

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.

You tried to order a doppelter Espresso but instead made-up the word "dooblé".

We shook hands twice before parting.

We laughed, mixing caffeine with dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins.

As I was leaving the Downs after the pass about twenty minutes later, an older man called out to me.

We laughed too when, during a beautifully intense dance performance, we saw ourselves in the two dancers' energetic, full-bodied exchange.

He said he lived close to Hackney Downs and had seen me many times with the antenna, and now wanted an explanation.

On the way back from lunch, I quite literally fell over your feet, bloodied my knees, and sat wordlessly gulping for air on the pavement.

I showed the satellite image I had just live-decoded and he mentioned his own work as an artist.

The activities list I drew-up before your arrival is now just over half crossed-out.

As his hands were trembling, he asked me to type in the open-weather website to the Notes on his phone.

Hungry to share, you and I pushed each other, as always.

The sun went in and out flooding the lush foliage in a dramatic yellow light.

Next time, I hope for fairer weather between us.

I had run out of time to reach the park, so carried my bike down a flight of steps to the bank of the Danube Canal.

What I thought was the beeping of a heart monitor was actually the beeps of a pedestrian crossing.

To my right two, trees that I did not recognise bore seeds and globe shaped fruit.

I feel hollowed out.

The uncut grass next to the water's edge was flush with wild flowers.

Heavy and exhausted, I sit on the street corner bench.

Up stream, almost under a road bridge, a woman wearing a hippy paisley print vest was collecting something from the bank, slowly filling two plastic shopping bags.

I began the satellite pass stood next to the empty plot beside our house but moved because there was so much radio noise.

I assembled the antenna unhurried with the knowledge that in my sunken position the satellite would take need to be almost overhead before I could receive it.

It has become a mysterious fact that, since the block of flats that stood there was demolished last summer, the void has been filled with radio waves.

It's transmission arrived earlier than I expected but my phone crashed, corrupting the file and forcing me to restart the recording.

I imagine live electrical cables buried under the compressed rubbled.

Once done, I sat on the bank, listening to the satellite's rhythmic presence and enjoying the cool winds and waters of the Danube.

Electric snakes hidden under shattered brick.

We woke up to dark skies again, but the air remained warm, humid.

This image has stopped me from venturing behind the flimsy construction site fence to pick wild flowers.

On my way to Southwark Bridge for a morning appointment it began to drizzle-rain and city-workers clutched their goose-bumped arms.

A woman walking to beautifully glossy dogs stops to ask if I am listening for bats.

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.

For a moment, I wish that I was engaged in a short-range, in-situ sensing that could connect me more directly to the nature that surrounds me.

A young man agreed to take some photos, and then went back to leaning on the railing, meditating on the water.

Before the building was demolished there was a large bat population.

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.

No, I say, weather satellites.

"When you're in the party b-b-bumpin' that beat / 666 with a princess streak..."

Man-made, metal birds, a thousand kilometres away.

It is very windy today - the kind of surprising wind that gusts and blows in corridors.

One of the three sisters in my building passes and asks what I am doing.

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.

I offer a less than satisfactory explanation as I have decided to rush to the nearby supermarket before it closes to buy a 'sports drink' in an attempt to replenish the electrolytes in my body.

The tape measure joints swung at odd angles from the wood stick.

I wake up having had a nightmare, but it is really a memory of a real event that was playing out in my dreams.

An older woman and a small, white, curly haired dog were meandering nearby and I waved to say hi.

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).

We ended up speaking for most of the satellite pass.

I run through all the ways I could have acted differently in that moment.

After considering my antenna for a few minutes she said: "the satisfaction...

I visualise myself standing up in front of the room and hitting back.

it gives satisfaction" and then "it's contact".

It plays and plays, until I manage to have breakfast.

I completely agreed.

By lunchtime, though, I am lost in the flow of an article I'm trying to finish before holiday.

A welcome overcast day with light rain.

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.

Inexplicably, I heard air traffic control on the same frequency as the satellite NOAA-19.

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.

I was sitting on the concrete bleachers of the local sports ground, beneath a GSM mast for mobile (cellular) phones, but I cannot think think that could have had an effect.

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.

The transmission seemed too strong to be a harmonic.

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.

Decreasing the bandwidth to exclude the noise worked well.

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...

I feel lethargic.

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).

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.

Does the thaumatrope help to destabilise the 'unified entity' of the Scirocco or Jugo wind that brings 'Saharan Dust' to Europe?

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.

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'?

'Nice one!' he replied, and then followed with "I like your glasses!!!'.

In contrast to a regional 'event', can we recognise something about the 'complex work of the air'?

'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.

Blue sky, hot.

Another man in a neat vest, jeans and glasses approached me a few minutes later and quietly asked what I was tracking.

The city is heating up again.

After I replied, he exclaimed 'And I thought I had an interesting job!!' 'What's your job?' I asked.

Yet the park, usually busy on such days, is quiet.

He said 'Oh I park cars...

Presumably many residents are already on holiday.

BMWs...

Summer holidays are taken seriously in Vienna.

train driver too'.

Its shops and restaurants can shut completely, sometimes for more than a month, only reopening in September.

He went on his way.

This ritual of city life and work grinding to a halt in high summer as people take in long holidays, is a side of Austrian culture that is, perhaps, less well know and more associated with our hotter neighbour, Italy.

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.

I hide the ground station's hardware under the shade of a plant, and limit my time in the sun by leaving as soon as the satellite pass is over.

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.

I am tried and a little nauseous today, but in the openness of the park these feelings are less.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Later in the afternoon I show my satellite image to SB, a physical geographer who specialises in studying past climates through tephra (volcanic ash).

She kept saying that this research, or the research materials themselves, were 'embarrassing'.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Meanwhile, he says, ‘anywhere below 40 degrees (latitude) is burning’.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I was reflecting on this during my satellite pass today.

Low-hanging, medium-grey cloud with a light drizzle that grew into light rain as I knelt on the grass.

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.

The sound of a car-sized grass mower in the distance.

They came over and started asking questions.

Damp ground.

I was sitting on the grass holding my antenna upright and listening to the sound of the satellite on my Android phone.

Despite the un-summerlike conditions, the park was full of primary school children running races and exercising.

They approached very near but stayed standing, so I had to look vertically upward to see their faces.

As soon as one group saw me and came over to ask what I was doing, I became a magnet for others.

Their tall, looming shapes were outlined against the bright, cloudy sky.

One girl asked if I was 'traveling the world...

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.

with that thing [pointing to the antenna]?' I said in some ways, I was, but also, I was just listening to the world.

Is it the fact that I use the word 'DIY'?

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!'.

Is it that I don't look like the type of person who is doing research or science?

But I appreciated their forwardness.

In 1989, Derek Jarman wrote of a day in July: "Lazy high summer.

As they huddled around, I showed them the growing satellite image and pointed to different countries so they could try identifying them.

The drowsy bees fall over each other in the scarlet poppies, which shed their petals by noon.

The answer was 'I don't know...

Meadow browns and gatekeepers flutter wearily across the shell-pink brambles disputing the nectar with a fast bright tortoiseshell.

' until it turned out they did know.

The bees clamber hungrily up the sour green woodsage.

Among the parents or chaperones, several asked further questions and wanted to know how to follow the project.

Drifts of mauve rosebay and deep yellow ragwort studded with orange and black burnt caterpillars" (Jarman, 1991: 107).

I had to hurry to pack up in between two waves of visitors to avoid disappointing anyone.

This morning I read an article in the Guardian about the rate and long-term advancement of mass insect death.

Grey, clouded, though lighter than yesterday.

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.

I noticed a thin, middle-aged man sat on a bench was watching me with my Yagi antenna.

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.

When I set my antenna down at the end of the pass, he walked over.

Other than the random lazy fly, I don't see any other pollinators.

He started with 'Just checking...

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.

you were tracking UFOs with that thing?'.

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 smiled and waved my hand in a 'sort of' gesture.

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.

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.

Low-pressing grey again.

We looked at the satellite image together.

A feeling of melancholy.

I pointed at the outlines of France, Spain and North Africa.

I'm missing Soph's presence on zoom calls and text channels.

He exclaimed 'Oh yeah, you're into weather!!' and he added 'I'm into weather too, always have been!'.

I go searching for the funfair in the northwest corner of the park.

'How come?' I asked.

It has not yet been activated, but I can see people walking around inside, checking and testing things.

He replied 'You can spell Rain, Cloud and Sun with my name...

I capture a satellite image with my Yagi antenna and Android phone, kneeling in the yellow grass.

also Oak, Acorn...

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.

all the elements!' 'What's your name?' I asked.

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.

He replied 'Frances S ...' and a last name that I don't recall that begins with a 'K'.

I hear a man speaking at an elevated volume on the phone.

'All the elements, then!' we laughed.

He says something like 'I thought I had 2 points!

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.

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.

As I packed up I heard him yell to a man on a bike 'EH!!

I wonder how many places they go.

you have a GOOD DAY!!' As I walked home I thought about which elements I could spell with my name.

As I walk back to Downs Road I pass a couple walking their greyhound.

By counting my middle name (Hildegard) I came up with 'shade', 'shine' 'hail' and 'snail'...

As I pass I can hear the woman say to her partner 'Oh yes that's the lady with the...'

As we lift the blinds in the morning, T says 'what does it mean if the sky is blue!?

It is a grey, energy-less, dark-clouded day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!'.

It mostly works.

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.

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.

The gloomy weather in London persists.

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.

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.

There was not a speck or glimmer of cloud in the sky- and it was a wide open horizon.

It feels surreal to think that we still have some time in the Adriatic planned for later in the summer.

It took Joaquin and I only 12 minutes to drive from Debora's house to VI.

It feels surreal to think of a 'normal' summer at all, at this point.

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.

I spend the morning organising open-weather finances in the university finance system called, fittingly, 'Agresso'.

We passed to the right of a large sand dune - a sand production facility- there were thick clouds of dust in the air".

I manage to extricate myself from Agresso to go outside for a satellite pass- finding a slow, languid drizzle.

From the open clarity of Debora's rooftop, it was a different experience being on the ground in VI.

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.

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).

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.

VI, like much of Buenos Aires, is on marshland, and we passed many pools of water and algae-covered ponds.

The deck felt more inviting than the humid, dark interior of the boat with airplane-like seats and sullen-looking people.

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.

We ate cheese and pickle sandwiches that neither of us liked very much.

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.

A NOAA-19 pass began just three minutes after the boat's departure.

It looked very old and dilapidated.

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!

Joaquin suspects that environmental regulations were relaxed during the pandemic to enable the repurposing of these kinds of incinerators.

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.

We also passed a smaller river - maybe 20m wide - that looked like slow-moving cement.

I wondered how my trajectory on the boat was affecting the image reception, if at all.

There was on oil slick on top.

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.

Claudia had compared the river to cement too".

He had travelled to the Isle of Wight for the weekend to 'see the stars'.

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.

Yet he also admitted to being 'very out of it' and having had 'little sleep'.

I thought about what it takes to turn a river into cement.

He lamented the rise of Starlink and the other ways we are 'ruining the planet', and didn't say much more.

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.

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.

I thought about the 'weather' of Villa Inflamable, the weather of flammable.

My experience of noise is normally a little 'softer', more like a gradient than a cut.

In a recent article on perceptions of air in Mumbai, two scholars write: "For the state, flammability is the result of the residents themselves.

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.

It is them, and their forms of work, that create fire risks, and so it is they who need to be removed.

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.

Residents, on the other hand, attribute causality to the gases that the garbage ecology itself produces.

The weather forecast had predicted rain and yet we were in the sun most of the day.

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).

Our shoes and hands were speckled with the chalk that is characteristic of the island, and our legs happily tired.

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.

We learned about the local footpaths and the 'right to roam' across farmland.

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.

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.

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.

We learned about some of the locals, too.

Last night on BBC weather, the presenter kept comparing current temperatures in the UK to what they 'should be' this time of year.

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.

The general trend was toward colder, wetter weather across England, Wales and Scotland.

We said we were from London.

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.

He said 'no your not!' so we had to explain further.

As he reported this, the presenter even seemed a bit embarrassed, as if it was an awkward secret he was revealing.

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 met Muffin Man and a new miniature-Pomeranian rescue, Moonpie, out on the downs in the morning.

I ran through angry retaliations in my head for several minutes, then let it go.

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.

Back at the cliff, we lay in the tall grass as the crows swirled around us and T did some deep listening.

They seemed unusually pendulous.

I told T that I felt like falling off the cliff, it felt so tempting to follow the crows.

I wondered whether warmer temperatures and the current humid conditions mean that drops grow larger before they fall.

Finally the grey has passed and a crisp wind has blown away most of the low-hanging, misty clouds.

It is another grey, misty and cold-ish day in London.

The air has a sharp chill, but one that will fade soon, I suspect.

I spend the morning working and take a brief break to capture a satellite image.

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.

A curly haired black dog tackles me and rolls around on my laptop as I am mid-pass.

Today wind and sunlight fill the landscape with laughter.

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.

An old window opened in the wind and sent the cobwebs flying.

We don't speak long.

The grasses are clapping - even the seagulls loop the loop".

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).

The day starts cold, gray and misty.

We rise sixty floors in what feels like five seconds, our ears popping.

During the satellite pass, I feel chilly in my Mom's flannel-lined denim jacket, jeans and boots.

At the top, T and I carefully approach the knife-edge, holding on to the metal beams for reassurance.

How is this the second of July, I think.

After a few minutes, though, we have our foreheads pressed against the glass gazing in every direction.

In the slow-loading satellite image, the sun glints tantalisingly, catching its own reflection over the Mediterranean.

A stranger offers to take photos of us.

I am wondering where Soph is at the moment, as they left for a two-week holiday on Sunday.

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.

I think somewhere in Croatia, soaking up sunrays and salty air.

It sort of dissolves rather than making it the whole way.

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.

There are only a few other people, and so plenty of space to circle all edges and study all perspectives.

Is it possible to miss an atmosphere, or a weather pattern?

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.

Is it possible to be nostalgic for places, less through their material surfaces and more through their elements?

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.

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.

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.

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.

One long-winged fly, looking like a cross between a grasshopper and a moth, landed on my keyboard.

Yet I think there is something beyond the beauty of Hvar and the Adriatic Sea that I am missing so much.

Purple-pink cornflowers and daisies bloomed abundantly in the uncut grass.

Maybe it's a direction I will always turn.

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.

'So humid' proclaims T as we walk to Hackney Central to catch the overground to Stratford on a rare trip to the Westfield Mall.

I resolved to return to the apiary one day and attempt a recording of both an orbiting satellite and honeybees.

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.

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.

On the overground, two Moms are taking a large group of young boys paintballing.

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.

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.

I appreciated his curiosity, but the way he had just placed his body in the middle of our private conversation was annoying.

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.

It transpired that he was an academic in the sciences, though I can't remember the exact field, employed by Queen Mary University.

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).

When I mentioned later in the conversation that I work at Royal Holloway, he immediately asked "And you live in East London?

We flee after no more than 45 minutes and head home, shoeless.

Why don't you work at Queen Mary?!".

I woke relieved to see a cloudy sky and even a few drops of rain.

I said I would love to have the option of a job at Queen Mary, things weren't that simple!

By eleven o'clock the sky had mostly cleared and the temperature is rising again.

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.

I feel the heat on my face as I lean out of the window to receive this image.

Yet as soon as he read the blurb, he exclaimed to his friend "Oh this is not for us...

My left arm turned to jelly as I tried to maintain the pose, thrusting my antenna as far East as possible.

it's a 'feminist experiment'....".

The Kestrels nesting in the building across the street made frequent alarm calls.

I replied actually, it was exactly for them.

Two flying ants danced around the stone work below me.

"I'll have to tie my hair back" said the first man.

It's Sunday, but N and I leave for Split by train tonight, so I am working a funding application.

The second seemed to understand what I had said and backed me up.

Sasha, I know that my contributions have been inconsistent recently.

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.

It's possible that I have been struggling with low moods more than I let on.

I decided to close my laptop.

They come to me at dusk like low pressure fronts, and often pass by the time I have finished my morning coffee.

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.

I am not depressed nor unhappy, I just think too much.

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.

The pain I have weathered for the last year has surely left it's mark.

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.

37 days until the operation.

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.

As I write this weather note there is a warm wind and the temperature has dropped.

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 park, I could see large cloud to my West.

In the last few lines of the book, Stephen, in anguish, pleads to God: "give us also the right to our existence!".

It might have been a cumulonimbus but its top was cirrus-like and its shape not well defined.

I think of how much has changed in the 100 years since the publication of The Well.

The heat is waking me early.

I can live together with T, I can live an openly queer life, and I can freely access and read this book.

This morning instead of rising, I read the news in bed.

Yet the 'pull' of 'normal' has not lost its strength.

President Biden has performed poorly in a debate about Trump, unnerving even his allies.

Society's 'straightening devices' work in new and different ways today, but they still work.

The American Democratic Party is panicking.

Living obliquely or 'slantwise' requires unusual and surprising effort at times.

If the situation wasn't so terrifying, it would be funny.

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.

Writing this note is taking longer that is should as I feel so drowsy.

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.

I have drunk a mate tea to wake-up, however it seems to be having opposite effect.

It's a warm evening and the street is loud.

The wind has dropped and the sun is shining again.

Starlings, children, adults shouting, car tyres screeching.

I could fall asleep at my desk.

The humidity has felt oppressive.

I awoke this morning not having slept because of the heat.

As I recorded the image the sky was clouding over.

T and I had left the bedroom and living room windows open but there was little breeze.

The clouds are dramatic, they look high defintion and high contrast.

In the middle of the night, the bedroom blinds started knocking against the window and I dreamed someone was trying to get in.

They are moving quickly.

Foxes screamed (or intensely rejoiced?) at 3am in the garden.

I felt one large drop of rain on my way home, but that's it so far.

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.

It's a hot, hot, hot day in London.

I had to cross the current by hopping a few feet at a time through moving bodies in order to speak to him.

People are bravely tanning on the grass in the park, though I imagine some might be roasting.

He had an American accent but I shied away from asking about his origins.

The moment T and I wake up, we open all the windows in our second floor flat.

He didn't open his eyes when he spoke.

T says, 'we need a storm'.

By the time I bought him a coffee, he had got another one from someone else.

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.

We joked about the double coffee situation before I re-entered the commuter river.

Was Soph already 'seeing the dust', I wondered?

When I left he had opened his eyes, gazing straight ahead.

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.

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.

Katherine had been briefed by Bill on my satellite ground station and open-weather, and complemented the project.

The one thing that might 'work' is to stop working.

We agreed that, 'you meet all sorts in this park' and 'you learn so much from chatting to people'.

Hence why my weather note ends here.

I mentioned my interest in seeing the dust, and Bill asked how many tons of dust actually travel in the air?

Hackney Downs was golden and glowing this evening, as the city held on to its heat.

Millions or trillions of tons?

My arms and shins throbbed slightly from a fast cycle ride from Bloomsbury.

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).

I thought about my meeting with J earlier today.

The takeaway was that it will take many millions of years for the mountains to return to the sea, but it will happen eventually!

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.

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.

J mentioned many collaborators, institutions and places who I imagined with fictional appearances and atmospheres.

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).

As I recorded the satellite pass, reflecting on the possible station in Australia, two people came over to speak to me.

That's 400,000,000 tons of dust per year.

They appreciated the measuring tape.

I wonder how much is airborne in any given 'dust' event.

Their names were Alex and Tamsin, and Alex kindly took the attached photo (thanks Alex!).

Or, phrase differently, how much air suspends the dust?

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.

At the Restore Nature Now march in London today, signs read, 'To Bee or Not to Bee', 'Hey Kier OR Rishi!

I had wanted to visit this cemetary for a long time, as it is situated on the prime meridian, 0.000 Longitude.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Their signs read 'Choose Butch.

I carefully unfurled my radio antenna.

Choose Femme.

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 '.

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!'.

Though I am not religious, I said a small prayer to request access to the radio spectrum from the cemetary's residents.

Our allegiance to the XR march was seriously challenged!

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.

T said 'OMG, there's Stav B!', (legendary artist and performer who used to host underground nights for queer womxn in east London).

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 barely resisted jumping the street barrier and carried on in the Restore Nature Now crowd.

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.

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.

'Lonely' was repeated by several voices.

There were just as many cowboy hats as dolly parton wigs.

The M11 road made a constant background hum, an incessant current of noise alongside our attempt to listen.

Two older men, dressed in matching pinstripe shirts and blue jeans, out-danced many of the gays.

Walking through Hackney Downs at lunchtime today, in peak park-hour, my Yagi antenna was especially conspicuous.

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.

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.

On a day like this, we give our gratitude to this city.

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.

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.

What I didn't properly think through was how this would look to other people coming to the meadow at lunch hour.

I wondered if my DIY Yagi can pick up the dust so far away from the UK.

From the path, it looked like me and my ground station were responsible for the squashed flowers.

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?).

Also, me being off the path probably suggested I authorised or agreed with such flower-destroying activity.

Yet despite the very weak signal received yesterday, my experience testing the antenna on Tuesday suggested it might be possible.

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.

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.

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.

Unlike yesterday, tracking the satellite was easy, or perhaps the signal was strong enough that I didn't need to be so precise.

I stopped the recording early even though the pass was very high elevation and my yagi was performing great.

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.

I debated whether to post any photos at all but then decided not to hide what I did!

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.

I hope the ten minutes I spent in the off-path area of the meadow can be forgiven by humans and flowers alike.

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.

It's a balmy temperature, just warmer than my body.

The dust is out of the frame, to the East.

The sky is hazy and there is a cool breeze.

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?

The weather is mild, but I feel enraged.

A fugitive 'weather between us' in the refractions and reflections of quasi-invisible traveling particles.

At breakfast, I let rage well up inside of me as I read the New York Times newsletter's coverage of crisis of aid not reaching people inside Gaza.

This is day two of measuring tape Yagi antenna experiments.

In my lay opinion, the article's conclusion is morally and legally bankrupt.

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.

I have worked on armed conflicts for the last seven years and yesterday, in preparation for a consultancy job, I read 'SOUTH AFRICA’S COMMENTS ON THE REPLY BY ISRAEL TO THE QUESTION POSED BY JUDGE NOLTE AT THE END OF THE ORAL HEARINGS HELD ON 17 AND 18 MAY 2024'.

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.

In short, denying civilians access to medical services and humanitarian aid is punitive and illegal.

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.

End of.

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 suspect different colours of my rage are interconnected, like clouds of a cyclonic weather system.

I hoped I wouldn't be noticed by an anxious parent or onlooker.

For example, I have such bad cycling rage at the moment and it’s very misandrist.

My first pass with a homemade, 'tape measure' Yagi antenna!

Everything time a male cyclist overtakes me at the traffic lights and then proceeds to cycle slower then me – a regular occurrence – I mentally flip-out and practice the cycling equivalent of tailgating.

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 should stop this and find a better outlet for this negative energy.

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.

Recently, I chased down a male cyclist who had, unprovoked, shouted at me.

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.

Sadly, he didn’t notice and it was me who turned into a one way street in the wrong direction.

Instead of PVC pipe, I used a long piece of wood that was intended for house moulding.

I could continue to list the things that have provoked rage in me, but there is little point as they are proxies for greater, less direct injustices.

The tape measure was an old heavy duty one that I had in my electronics box.

After what has seemed like weeks of rain, cold and relative darkness, today was a dramatic shift into sun and warmth.

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).

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!

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!

One of its teeth even slightly knocked one of mine.

I tracked the satellite to a maximum elevation of 45 degrees to the East and then down to the Southern horizon.

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.

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.

I saw it go back to its owner, and then spot a sunbather on the grass that it could love-attack.

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!

Later, as I was packing up, a gorgeous Romanian sheepdog came over and sat down next to my laptop.

More testing to follow soon...

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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".

I went to the grocery store and bought portobellos, salad, cucumber, sweet potato and mochi.

The man also insisted on showing us a photo of the Lake Atitlan, which was a pearl blue surrounded by deep green hills.

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.

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.

The next few minutes were a complete blur of overwhelming emotions, extreme happiness and my cheeks hurting from smiling too much.

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.

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.

I placed my open laptop upside down on the brunch table so it could dry itself out.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

We don't speak.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Police used pepper spray, water cannon and teargas against the huge crowds while demonstrators set two overturned cars ablaze and threw molotov cocktails".

On the train to the university campus this morning, I think: what might it mean to ‘queer’ air, and our relations to it?

I think about the generic-ness of this reporting, how little it actually says about the events occurring.

Several scholars I read and admire have recently gestured to air’s queerness.

Or, conversely, how much it says about how often similar events are occurring.

Nerea Calvillo writes about queering as a practice that is useful when we consider airborne things like pollen.

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.

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).

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.

Queering air “brings desire, multispecies reproduction and interactions, excess, and ambiguity” to the fore (2023: 241).

Plus, they're giving foreign extractive companies the right to litigate in foreign tribunals.

Nerea thus figures queering air as a tactic of honouring air’s multiplicity and deviancy.

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.

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.

It's really tough, especially in the middle of a years-long recession and economic crisis, with poverty rising to a staggering 55%".

Minutes later, I am listening to the Russian satellite Meteor MN2-3 drown-out the weaker signal of NOAA-18.

D shares that some students from her university have been unfairly imprisoned last night, not far from her house.

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.

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'.

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).

'A form of torture' D adds.

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.

All of this as Milei prepares to travel to the G7 summit, a guest of Giorgia Meloni.

Spahr’s poem offers a very different diagram of air to space, and I would argue this is a queer one.

All of this as 50,000 new fires have been reported in Argentina the past several days, despite the winter season.

The word ‘air’ is never mentioned in the poem, yet ‘breathes the space’ arises several times.

I spend the rest of my day thinking about Aya Nassar's question: "we hold our breath.

Air is an anterior, a semi-nothingness that nevertheless infrastructures lungs and spaces.

Where do we go from here?" (2024: 3).

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’.

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.

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.

I am not sure if I can make out the fingerprint that is Iceland in the North Atlantic, normally so disinguishable.

This is an "affective scene [that] focuses on receiving and metabolizing the world while unraveling its presumed solidity" (Berlant, 2022: 97).

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.

This is perhaps a "queer reboot of the common" (Berlant, 2022: 99) that comes about through the queering of air.

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'.

Today I am reflecting on volumes of air.

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).

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.

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).

He writes: "To study an object, one must pick it out from its surroundings, and concentrate it in one place.

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.

How was one to make of the air such an object?

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.

How was the air to be picked out of its surroundings, when air was ambience itself?

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.

How was the air to be brought before one, when it was of necessity and at all times about?" (Connor, 2010: 17).

As my workday draws to a close around 7pm I fantastise about writing Chen an email to ask: what is your melancholy layering now?

To 'pick something out' from its surroundings, to 'concentrate it' and to bring it 'before one' is to orient toward it.

what are you permitting?

Yet this act of orientation proves tricky when the thing one seeks to 'pick out' is 'at all times about'.

The sunlight comes sideways today.

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).

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.

Thus, in lieu of condensing air, one might work to enclose it, to create a space in which air is 'locked'.

A flash of sun comes from the horizon as a gap in the sky opens for a few seconds and closes again.

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 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 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.

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.

Could Boyle have conceived of the consequences of volumetric air?

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.

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?

I find myself turning on and off the desk lamp and living room light, unable to find optimal emailing conditions.

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?

One clap of thunder booms across the city just after lunchtime, answered by a far away siren.

Is there anything there?

Pockets of deep cerulean blue shown through grey and white cloud this Sunday morning.

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).

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.

The air is warm but skies are grey, which has been a regular theme these last few weeks in London.

As the pass was ending, a man named Paul rode over to me on his bike, and asked what I was tracking.

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".

He was suprised that the answer was satellites, as he had expected wildlife.

We spoke for almost the duration of the pass, and he kindly took the attached photo of me.

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.

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.

The photo was of Paul next to a train with the lettering Dr Paul Stephenson on the side.

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.