Sophie "Soph" Dyer is a transdisciplinary designer, researcher and sometime writer. They co-lead the feminist art, tech and pedagogy collective, open-weather.

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External Advisor

External Advisor to Forensic Architecture on digital participation in research.
(October 2023 – April 2025)
Forensic Architecture
Goldsmiths
London
#archives #investigations #participatory-works #storytelling

2023 open-weather trailer

Open-weather in three minutes. Our first trailer documenting where we are as a collective, from antennas to sci-fi, workshops to writing, and how-to guides to planetary 'nowcasts'.
(2023)
Unsolicited
online
#archives #open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Open-weather retreat in Glasgow

Open-weather is holding two weeks of internal workshops, strategy sessions and prototyping. We are hosted by our longtime collaborators and friends, the prolific design and programming duo, Rectangle. Open-weather and Rectangle are thinking together about the project’s digital tools, infrastructure, and how to host the growing meshwork of more than one hundred DIY satellite ground station operators. We are also be discussing how to take forward emergent themes in the work, such as ecological grief and climate rites. Our retreat is supported in part by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. We are grateful to Rectangle for their hospitality, without which the two weeks would not have been possible.
(May 2023 – June 2023)
Unsolicited
Glasgow

Open-weather takes part in Sonic Acts

Performative talk and one-day workshop in collaboration with Sasha Engelmann for the biennial's Leaving Traces symposium.
(October 2022)
Sonic Acts
Leaving Traces Symposium
Amsterdam
#archives #open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

For the Sonic Acts, open-weather presented the project ‘When I image the earth, I imagine another’ and held a day-long ‘DIY Satellite Ground Station Workshop’ on the waterfront.

In our talk, we used speculative fiction to explore “what’s at stake” for the project, travelled through the COP26 nowcast and proposed a “fractal grammar” for images of earth, foregrounding the different modes of being that are performed in satellite imagery, field notes and bodies.

Thank you to the more than one hundred DIY hundred ground stations operators to whom open-weather belongs; Olivia Bercowicz for being our voice from the future; Teresa Cos for mixing the sound; and Golrokh Nafisi for illustrating our story.

Warmest thanks to Mirna Belina, Margarita Osipian, Roos Duijnstee, Sebastian Frisch, Michela Trovato, Zareena Ackbar, Oleg Khadartsev, Zhanna Gulenko, Alice Johnston Rougeaux and Viktoria Douka-Doukopolou for hosting and supporting us at Sonic Acts.

Documentation by Sonic Acts.

The COP26 nowcast was created in collaboration with Rectangle. Open-weather is co-led by Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer.

One hundred voices: Women and girls under Taliban rule in Afghanistan

Extracts from one hundred interviews with women and girls in Afghanistan, rendered as messages. A collaboration with Rectangle (Lizzie Malcolm and Daniel Powers).
(July 2022)
Amnesty International
online
#archives #investigations

Extracts from one hundred interviews with women and girls living under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, rendered as messages for Amnesty International’s 2022 report and campaign, Death in Slow Motion.

View the multi-channel version: demo

Developed in collaboration with designer and developer Lizzie Malcolm (Rectangle), filmmaker Tamana Ayazi, and human rights researcher Nicolette Waldman (Amnesty International).

*Names have been changed to protect identities.

Visual investigation into the attack on the Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine

Producer for Amnesty International's visual investigation into the air strike on the Drama Theatre in Mariupol. The investigation used 3D modelling to piece together open source evidence with witness and expert testimony.
(June 2022)
Amnesty International
online
#investigations

Producer for Amnesty International’s visual investigation into the Russian air strike that destroyed the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theatre in Mariupol on on 16 March 2022.

At the time of the attack, hundreds of civilians were in and around the theatre; many were killed. The theatre was clearly recognisable as a civilian object, perhaps more so than any other location in the city. The evidence Amnesty International gathered demonstrated that the attack was a war crime.

Disinformation online and a lack of access to the site of the attack led to a struggle to first obtain evidence and second to communicate the organisation’s findings. During its investigation, Amnesty International’s researchers spoke to 53 witnesses as well as experts in physics, weapons, and satellite imagery. The resulting visual investigation used 3D modelling to organise this diverse evidence base in space and time.

A video of the 3D model was created to communicate the organisation’s layered and often technical findings to a general audience. For the investigation team, the reconstruction revealed new relationships between evidence, such as the positive correlation between the locations of interviewees at the time of the attack and the areas of the theatre that experts had estimated were the least severely damaged.

The video was published on 30 Jun 2022 to accompany an in-depth report.

3D modelling by Tom Jones.

Open-weather exhibits at Getxophoto

Installation.
(June 2022)
Getxophoto International Image Festival
Punta Begoña Galleries
Getxo
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Open-weather presented two works, ‘When I image the earth, I imagine another’ and ‘Impossible weather station’ as installations in the Galerías Punta Begoña in Getxo.

Special thank you María Salazar Riaño who activated the ‘Impossible Weather Station’ during the festival, and Jon Uriarte for inviting open-weather. Visit the project page in the Getxophoto archive.

The COP26 nowcast was created in collaboration with Rectangle. Open-weather is co-led by Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer.

Images: Getxophoto

Inside the NYPD’s Surveillance Machine

Project co-lead for the multi-award nominated investigation and web app, Inside the NYPD’s Surveillance Machine. When Amnesty International asked the NYPD to publish data on its use of facial recognition technology, it refused. With the help of more than 7K digital volunteers, we used Google Street View to map the surveillance cameras that feed the software. The resulting web app is a collaboration with the Dutch design studio, Superposition.
(January 2022)
Amnesty International
online
#archives #investigations #participatory-works

Reactive video investigation into a cluster munitions attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine

Producer for the visual investigation conducted over the three days after reports emerged of a Russian attack on a residential area of North Kharkiv.
(March 2022)
Amnesty International
online
#investigations

Producer for the reactive visual investigation conducted by Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab during the three days after an alleged Russian attack using cluster munitions in a residential area of Kharkiv, Ukraine.

The modelling combined video obtained from open sources with witness testimony to locate reports of civilian fatalities and measure the footprint of the rocket attack.

The multimedia investigation was used in reporting by Vox in a video that received 1.6 million views and Radio France, amongst others.

More information: On 28 February 2022 at approximately 12:30 local time – around the same time that peace talks were beginning at the border with Belarus – the apparent indiscriminate attack in North Kharkiv killed at least four civilians, including a child and three people collecting drinking water. At least 16 more people were injured. Amnesty International’s reconstruction is based on verified videos and witness testimonies. A verified image, first acquired by Bellingcat, shows the attack included Russian-manufactured 300mm Smerch rockets with 9N235 cluster munitions. The 2019 manufacture date, after Russia stopped selling these arms to Ukraine, indicates that the attack was launched by Russia.

3D modelling by Martyna Marciniak.

Read the original Twitter thread.

When I image the earth, I imagine another

On the first day of COP26, a network of volunteers operating DIY satellite ground stations around the world captured a snapshot of earth and its weather systems: a ‘nowcast’ for an undecided future.
(November 2021)
The Photographers' Gallery and Tabakalera
online
#archives #open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Link to the project’s web page.

What would it mean to collectively image, and in doing so, reimagine the planet? To see its details and patterns from multiple perspectives and many situated positions? If we could each take a photo of our home from space, could we build a patchwork, an impossible view, another whole earth?

On the first day of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, a network of people operating DIY satellite ground stations around the world will capture a collective snapshot of the Earth and its weather systems: a ‘nowcast’ for an undecided future. Tuning into transmissions from three orbiting National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites, members of the network will collect imagery and submit field notes from their geographical locations. Combined, these contributions will generate a polyperspectival (from many angles) image of the earth. Led by open-weather (Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann) with Rectangle (Lizzie Malcolm and Daniel Powers), the artwork is a feminist experiment in imaging and reimagining the planet in an era of climate crisis.

‘When I image the earth I imagine another’ is supported by The Photographers’ Gallery (London, UK) in partnership with CCIC Tabakalera (Donostia / San Sebastián, Spain).

Open-weather (Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann) extend our warmest thanks to Rectangle (Lizzie Malcolm and Daniel Powers) for collaborating on the nowcast for COP26.

Open-weather thank the nowcast contributors, in particular:

Ground stations
Alison Scott (Glasgow, UK)
Ankit Sharma (Mumbai, India)
Aouefa Amoussouvi (Bucharest, Romania)
Barfrost (Kirkenes, Norway)
Bill Liles (Reston, USA)
Carl Reineman (Jefferson, USA)
Catherine Fletcher (Norfolk, USA)
Cedrick Lukunku Tshimbalanga (Kinshasa, DR Congo)
Chonmapat Torasa (Bangkok, Thailand)
Dey Kim (Seoul, South Korea)
Florent Leon Noel (Venice, Italy)
George Ridgeway (Melbury Abbas, U.K.)
Jasmin Schädler (Stuttgart, Germany)
Joaquin Ezcurra (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Ketsia Kinsumba Muanakiese (Kinshasa, DR Congo)
L Paul Verhage (Homedale, USA)
Natasha Honey (Newcastle, Australia)
Olivia Berkowicz (Paris, France)
Pablo Cattaneo (Mar Del Plata, Argentina)
Sofia Caferri (San Vittoria, Italy)
Steve Engelmann (Los Angeles, USA)
Sybille Neumeyer (Berlin, Germany)
WXVids / Zefie (Albany, USA)
Yoshi Matsuoka (Atsugi, Japan)
Zack Wettstein (Seattle, USA)

Special thanks
A. and J. Powers
Alexander Barth
Anna Pasco Bolta
Arieh Frosh
Eugenia Morpurgo
Grayson Earle
Jon Uriarte
Martin Bernardi
Nicola Locatelli
RTL-SDR blog
Sabina Ahn
Winkler Spezialantennen

Open-weather takes part in ‘Make me a signal’

Audio contribution. Recorded in one take off the West coast of Scotland. Listen to the tick-tock of a weather satellite intermingled with bird calls, and chatter of water and radio waves.
(September 2021)
Adriana Knouf, ShuLea Cheang, and Franz Xaver
STWST48x7
online and at Stadwerkstatt, Linz
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Audio contribution. Recorded in one take off the West coast of Scotland. Listen to the tick-tock of a weather satellite intermingled with bird calls, and chatter of water and radio waves.

Decode Surveillance NYC

Co-lead for the investigation that enrolled more than 7,000 digital volunteers from around the world to create the first ever city-wide map of surveillance cameras in New York City.
(2021)
Amnesty International
remote
#investigations #participatory-works

Impossible weather station

An open-weather installation produced in collaboration with Sasha Engelmann on the occasion of the im/possible images exhibition.
(July 2021)
Munich
#archives #open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

A web of impunity: The killings Iran’s internet shutdown hid

A joint investigation by Amnesty International and The Hertie School in partnership with the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) project.
(November 2020)
Amnesty International
remote
#archives #investigations

Prototype nowcast for Our Networks Festival

An experiment in collectively imaging the Earth and its weather systems.
(September 2020)
Our Networks
multiple locations
#archives #open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

On 6 September 2020, open-weather collaborators and extended networks prototyped a global weather ‘nowcast’ for the Our Networks festival. The nowcast is composed of 14 weather recordings made by 13 people with their autonomous satellite ground stations at different geographical locations.

The nowcast was co-produced by: Audrey Briot; Sofia Caferri; Sophie Dyer M6NYX; Sasha Engelmann M6IOR; Steve Engelmann; Joaquin Ezcurra; Jacques Gentil; Bill Liles NQ6Z; L. Paul Verhage KD4STH; Yoshiki Matsuoka JF1SAG; Ankit Sharma; Zack Wettstein; WXVids

Deepest gratitude to Piper Haywood for her efforts coding and launching the first version of our website.

DIY satellite ground station

Guide for the reception of NOAA satellite images using affordable hardware and free software. Co-written with Sasha Engelmann.
(June 2020)
Unsolicited
Public Lab
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Consultant on the Forensic Architecture investigation into the police killing of Mark Duggan

A visual language to communicate the researchers often dense and complex analyses to the legal teams, judge and jury.
(2020)
Forensic Architecture
London
#archives #investigations

On 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan, was shot twice by the Metropolitan police­—one of the shots, which hit him in the chest, was fatal. Duggan’s death sparked a week of rioting across the UK. In 2019, Duggan’s family lodged a civil claim against the Metropolitan police and invited Forensic Architecture to investigate the legality of the police shooting.

Part of Forensic Architecture’s brief was to produce an “aid to court” to be used by both the defence and prosecution. I worked with the researchers to develop a visual language to communicate their often dense and complex analyses into an intuitive visual language that both legal teams, judge and jury could understand.

Shortly after Forensic Architecture shared its research with the police, Duggan’s family reached an out of court settlement.

Open work, second body

Performance in collaboration with Sasha Engelmann, ft. Daisy Hildyard.
(May 2020)
Soundcamp
London
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Open Work, Second Body is a live-stream performance with Sasha Engelmann, in collaboration with author Daisy Hildyard.

From the climate crisis to coronavirus: what are the tools we need to make sense of events unfolding on vastly disparate scales? Through spoken word, field recordings and radio reception of two satellite images, the work probes the porous boundaries between our bodies, local atmospheres and weather systems.

The work was commissioned by Soundcamp and performed twice on 2 May 2020 on the occasion of Reveil 2020. Sound design by Jol Thoms.

Open-weather

Open-weather is a collaborative art and research project with geographer Sasha Engelmann probing the noisy relationships between bodies, atmospheres and weather systems through experiments in Ham radio, open data and feminist tactics of sensing and séance.
(2020)
Unsolicited
London
#archives #open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Open-weather is a collaborative project with geographer Sasha Engelmann probing the noisy relationships between bodies, atmospheres, and weather systems through experiments in amateur radio, open data and feminist tactics of sensing and séance.

Open-weather encompasses a series of how-to guides and critical frameworks, artworks and workshops on the reception of satellite images using free or inexpensive amateur radio technology. When possible, we work with open-source software and hardware.

Feminist open source investigations group

An informal and anonymous alliance of women and queer tech and human rights workers formed around the the urgent question: What would a feminist open source investigation look like? Over two years the group functioned as a space for peer-to-peer care, sharing questions and resources.
(November 2019 – November 2022)
Unsolicited
Glasgow, London, Berlin and New York
#archives #investigations #storytelling

Concrete flux: Issue V aesthetic journalism

Publication and experiment in aesthetic journalism as media activism.
(August 2019)
Unsolicited
London and Beijing
#storytelling

Since 2013, Concrete Flux 流泥 has been a platform for self-determined and unsolicited investigations into urban spaces across China. For Issue 5 we shift focus from the region to explore the possibilities of aesthetic journalism. The micro-issue inaugurates a new direction for the publishing project, towards a sustained investigation into experimental documentary practices that address new visualities and vocabularies. Around this theme, we have gathered dissatisfied journalists, amateur filmmakers, former student leaders, poets and community activists. The resulting articles are experiments in aesthetic journalism as media activism – through a restructuring of the “sensuous parameters of reality itself”. (Bulter, 2010)

Contributors: Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Alfredo Cramerotti, Ana Naomi de Sousa and Twist Qu
Editors: Sophie Dyer and Solveig Suess
Special Editors: Ifor Duncan and Yugong 宫羽
Translation: Ceres Shi 时苒析, Yugong 宫羽 and Jennifer Zhang 张萃
Proofing: Miranda Johnson, Nicola Locatelli and Kevin Xing 邢凯新

Special thanks to Ayşe Güleç, Nora Sternfeld and Peter Suess

Issue V was supported by Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Culture in Donostia. An advanced print version was first published on the occasion of the 2018 Logan Symposium, organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London.

Design, in print and online: Rectangle

Solidarity

Titles design for Solidarity, an award-winning documentary film about the struggle for justice in the wake of public revelations about the secretive methods used by corporations and the police against UK activists and trade unionists.
(2019)
Lucy Parker and City Projects
London

Titles design for Solidarity, a feature length documentary about a collective struggle for justice in the wake of public revelations about the clandestine methods used by corporations and police against trade unionists and activists in the UK.

In 2009, British authorities seized a database containing 3,213 files belonging to the secretive anti-union group, The Consulting Association. The database was a blacklist, detailing the names and activities of thousands of construction workers identified as so-called “troublemakers”. The discovery vindicated blacklisted workers, many of whom had endured years of unemployment and had their concerns dismissed as paranoia, and led to the formation of the Blacklist Support Group. Additional links between workplace blacklisting and undercover policing have emerged since.

A project by City Projects and Lucy Parker, who worked alongside members of the Blacklist Support Group for over four years.

Airwars and Amnesty: War in Raqqa, rhetoric versus reality

Secondment to Amnesty on behalf of Airwars for the joint investigation into civilian deaths from US, UK and French air and artillery strikes during the battle to recapture Raqqa from ISIS.
(April 2019)
Airwars and Amnesty
London
#archives #investigations

“I challenge anyone to find a more precise air campaign in the history of warfare […] The Coalition’s goal is always for zero human casualties.” Former Coalition commander Lt Gen Townsend (Sep. 2017) Airwars

“Every minute of every hour we were putting some kind of fire on ISIS in Raqqa, whether it was mortars, artillery, rockets, [High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems], Hellfires, armed drones, you name it.” Army Sergeant Major John Wayne Troxell (Nov. 2017) Marine Corps Times

The joint investigation by Amnesty and Airwars that found at minimum 1,600 civilians died as a direct result of thousands of US, UK and French airstrikes and tens of thousands of US artillery strikes during the Coalition’s assault on the Islamic State-held city between June to October 2017. The interactive report, which combined field research with open and crowd sourced data, is the most comprehensive civic inquiry into civilian deaths in modern warfare. At the timing of publishing the Coalition had conceded only 10% of civilian deaths documented.

  • Extract from the online report. Indiscriminate American artillery fire killed many civilians trapped in Raqqa's low-rise Dara'iya neighbourhood. Alongside witness statements, the report drew on a range of sources: Google Earth satellite imagery of US artillery bases, military strike reports, news articles and propaganda videos, to build a picture of the ferocity of the offensive

Airwars: Digital advocacy tools

Digital tools, data analysis and visualisation e.g. maps and videos for social media, the 'victim in focus' feature on Airwars homepage and data modelling for in-depth reports.
(October 2017 – March 2019)
Airwars
London
#investigations

Strike Map
Since August 2014, the US-led Coalition declared the date and nearest population centre for 30,801 air and artillery strikes in Iraq and Syria against so-called Islamic State. During this time the Coalition admitted to causing over one thousand civilian deaths. In December 2018, without reason, it stopped saying where or when it bombed—making it impossible to know who is responsible for civilian deaths and injuries. Airwars has tracked and mapped every known strike. We ask the US and its allies. Reverse the decisions. Restore accountability.

Source: Airwars
Data wrangling, script and art direction: Sophie Dyer
Design and development: Rectangle

 

War in Numbers
On the five year anniversary of the international war against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, here is a visual guide to the conflict and its untold impact on civilians.

Source: Airwars
Data wrangling, script and art direction: Sophie Dyer
Design and development: Rectangle

 

Victim in Focus
The Victim in Focus feature on Airwars’ homepage tells the individual story of different alleged civilian casualty every week. The story is automatically generated from Airwars’ database of named victims, leaving researchers to add additional details and select an image when appropriate, before publishing to the site.

Source: Airwars
Data wrangling and art direction: Sophie Dyer
Design and development: Rectangle

Artefact

Group exhibition curated by Migrant Journal. Installation produced in collaboration with Eline Benjaminsen, Sasha Engelmann and oneacre.online.
(February 2019)
Migrant Journal
STUK
Leuven

At 3 Hz to 3,000 GHz, radio blurs physis and techne, celestial and terrestrial, ancient and contemporary, human and nonhuman. It reverberates through different historic struggles. More than a medium, radio is an agitator.

The three-year research project takes the form of a series of collaborations, field trips, films and short stories of radio “as sensation, affect, as technological compulsion”. [1] The  installation for Artefact brings together the very beginning and very end of the research period.

We begin at 30 GHz, with a photograph of the landscape transversed by the radio relays that link Frankfurt and London’s financial centres and converge over the Calais refugee camps. During the research we were witnesses to “a strange sympathy between the atmospheric particles that float through the sky and the human beings who migrate across the ground and then across the sea. [2]

We end at 92 MHz, with a recording of the radio show, ‘Radio Techno Fossil’, broadcast on Den Haag FM, on 5 July 2018. The show is a conversation between artists and researchers on radio as a force that moves capital, bodies and time. It is also a radio fossil: the transmission itself will escape our Earth’s atmosphere and be preserved for perpetuity in the near vacuum of space.

[1] Irit Rogoff. A Short Tale of Infrastructure. Unpublished
[2] Adrian Lahoud. Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, “Scale as Problem, Architecture as Trap”. Lars Müller: 2016
[3] Fredric Jameson. The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New York, Verso: 1991

Conflicting truths

Time based installation drawing on Airwars' public archive of civilian casualty allegations against the US-led Coalition from war against the so-called Islamic State.
(April 2019)
Feedback #4: Marshall McLuhan and the Arts
College For Creative Studies
Detroit
#archives #investigations

Project in collaboration with Rectangle (Lizzie Malcolm and Dan Powers)

“What does it mean to defend the dead?” Christina Sharpe, 2016

Over the duration of the exhibition, the names of 11,431 civilians alleged to have been killed by US-led Coalition strikes against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, were projected alongside the social media reports from which they were gathered. The names were grouped by assessments made by the nongovernment organisation, Airwars, which has monitored reports of civilian casualties since the conflict began in August 2014.

At the time of the exhibition in Detroit, the US-led Coalition had conceded just 1,190 civilian deaths over its four-year campaign against the so-called Islamic State. Conversely, by listening to social media, local news and speaking to monitors on the ground, Airwars had recorded over 28,000 alleged deaths.

In 2017, a New York Times article called the civilians killed by Coalition strikes, “the uncounted”. For the philosopher, Judith Butler, they are the “ungrievable” – those whose deaths exist outside the dominant frames of war.

Airwars: Public archive

Project lead on the redesign of Airwar's public archive of civilian casualty allegations and related military claims.
(January 2018 – December 2018)
Airwars
London
#archives #investigations

I pitched and lead the redesign of Airwars’ public archive of civilian casualty allegations and related military claims.

The exercise ran over one year and involved working with every member of the Airwars team as the organisation transitioned from unstructured research documents to a structured, searchable and accessible database. The project put online hundreds of unpublished geolocations, images and videos from local sources. Additionally, it enabled live data visualisations, transforming not just how Airwars publicly communicated its findings, but the organisation’s ability to recognise patterns and anomalies in its own data.

While the backend of the database was designed to be highly structured, the frontend focused on the qualitative narration of events, visuals, and the naming of victims. For the first time, local allegations of civilian harm were displayed alongside related belligerent strike reports and casualty assessments.

The archive was designed to preserve the ambiguities of real-world, “muddy” data. For example, fields were designed to accommodate multiple types and formats of data.

The work was realised through a close and sustained collaboration with Rectangle, an external design and web development studio.

Radio Techno Fossil

Live radio show, text and reading.
(July 2018)
oneacre.online
Schimmengebied on 92.0 Den Haag FM and Witte de With
Den Haag and Rotterdam
#archives #storytelling

At 0.2 Hz, scientists in the Finnish arctic listen for Very Low Frequencies that index industrial, military and cosmic activity. At 3 – 30 GHz the radio relays of financial traders converge and compete for lines-of-sight at the French port of Calais. At 2.4 GHz an NGO prototypes Wi-Fi kits for use in European refugee camps and by sea rescue vessels. This is a politics of radio. A parallel wireless world, modulated by intergovernmental treaties, corporate monopolies, ionospheric conditions, and the radio-active cycles of our Sun.

What began as a photograph of the Earth’s techno-geographies, is now textured by the electromagnetic conditions of the planet. An image borne of radio waves. An anti-pattern, a fossil.

Radio Techno Fossil was first broadcast live on the show Het Schimmengebied on 92.0 Den Haag FM, 5 July 2018 at 23:00 CET. The accompanying text was published on oneacre.online, and performed at Witte de With in Rotterdam on 6 July 2018.

Other broadcasts:
Goldsmiths College for the Free Seminar, July 2018
Serpentine Gallery for Radio Earth Hold, 28 October 2018
Matters of Transmission on CoLaboRadio, 28 May 2019

View the original tracklist.

Format and content developed in collaboration with Eline Benjaminsen, Sasha Engelmann and oneacre.online (Victoria Douka-Doukopoulou, Titus Knegtel and Stef Kors). Work commissioned by oneacre.online

For the text component see: This is an image bourne on radio

Miscellaneous artist film titles

Design for independent documentaries and artist films.
(June 2017 – July 2019)
Multiple
London

Titles design for:

meta incognita: missive ii by Alia Syed (2019)

Those, That At A Distance, Resemble Another by Jessica Sarah Rinland (2019)

Solidarity by Lucy Parker and Kate Parker (2019)

Why Are You Angry? by Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer (2017)

Vivian’s Garden by Rosalind Nashashibi (2017)

Dedications

Group exhibition.
(February 2017)
Art Review Bar
London
#archives

Jangala

Graphic identity for Jangala, a Wi-Fi kit designed for use in camps and by at sea rescue vessels.
(December 2016)
Jangala
London

Graphic identity for the charity, Jangala.

In 2015 Jangala installed its first prototype Wi-Fi network in the informal camp near Calais, France. While active, the improvised network provided free Internet access to the camps’ estimated 7,000 residents, who otherwise had to rely on costly data-packages.

Since Calais, Jangala has evolved into a charity, developing low-cost Internet access systems for use in emergency situations around the world.

For further collaboration with Jangala, see Calais, Capital and an Electromagnetic Commons

Agency of living organisms

Virtual guide and exhibition design.
(October 2016)
Pauline Doutreluingne
Tabakalera
Donotstia
#archives

A virtual counterpart to the exhibition, Agency of Living Organisms, is a digital map and guide the dark ecologies that animate the Earth’s hydrosphere, atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere.

Work commissioned by the curator, Pauline Doutreluingne. Website and exhibition design in collaboration with Solveig Suess. Code by Internet Friends Forever.

The Miraculous

Text-and-architecture experiment with Maeve Redmond and the American writer and critic, Raphael Rubinstein.
(June 2016)
Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop
Edinburgh
#archives

In an text-and-architecture experiment Sophie Dyer and Maeve Redmond worked with the New York-based poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein to transpose short narratives from his book, The Miraculous, into an installation that permeates the spaces of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.

Episodes, both legendary and obscure, taken from the artistic avant-garde from the last five decades will reside along studio corridors, within communal spaces and on exterior walls, relocating a range of historic and contemporary artworks onsite via the imaginative space of writing.

Commission by Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and curated by Peter Amoore on the occasion of Edinburgh Art Festival 2016.

A Public Hearing

Group residency facilitated by the Centre for Research Architecture.
(June 2016)
Arts Catalyst
London
#participatory-works #storytelling

The use of public hearings originates from the process of the enclosure of public lands in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. Public meetings were held in order to create a petition to parliament to enclose land, and later to hear objections to the act created by parliament. This use of commissions to hear public concerns over the enclosure of lands is one of the first examples of a public hearing, and today public hearings are still used when dealing with public lands as well as private properties.

Forensic Architecture: 15th Venice Architecture Biennale

Design for the Forensic Architecture in Italian Pavilion.
(May 2016)
Forensic Architecture
15th Venice Architecture Biennale
Venice
#archives #investigations

Design for the Forensic Architecture in Italian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Reporting From The Front.

Other exhibitions worked on with Forensic Architecture include: Bi-City Biennale of Architecture in Shenzhen, China and Constellation.s in Bordeaux, France.

Work in collaboration with Solveig Suess.

Archives of Substance

Research and exhibition design for the curatorial collective, freethought, for Bergen Assembly.
(April 2016)
freethought
Bergen Assembly
Bergen
#archives

Research, film and exhibition design for the guest curators of Bergen Assembly 2016, Freethought. Design and research in collaboration with Solveig Suess, Robert Preusse and Laurie Robins.

In Archives of Substance, Irit Rogoff – in collaboration with the writer Vali Mahlouji and historian Mike Berlin, among others – assembles archives that make concrete moments which do not have a clear history, a stable form or identity.

These archives help us grasp how content, desire, aspiration and shared hopes can become a form of ‘substance infrastructure’. When a group of people share trajectories within particular historical moments, they may not build lasting structures but their joint hopes and beliefs do come together in dense atmospheres that are elusive but charged. The archives assembled here are testimony to such charged atmospheres, when aspirations predate any formalised organisation and result in mythic forms: a moment of political vision and solidarity at the Partisan Coffee House in London; a set of cultural imaginaries in Tehran at the Festival of Arts Shiraz-Persepolis; the reactions of viewers around the world to exhibitions they have seen and that have affected them; the efforts by a group of friends and colleagues in Europe to collectively establish a way of researching and thinking in public.


BELOW
Extracts from a text written by the Mike Berlin to accompany materials (photography, film and printed ephemera) from The Partisan Coffee House archive.

Coffee House Cultural Politics
The Partisan became a platform for the New Left’s critical engagement with 1950s popular culture. Through exhibitions, film screenings and in the pages in the New Left Review, it championed the art, film, music and photography of an emerging generation of political engaged cultural practitioners. Documentary photographer Roger Mayne, who captured the early opening of the Partisan in November 1958, as well as filmmakers associated with the Free Cinema documentary movement were closely linked to the Partisan milieu. The walls of the Partisan were covered by works by the post war neo-realist ‘Kitchen Sink’ school of painters.

The Partisan hosted meetings where the radical art critic John Berger spoke alongside the South African dissident communist novelist Dorris Lessing, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, Welsh writer Raymond Williams, the French activist journalist and former resistance fighter Claude Bourdet. Open public meetings, poetry readings, chess and coffee opened up a new world of cultural and political heterodoxies which was to shape the identity of a generation of young people.

Legacy
The Partisan closed in 1962, the victim of its own success, as hundreds of coffee drinking leftist students used the building daily as a meeting place but didn’t spend enough money to make it a going concern. On a broader level its founders and frequenters went on to play a crucial part in the great social and politic movements of the 1960s. Raphael Samuel went on to found the influential History Workshop movement, which helped to revolutionise historical practice by the invention of non-hierarchical community based ‘history from below’. Stuart Hall joined the sociologist Richard Hoggart to create the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, which became the birthplace for the scholarly examination of modern popular culture. The New Left Review became and remains the foremost left theoretical journal in the English speaking world.

Beyond this, the brief historical moment that the Partisan encompassed helped to inspire a generation of young people to believe that another world was possible. Amid the terrors and cynicism of the Cold War the Partisan represented and provided a sense of hope. Certainly the cultural turn of the 1960s, with its sense of playful experimentation, of improvisation voluntary activism, embodied in the happenings of the mid sixties, the anti Vietnam war movement and the women’s movement owe something to the early New Left’s vision of the interpenetration of politics and culture. The short life of the Partisan embodied a distinct moment of conjuncture, of coming together of disparate, contradictory influences in fertile interplay. Such moments are sometimes destined not to last, but they may be of immense importance in the future.

Concrete Flux: Issue IV Suzhi

Production of the bilingual Chinese and English magazine.
(September 2015)
Unsolicited
Berlin and Beijing
#storytelling

“Suzhi” is a word so ubiquitous in China that no one can define it. We hear it from the mouths of our professors, cab drivers, political leaders, colleagues and we see traces of it in television ads, on patriotic banners, and school gates. Well-behaved children have suzhi. So do the principled soldiery, the traveled and moneyed, the socially circumspect. But what does suzhi actually mean? While at its most basic, suzhi signifies upstanding character and propriety; to say that someone lacks or has suzhi carries with it a whole host of connotations involving place, class, and culture. And, does it carry the same connotation to everyone?

With contributions from George Alabaster, Dorian Cavé 道旸, Patric Dreida, Susan Fang 方還如, Benjamin Haas, Cheryl Schmitz 潘美婷, Jeremy Tsang, QingQing Matt Turner, Sun Yanchu 孙彦初.

Design in collaboration with Solveig Suess.

Nothing For Sale Here

Public artwork produced in collaboration with poet, Luke Shaw, and designer, Maeve Redmond.
(July 2015)
Merchant City Festival
Glasgow
#archives #storytelling

A series of nine posters and poems which, inspired by the relative lack advertising on the tiled walls of Berlin’s U-Bahn stations, occupied commercial advertising spaces in Glasgow during the Merchant City Festival.

Artwork produced in collaboration with the poet, Anthony Autumn (Luke Shaw), and designer, Maeve Redmond.

The three triptychs were based on Wilmersdorfer Straße, Kurfürstendamm and Jungfernheide U-Bahn stations.

The Persistence of Type

Group exhibition with Maeve Redmond and Fiona Jardine.
(June 2015)
Panel
Tramway
Glasgow
#archives #storytelling

Elida was created in the 1970s for women with the world before them.
Elida is type.
Elida speaks by re-mixing advertising copy from
old magazines, newspaper cuttings and post office directories.
Elida penetrates text with image as a means of disruption.
Elida likes erotic text and soft-focus imagery.

An exhibition, events programme, billboard and distributed newspaper, with newly commissioned work by artist Fiona Jardine and designers Sophie Dyer and Maeve Redmond. Curated by Panel and produced in partnership with the Tramway centre.

Moira Jeffry, The Scotsman (5 July 2015)
“The joy of the Persistence of Type, a new collaborative exhibition commissioned by curators Panel from artist Fiona Jardine and the excellent designers Maeve Redmond and Sophie Dyer, is that while the show harvests this rich social history through some key Scottish source material, it never succumbs to self-serving legend. Instead, it explores – through a clutch of screenprints, a digital film and an erudite printed essay by Jardine – the notion of type and types.

For these women were types, not individuals. Known by their first names only, they were blondes or brunettes. They were descended in a way from the modern stenographer with shingled hair of the 1920s, the office girls and saucy secretaries of the 1950s.”

The Guardian, Robert Clark (19 Jun 2015)
“There’s a distinctly retro look to The Persistence Of Type. It’s as if the 1968 Situationist International has transferred its graphic subversions to 21st-century Glasgow with a display of reworked posters at the Tramway. Artist Fiona Jardine has taken up with designers Sophie Dyer and Maeve Redmond to interrogate images of women in corporate advertising. They raid and recompose the commercial campaigns of two firms, British Caledonian Airways and Tennent’s Lager. The brewery’s “lager lovely” is recognised as playing a comparable stereotypical role to the airline stewardess: both come on with a girl-next-door familiarity, equal parts sexy playmate, wet nurse, waitress and mother. As with the enduringly influential Situationists, the revealing tactic here is cut-and-paste, close-up photo fragments overlaid with slogans such as “first-class” and “ideal” to deceptively cool-as-they-come effect.”

Tomorrow Is Always Too Long

Design and research for the visual artist, Phil Collins.
(December 2014)
The Common Guild
Queen's Park
Glasgow

Outdoor installation and screening of Tomorrow Is Always Too Long.

Design work for the visual artist, Phil Collins, and The Common Guild gallery. Project in collaboration with Maeve Redmond and Sebastian Gorton Kalvik.

Concrete Flux: Issue III Escapism

Production of the bilingual Chinese and English magazine.
(October 2014)
Unsolicited
Berlin and Beijing
#storytelling

“After the dream they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream.” Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

The impetus for this issue was born out one of those conversations that take place in the city – during one of those moments where amidst the constant cacophony of the city, we find an other with whom we can share a moment of imagined quiet, and in the imagined quiet, allow errant thoughts to be formed into words and carelessly uttered.

With contributions from Ye Cheng (Jiang Bin) 江彬(野城), Liang Ban 梁半, Jacob Dreyer, Michael Eddy, Alessandro Rolandi, Josh Feola, Yuan Fuca 富源, Gao Ling 高灵, Simon Kentgens, MAP Office, Hu Moran 胡默然, Zhu Dianqiong 朱殿琼, Nadine Stijns, Mukta Das.

Design in collaboration with Solveig Suess.

Glasgow Women’s Library

Design work over a two years for Glasgow Women's Library.
(May 2012 – May 2014)
Glasgow Women's Library
Glasgow
#archives

Design work (pamphlets, posters, merchandise and building hoarding etc.) over a two year period for Glasgow Women’s Library.

Valise, The Glasgow Weekend

Group exhibition curated by Sarah Lowndes.
(September 2013)
Sarah Lowndes
Volksbühn
Berlin

Participation in the group show formed of transportable works by ten artists from Glasgow, which took its title from Marcel Duchamp’s portable miniature monograph Boîte-en-valise or box in a suitcase (1935–1940), presented in the glass pavilion of the Volksbühne.

Artwork from the bi-annual prose, poetry and art magazine, The Burning Sand was exhibited in the pavilion, and issues one and two were sold in the Volksbühne.

The magazine designs were produced in collaboration with Maeve Redmond. The Burning Sand was commissioned and edited by Sarah Lowndes. Exhibition and events programme curated by Sarah Lowndes.

Barrie Girls

Group exhibtion.
(July 2013)
Panel
Off Site
Glasgow
#archives

An exhibition of six poster works, archival materials and the text, C’est Ci N’est Pas Une Foto, created by graphic designers, Sophie Dyer and Maeve Redmond, in collaboration with artist, Fiona Jardine.

Part archival encounter, part set design, the installation recreated the work desk, drawings and persona of a fictional textile designer working in the 1950s Barrie Knitwear factory. Found photographs of ‘factory girls’ showing modelling a knitwear collection, historic records and a visit to the contemporary factory combined to trace the existence of the “effervescent” Barrie Girl.

Work commissioned by the design curators, Panel and developed response to the informal archives of Barrie Knitwear factory in Hawick, Scotland.

Extract from C’est Ci N’est Pas Une Foto by Fiona Jardine:

In the look-book archives, annotated with information concerning style, colour, shoulder shapes and yarn ply, the photographs hint at the provenance of place. Styles carry the names of solid, stone-built towns – Dunbar, Nairn, Brodick – and regional rivers – Ettrick, Esk, Slitrig. The colours are colloquial Ling and Whin. Wormholes open to the memory of unheated morning rooms, patrolled by grizzly terriers, stacked with copies of the Scots magazine. Those are your wormholes as much as they are mine.

There’s a lot channelling through names – tradition, ambition, instrumental association. Indeed, ‘Braemar’, the name of a long-established, weill-kent firm that laid daim to originating the term ‘knitwear’, is a name that properly belongs on Royal Deeside not in Teviotdale. Huddersfield Street and Wakefield Mill, (in Galashiels), carry names borrowed from the locale of trading partners in Yorkshire

A few years on, we might imagine the look-book annotations might refer to Cumbernauld, Livingstone, Glenrothes and East Kilbride; to Pastis, Cointreau and Grenadine. The collusion of spirit and place seems appropriate. Prestwick in Rinquinquin. Here, the Barrie Girl is effervescent, sportif, running through a barre of set pieces. She’s on location (Park Circus?) and on a photographer’s paper roll (it’s hardly Blow Up) fully-fashioned, perfectly coiffed in her neat ski polo. She’s next door. Pleated for play. Mothproofed.

We had names for her.
Lesley.
Joan.
Sandra.
Roseanne.

Teaching & Learning

Tutor, Information Design

Leading the Critical Cartographies studio in the Information Design Masters.
(September 2023 – April 2024)
Design Academy Eindhoven
Netherlands
#archives #investigations #open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Claiming*Spaces summer school: Whose climate?

Workshops and public conversation as open-weather, in conversation and collaboration with Marlene Wagner.
(July 2023)
Claiming*Spaces
Schloss Drosendorf
Austria
#open-weather

Talk for Atmosférica: Semana de la Escucha 2023

Pre-recorded talk subtitled in Spanish with a live Q&A.
(July 2023)
Tsonami Arte Sonoro
Chile and online
#open-weather

Open-weather presents at The Ediths Roundtable

The Ediths 2023 Responsive Roundtable Series.
(July 2023)
The Ediths
Australia and online
#open-weather

Open-weather talk at Rhode Island School of Design

(May 2023)
Nature Culture Sustainability Studies
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
online
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Open-weather workshop at Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths

Day-long workshop and discussion with students and staff.
(March 2023)
Goldsmiths
London
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

External examiner for the Non-Linear Narratives Masters

(September 2021 – June 2022)
Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten
The Hague

Two-day open-weather workshop at Onassis Stegi

Two-day workshop co-run with Sasha Engelmann on the occasion of the exhibition, Weather Engines.
(May 2022)
Onassis Stegi
Athens
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

The Photographers’ Gallery workshop and talk

In-person workshop and online talk with Sasha Engelmann.
(November 2021)
The Photographers' Gallery
London
#archives #open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Book launch for (W)archives: Archival imaginaries, war, and contemporary art

Presentation and panel discussion.
(February 2021)
Mosaic Rooms
London
#archives #investigations #storytelling

An introduction to feminist open source research

Visiting lecturer to the MA Global Futures module, Advanced Methods.
(February 2021)
Royal Holloway University
London
#investigations

Sensing environments with care: feminist practices and technologies of embodiment

Workshop and panel with Sasha Engelmann.
(September 2020)
Akademie Schloss Solitude
Kunstverein Wagenhalle
Stuttgart
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

HRCD call on trauma and design in human rights work

Human Rights Centered Design community call.
(September 2020)
online
#investigations #participatory-works

Building networks for nowcasting the weather

Virtual talk with Sasha Engelmann.
(September 2020)
Our Networks
Toronto and cyberspace
#archives #open-weather #participatory-works

Using data ethically in humanitarian, human rights, and open source investigations

Panel discussion hosted by The Engine Room.
(July 2020)
RightsCon
online
#investigations #participatory-works

Journal of Digital War editorial board

Editorial board board member.
(2020)
Journal of Digital War
Virtual

Satellite Séance × ADS7 Studio

Collective sensing of the NOAA-19 weather satellite performed with students from the ADS7 Architecture Studio. In collaboration with Sasha Engelmann.
(January 2020)
Royal College of Art
Hyde Park
London
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Collective sensing of the NOAA-19 weather satellite, using amateur radio equipment and software-defined radio (SDR). The satellite séances are part of an ongoing research project developed with Sasha Engelmann into feminist histories of remote sensing.

Images from a seminar with students from the ADS7 Studio at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, London.

Live Project 2019

Visiting lecturer for the five-week project working with Amnesty International and Airwars data. Focus on quantitative methods, ethics and secondary trauma in open source investigations.
(October 2019 – November 2019)
Centre for Research Architecture
Goldsmiths
London
#archives #investigations #participatory-works

When Is data collection activism?

Guest talk. The public and collective documentation of deaths that have been systematically denied, racialised, gendered, individualised or otherwise suppressed has long been a form of "non-violent protest". What does this kind of activism look like today? What are the questions it raises in our data-saturated world?.
(October 2019)
Non Linear Narrative
Royal Academy of Art
Den Haag
#archives #investigations #participatory-works

Guest talk. The public and collective documentation of deaths that have been systematically denied, racialised, gendered, individualised or suppressed has long been a form of “non-violent protest”. What does this kind of activism look like today? What are the questions it raises in our data-saturated world?

Using the Missing Datasets project by the Nigerian-American artist, Mimi Onuoha and examples from contemporary civilian casualty recording, we will ask are the blank spot in our otherwise data-saturated world? Why do they exist?

Seeing through the rubble: Using crowdsourced data and fieldwork to investigate civilian deaths in Raqqa

Panel discussion hosted by Amnesty International.
(June 2019)
RightsCon
Tunis
#investigations #participatory-works

The 6th June marks the two years anniversary since the beginning of the “war of annihilation”, a US-led Coalition military campaign to oust the armed group calling itself Islamic State from Raqqa, Syria. Four months of relentless bombardment killed and injured thousands of civilians and reduced homes, businesses and infrastructure to rubble.

Amnesty and Airwars have teamed up and conducted the most comprehensive investigation into civilian deaths in a modern conflict. The investigation, collating multiple data streams, gave a brutally vivid account of more than 1,600 civilian lives lost as a direct result of thousands of US, UK and French air strikes and tens of thousands of US artillery strikes.

This session will showcase how a team of investigators at Amnesty and Airwars supported by thousands of digital volunteers from around the world pieced together evidence such as field investigations, satellite images, thousands of user-generated videos and social media reports in one of the most comprehensive accounts of the Raqqa war. The panel will discuss challenges and opportunities for using multi-dimensional investigations for advocacy and change making, as well as the importance of preserving the ‘digital memory’ of modern conflicts that are increasingly monitored by civilians on the ground.

Airwars: Conflicting Accounts

Talk and panel discussion.
(March 2019)
Journal of Digital War
Glasgow University
Glasgow
#archives #investigations

To date, the US-led Coalition has conceded 1,190 civilian deaths over its four-year campaign against the so-called Islamic State. Conversely, by listening to social media, local news and speaking to monitors on the ground, Airwars has recorded over 28,000 alleged deaths and after provisional assessment, places the minimum number of civilians likely killed by Coalition air and artillery strikes at between 7,400 to 11,800.

In an effort to reconcile its records with those of the Coalition, Airwars has maintained regular exchanges with the US-led alliance since its civilian harm cell was established in December 2016. Despite this, and recognition from military sources of the credible contributions made by NGOs to civilian harm monitoring, the transparency of Coalition civilian casualty and strike reports remains inadequate – and the official death toll, implausibly low.

In 2017, a New York Times article called civilians killed by Coalition strikes “the uncounted”. For the American philosopher, Judith Butler, they are the “ungrievable”. In other words, those whose deaths do not fit within the many – aesthetic, juridical and narrative – frames of war.

Taking as its focus two recent collaborations, the first with Amnesty’s Crisis Response Team and the second with Glasgow-based designers Rectangle, the talk will outline two experimental ways in which Airwars’ archive is being mobilised to reframe civilian deaths.

Airwars: Radical Listening

Day-long workshop on open source tools and techniques. Led with Hanna Rullman.
(May 2019)
Het Nieuwe Instituut
Rotterdam
#investigations #participatory-works

A practical introduction to working with open source information and methods to report civilian deaths in war.

We will discuss a recent investigation by Airwars and Amnesty International into civilian harm during the Battle of Raqqa in 2017. Together, we will explore social media as a source of reporting, geolocation, and satellite image analysis, all using publicly available information. In the second half of the workshop, we will experiment with the different ways organise and narrate open source research.

Airwars: Counting the Uncounted

Lecture on the possibilities of combining open, crowd and field research to trace undocumented deaths.
(May 2019)
Het Nieuwe Instituut
Rotterdam
#archives #investigations

Lecture on the possibilities of combining open, crowd and field research to trace undocumented civilian deaths.

Our taxes fund opaque wars in the Middle East and Africa – the realities of which are documented by civilians in near real-time on social media platforms moderated by private tech companies. What does this mean for transparency, accountability and activism?

Taking as our focus Airwars’ recent collaboration with Amnesty International, we will discuss how open source intelligence in combination with crowd and field research, is has being used to track civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria.

Airwars: BBC NewsHack

Lightening talk with Hanna Rullman.
(May 2019)
BBC NewsHack
London
#investigations

Airwars: Remotely Sensing Conflict

Talk for Research Architecture and Forensic Architecture MA studios.
(April 2019)
Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths
London
#investigations

DEFRAG: Open Source Intelligence

Panel on open source intelligence.
(April 2019)
Somerset House
London
#investigations

The civilian dead from the US-led intervention in Iraq and Syria have been called the “uncounted”. What does it mean to count the uncounted – to defend the dead? Amnesty and Airwars have been working with the digital rubble of the war to assemble the untold story of massive civilian loss of life in the 2017 battle to retake Raqqa from the so-called Islamic State.

Feeling/Following Materials as Method

Talk on research methods for Research Architecture MA studio.
(March 2019)
Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths
London
#storytelling

Atmospheres: Sounding Radio

Teaching assistant, second year running for the BA Geography workshop on radio, taught by Sasha Engelmann.
(February 2019)
Geography Department
Royal Holloway, University of London
London

Radio Earth Hold

Talk as part of a day of conversation and collective listening around sonic solidarity with Ultra-red, Daisy Hildyard, Sulaïman Majali, Dhanveer Singh Brar and Louis Moreno.
(October 2018)
Radio Earth Hold
Serpentine Galleries
#storytelling

Concrete Flux × Belligerent Eyes

Participation in a three month-long, experimental film school.
(May 2016 – September 2016)
Fondazione Prada
Ca' Corner della Regina
Venice
#storytelling

Radio Techno Fossil × Free Seminar

Radio workshop co-organised with Sasha Engelmann.
(July 2018)
Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths
London
#storytelling

Test Unit: Learning Platforms

Unit facilitator with Neil McGuire at the week long architecture summer school.
(June 2018)
Agile City
Civic House
Glasgow
#participatory-works #storytelling

Unit facilitator with Neil McGuire for the week-long architecture summer school. Download the group’s documentation, Meditations on a Circle, here.

Unit participants: Briana Pegado, Robert Mills, Charles Myatt, Rosalind Peebles, Miranda Stuart, Lauren La Rose, Gemma Crook, Maeve Dolan, Giovanni Sambo

Concrete Flux × Tabakalera International Residency Programme

Two months research residency with Solveig Suess.
(October 2017 – December 2018)
Tabakalera
Donostia
#archives #storytelling

Two month research residency with Solveig Suess at Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Culture, Donostia.

Free Seminar

Co-founder and participant of the student-led seminar open to all, hosted by the Centre for Research Architecture. Free education in every sense: liberated, critical and decolonised.
(October 2015 – October 2017)
Unsolicited
Goldsmiths
London
#participatory-works #storytelling

Proxy Archives: Touching Without Touching

Guest lecturer for the Curating, Managing and Mediating Art masters programme.
(March 2017)
Aalto University
Helsinki
#archives #storytelling

Over the course of a series of chance commissions, Sophie Dyer and Solveig Suess developed set of strategies for the display and preservation of archives. For this lecture we discuss our design practice through the notion of the proxy archive. We draw on examples from recent work with the curatorial collective, freethought, for the Bergen Assembly.

A proxy is that which has authority to represent someone or something else – a placeholder that may or may not bear resemblance to the original. As designers tasked with presenting often inaccessible and incomplete archives, we ask: How to conjure the archive in its absence? How to touch without touching?

The Oracle and the Algorithm

Guest workshop for the Curating, Managing and Mediating Art masters programme.
(March 2017)
Aalto University
Pori
#archives #storytelling

“The archive is the ultimate rabbit hole” Kate Crawford

The Oracle is the medium, the soothsayer and the search engine. In the word’s original sense, meaning to speak, the oracle articulates the archive. Whether you believe her words or not, they are prophetic. Her utterances have futurity. “Worlds world worlds”, writes Donna Haraway. Mind, the Oracle’s existence is subject to rituals, rites and algorithms.

Guided by the figures of the Oracle and the Algorithm we navigate the collections of Pori Art Museum. 

Our workshop is an experiment the ways in which we articulate the museum’s archive. Through the creation of image complexes we will engage in practices of (re)assembling, (re)animating and (re)composing. We will test the malleability of documents and explore methods of sampling.

The workshop outcome will be a series of so-called proxy archives. Our notion of a proxy archive draws on existing ideas of the “counter archive” (Abbas and Abou-Rahme), the “anarchive” (Zielinski and Weibel) and our own experiences of exhibiting. The anarchive “does not lay claim to leadership or truthfully know where things come from or where they may be headed to”. Rather, is an assembly of “poor images, mutated copies and re-inscriptions,” wrote Zielinski and Weibel.

A collaboration with Solveig Suess.

Shared readings: Abbas, Basel and Abou-Rahme, Ruanne (in conversation with Tom Holert). (2013) Journal of Visual Culture, (12)3. pp 345–363. The Archival Multitude. Crawford, Kate. (2016) ‘Astro Noise’, ed. Laura Poitras. Asking the Oracle pp 128–141

Think Twice Before You Think × Antiuniversity Now

Co-organiser of the discussion and prototyping workshop on the proposition of setting up a new design school.
(November 2015)
Antiuniversity Now
London
#participatory-works #storytelling

Discussion and prototyping workshop on the proposition of setting up a new design school. This school could take many forms, durations and/or iterations. We will outline a proposals via the construction of Baugespann, against which ideas, objections and declarations of intent can be voiced.

Baugespann is a Swiss German word for a temporary construction, usually made of wooden poles, erected during the planning process so the local community can envisage the form and scale of a proposed development.

Held on the occasion of the launch of the publication, Think Twice Before You Think.

Inside Out School

Co-organiser of a two day workshop on radical pedagogy in art and design: its histories, spatial strategies and what it asks of us.
(December 2014)
A Feral Studio
Communication Design BA, The Glasgow School of Art
Glasgow
#participatory-works #storytelling

Inside Out assembled in the corridors of the newly built School of Design in December 2014. Working with final year design students, our aim was to explore the tensions present within institutional education, more precisely, the tensions which exist between inside and outside art school. The activities we planned were intended to create discussion by manifesting these tensions in a series of symbolic and functional acts. The most basic of these was the displacement of work from the classroom into the corridors of the school. Chairs, tables and other objects were then assembled, modified and combined to create temporary partitions, seating and general infrastructure for the afternoon’s working groups. The idea of conflict as a methodology, as discussed by Markus Miessen and Chantal Mouffe, was a key reference, as were past pedagogical projects such as The Antiuniversity and Hidden Curriculum by Annette Krauss, amongst others.

See the publication here.

Parallel School: Glasgow

Organiser of the free school on the occasion of the exhibition, It’s Not Very Nice That: Politics in Contemporary Graphic Design exhibition at The Lighthouse.
(April 2014)
Unsolicited
The Glasgow School of Art and The Lighthouse
Glasgow
#participatory-works #storytelling

Parallel School belongs to no one.
Parallel School has no location.
Parallel School is not teaching.
Parallel School is learning.

Workshop #0: Parallel Journeys
Document your means of travel and route to Glasgow. Collaborate, communicate, connect and arrive together. Stories will be shared and rewritten over drinks on Thursday evening.

In parallel to two host institutions (The Glasgow School of Art and The Lighthouse Gallery), a local politics (the raise of tuition fees in the UK and the implementation of The Bologna Accord in the EU) and each participant’s education or professional practice, the week-long free school assembled on the simple promise of: each one, teach one. Twenty five participants answered an open call disseminated through art schools in Europe, cultural newsletters and peer to peer networks. Those travelling from outside Glasgow were hosted by local participants, and a small amount funding from the Lighthouse Gallery was used to pay for lunch.

Co-organised with Neil McGuire (After the News) with guests workshops from Daniel van der Velden (Metahaven), Glasgow Open Dance School and Eric Schrijver (Open Source Publishing).

Incomplete list of participants: Ana Cecilia Schettino, Anna-Luise Lorenz, Antonia Brell, Callum Copley, Carolin Gießner, Chris Kohler, Duncan Tullis, Elise Migraine, Friederike Fankhänel, Jade Richardson, Jan Lütjohann, Joel Colover, Jordan Derrien, Malcolm Murdoch, Mary Knox, Penny Anderson, Robert Haselbacher, Robert Preusse, Channing Ritter, Stefanie Rau, Steven Swinney, Teresa Schönherr and Thom Swann

Parallel School: Berlin

Participant in the free school.
(September 2013)
Unsolicited
Universität der Künste
Berlin
#participatory-works #storytelling

No Translation Needed

Guest workshop and lecture for the Singapore Immersion Programme.
(May 2013)
The Glasgow School of Art
Glasgow
#storytelling

Texts

Book chapter for Militant Media

Preface for the reprint of 'What would a feminist open source investigation look like?'. Original article co-authored with Gabriela Ivens, Head of Open Source Research at Human Rights Watch.
(2024)
Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths
Spector Books, Coming soon
#investigations

New York: ceci est une caméra de surveillance

Interview for the Amnesty International France podcast.
(June 2023)
Amnesty International
Online
#investigations #participatory-works

Open-weather chapter for Verticality and Vision

Book chapter lead-authored by Sasha Engelmann. Book edited by Gary Bratchford and Dennis Zuev.
(2024)
Palgrave
Coming soon
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Neural magazine: Strange Weather

Interview with Sasha Engelmann as open-weather for the 'Strange Weather' issue edited by Daphne Dragona and Jussi Parikka.
(March 2023)
Neural
in print
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Modelling the Mariupol drama theatre attack

Case study demonstrating how digital 3D models can organise a diverse evidence base in time and space.
(February 2023)
Al Jazeera and Amnesty International
online
#archives #investigations #participatory-works

Open-weather ebook for Library Stack

Ebook co-authored and designed by open-weather and Rectangle (Lizzie Malcolm and Dan Powers), documenting the artwork, 'When I image the earth, I imagine another'.
(February 2023)
Library Stack
online
#archives #open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

“A planet in a book” commissioned by the New York and cyberspace-based lending library, Library Stack, with the support of NN Contemporary Art.

The book, co-created by open-weather and Rectangle, is an archive of the project, ‘When I image the earth, I imagine another’, and a set of lenses on the materials that compose it.

What would it mean to collectively image, and in doing so, reimagine the planet? To see its details and patterns from many situated positions? If we could each take a photo of our home from space, could we build a patchwork, an impossible view, another whole earth?

On the first day of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, a network of people operating DIY satellite ground stations around the world captured a collective snapshot of the earth and its weather systems: a ‘nowcast’ for an undecided future. Tuning into transmissions from three National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites orbiting 800 km above Earth’s surface, members of the network collected imagery and submitted field notes from their different locations. Combined, these contributions create a fractal image of the earth: a record of weather at different scales in which alternative patterns and relations emerge.

Ground stations
Alison Scott and Aaron McCarthy (Glasgow, UK)
Anna Pasco Bolta (Munich, DE)
Ankit Sharma (Mumbai, India)
Aouefa Amoussouvi (Bucharest, Romania)
Barfrost (Kirkenes, Norway)
Bill Liles (Reston, USA)
Carl Reineman (Jefferson, USA)
Catherine Fletcher (Norfolk, USA)
Cedrick Lukunku Tshimbalanga (Kinshasa, DR Congo)
Chonmapat Torasa (Bangkok, Thailand)
Dey Kim (Seoul, South Korea)
Florent Leon Noel (Venice, Italy)
George Ridgeway (Melbury Abbas, U.K.)
Jasmin Schädler (Stuttgart, Germany)
Joaquin Ezcurra and Aimee Juhazs (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Ketsia Kinsumba Muanakiese (Kinshasa, DR Congo)
L Paul Verhage (Homedale, USA)
Natasha Honey (Newcastle, Australia)
Olivia Berkowicz (Paris, France)
Pablo Cattaneo (Mar Del Plata, Argentina)
Sofia Caferri (San Vittoria, Italy)
Steve Engelmann (Los Angeles, USA)
Sybille Neumeyer (Berlin, Germany)
WXVids / Zefie (Albany, USA)
Yoshi Matsuoka (Atsugi, Japan)
Zack Wettstein (Seattle, USA)

The ebook is published by Library Stack with the support of NN Contemporary Art (Northampton, UK), within the context of the NN Contemporary Art Branch of Library Stack. This eBook was generously supported by Arts Council England.

Images: open-weather and Rectangle

Civil society and innovation podcast: Digital volunteers disrupt asymmetrical power dynamics

Interview for the International Civil Society Centre's 2022 report and podcast, 'Civil Society Innovation and Digital Power Shift'.
(October 2022)
Amnesty International with the International Civil Society Centre
Online
#archives #investigations #participatory-works

Open-weather: Speculative-feminist propositions for planetary images in an era of climate crisis

Academic paper. Lead authored by Sasha Engelmann. Co-authored in practice and code by Sophie Dyer, Lizzie Malcolm and Daniel Powers.
(September 2022)
Geoforum
Online
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

Words of weather: A glossary

Glossary entry co-authored with Sasha Engelmann.
(2022)
Edited by Jussi Parikka and Daphne Dragona. Published by Onassis Foundation
Athens
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

When I image the earth, I imagine another

Short story in the genre of speculative feminist fiction. Co-authored with Sasha Engelmann and illustrated by Golrokh Nafisi.
(2022)
Sonic Acts
Amsterdam
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

How to capture satellite images in your backyard – and contribute to a snapshot of the climate crisis

Article inviting people to set-up up DIY satellite ground stations to capture a collective snapshot of the climate crisis.
(February 2022)
The Conversation
online
#open-weather #participatory-works

Access and inclusion: Why and how we translate

Blog post for the Crisis Evidence Lab on translation in human rights research.
(October 2021)
Amnesty International
online
#investigations #participatory-works

How we enrolled more than seven thousand volunteers to generate data the NYPD wouldn’t publish

Blog post documenting the research and rationale behind the investigation 'Decode Surveillance NYC'.
(September 2021)
Amnesty International
online
#investigations #participatory-works

What we’ve learned from keeping this blog …and why we’ll keep posting

Reflective, summer blog post for the Crisis Evidence Lab.
(August 2021)
Amnesty International
remote
#investigations

Citizen evidence online video wrangler

How-to guide and bash scripts to batch download, resize and generate thumbnails from videos posted to social media.
(March 2021)
Amnesty International
remote
#archives #investigations

Open-weather Feminist Handbook

Digital handbook and living document recording the values, positions, and proposition that have emerged during the development of open-weather.
(December 2020)
Almanac
online
#open-weather #participatory-works #storytelling

The open-weather handbook is a shared resource and series of values and positions that emerged over two years during which the open-weather project took shape. It is a living document co-written by Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer. Inspiration for this document comes from many places, but it is informed greatly by the CLEAR Lab Handbook.

In dozens of countries, governments rely on Internet shutdowns to hide repression

Article co-authored with Anita Gohdes and Likhita Banerji, following the investigation, A web of impunity: The killings Iran's internet shutdown hid.
(December 2020)
Amnesty International
online
#investigations

Ten questions we’re asking about ethics, data, and open source research

Blog post co-written with Laura Guzman for Amnesty and The Engine Room.
(November 2020)
Amnesty International
online
#investigations

What would a feminist open source investigation look like?

Academic paper. What would an explicitly feminist open source investigation look like? This is not a thought experiment nor an exercise to identify what is feminist and what is not. Rather, it is an action plan by a group of human rights and tech workers seeking to conduct open source investigations differently. Our aim is to apply feminist thought to open source investigations so as to question and to reimagine what, in the last five years, have become dominant and default ways of working.
(April 2020)
Journal of Digital War
#archives #investigations #participatory-works #storytelling

Co-authored with Gabriela Ivens (Human Rights Watch)

Use of publicly available information to offer radical retellings of violence has powerful democratising potential, both in terms of who contributes to open source investigations and whose stories they centre (Heyns, 2015). At a time when trust in government, media institutions and non-government organisations as fact bearers has been eroded, emergent open source methods have become “an alternative set of truth practices” (Weizman, 2019). Yet there are few accepted guidelines on what is legally, morally, or ethically permissible in such investigations. A growing question within the work of those using open source investigation techniques for human rights is not “Can we do this?” but “Should we be doing this?” What follows is an argument for why intersectional feminist thought should be considered when grappling with the radical possibilities and ethical challenges of open source investigations. The article works through these questions and ideas by giving practical examples of how an investigator might better situate their findings, show their workings, design for ambiguity, practice equity in attribution and find new ways to care for themselves and others.

The article is a direct response to an earlier article by Catherine D’Ignazio titled, “What would feminist data visualization look like?”, which became the academic paper, “Feminist Data Visualization”, co-authored with Lauren F. Klein.

References
Heyns, C., 2015. Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions.
Weizman, E., 2019. Open Verification. e-flux architecture

A probable female, a probable child: Civilian casualties, remote monitoring, and recognition work in the air war against ISIS

Book chapter for (W)archives Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art. The international war against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is one of the first in history to be extensively documented en masse by civilians, militants and state militaries alike, all uploading content to the Internet in near real time. The result is a "polyperspectival" and highly distributed, digital record of the conflict. Working with Airwars public archive, the text moves through reports of civilian harm to map their archival relations, which are also the relations between sensed and sensing bodies – from cold fleshy bodies, to “probable” pixelated bodies and “hot data subjects”. Eds. Daniela Agostinho, Solveig Gade, Nanna Thylstrup and Kristin Veel.
(June 2020)
Sternberg Press
Berlin
#archives #investigations #storytelling

“You cannot see through rubble,” said Greg Bagwell, an erstwhile Royal Air Force Commander, when asked if the British military was doing everything possible to detect civilian harm in Iraq and Syria. (Drone Wars UK 2018)

Responding to Bagwell, I question if the claim “you cannot see through rubble,” can be unsettled by local and situated knowledge. Where are you? Who are you ‘looking’ for? The last question hints that what is at stake is perhaps not ‘seeing’ but “mis/seeing”, that is to say, recognising. (Sharpe 2016)

The chapter is an inquiry into how the digital record of the war against the so-called Islamic State (IS) in the Middle East has been instrumentalised (cached, catalogued and annotated) by activists in Europe to counter official counts of no or low civilian harm. What possibilities might these emergent archi-activist practices offer?

My investigation focuses on the activities of the London-based, remote conflict monitor, Airwars, the near-real time casualty data of which, was referenced in news articles, parliamentary hearings and classified military studies during the American-led war against IS. Its scope is limited to the main territorial conflict that began in Northern Iraq, in August 2011 and ended with the siege of Baghouz Fawqani in Syria, in March 2018.

The text moves through Airwars’ public and private research documents to map their archival relations, that are also the relations between sensed and sensing bodies – from cold fleshy bodies, to “probable” pixelated bodies, to “hot data subjects”. (Schuppli 2017; CENTCOM 2015) I propose Derek McCormack’s modified definition of remote sensing as a set of “modest techniques” as opposed to technology, and Judith Butler’s call for a “radical equality of the grievable” as conceptual tools with which to unpack the labour, ethics and efficacy of ‘civic sensing’. (Butler 2018; McCormack 2010) By civic, I mean not military.

The international war against the IS in Iraq and Syria is one of the first in history to be extensively documented en masse by civilians, militants and state militaries alike, all uploading content to the Internet in near-real time. The result is a “polyperspectival” and highly distributed, digital record of the conflict. (Weizman 2019) Working with this record, Airwars estimates that between 8,000 to 12,000 civilians died as a result of US-led Coalition air and artillery fire. The small non-government organisation is the source for over two-thirds of all Coalition investigations into alleged civilian harm. At the time of writing, the Coalition had conceded the deaths of only 1,302 civilians.

Poles apart, the two accounts cast doubt on one another. At stake is an accurate, historical record of the Coalition’s air war over Iraq and Syria, and vitally, how it was experienced on the ground by the “innocent civilians” America purported “to stand with”. (Obama 2011; US Office of Legal Counsel 2014) To begin to understand whose deaths count, we must first understand how they are counted.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Butler, Judith. 2018. ‘My Life, Your Life, Equality and the Philosophy of Non-Violence’. Gifford Lecture, Glasgow University, October 2.
United States Central Command. 2015. ‘Declassified Iraq/Syria CIVCAS Allegation Tracker’. Airwars.
Drone Wars UK. 2018. ‘Interview of Air Marshall Greg Bagwell by Chris Cole, Drone Wars UK’. Drone Wars UK. January 2018.
McCormack, Derek. 2010. ‘Remotely Sensing Affective Afterlives: The Spectral Geographies of Material Remains’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100 (03): 640–54.
Obama, Barak. 2011. ‘Remarks by President Obama in Address to the United Nations General Assembly’. presented at the Speech, United Nations, New York, September 21.
Schuppli, Susan. 2017. ‘The Subterfuge of Screens’. In Et Maintenant Regardez Cette Machine, 125–39. Montréal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness And Being. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.
US Office of Legal Counsel. 2014. ‘Memorandum Opinion for the Counsel to the President: Authority to Order Targeted Airstrikes Against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’. US Department of Justice.
Weizman, Eyal. 2019. ‘Open Verification’. E-Flux. 18 June 2019.

Airwars: Lessons learned from the international fight against the so-called Islamic State

White paper on the US-led Coalition's public reporting of civilian harm allegations and assessments during its military campaign against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Co-written with Chris Woods, Director of the British not for profit, Airwars.
(March 2019)
Airwars
London
#archives #investigations

Civilian harm claims against the US-led Coalition averaged nearly 16 alleged deaths per day over the four and a half year war against the so-called Islamic State. Yet, it would be over two years before a standardised procedure for submission, assessment and publication emerged.

Co-authored with Airwars’ director, Chris Woods, the report is an initial evaluation of the US-led Coalition’s public reporting of civilian harm throughout the territorial war against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Its 25 recommendations are drawn from Airwars work with Operation Inherent Resolve’s Civilian Harm Team since December 2016 and prior to that with CENTCOM. During the conflict, Airwars became the Civilian Harm Team’s primary external source, accounting for over two-thirds of allegations and one-fifth of “Credible” assessments.

Co-written with Airwars director, Chris Woods.

Read the full report.

Radio Techno Fossil

Essay commissioned for the radio broadcast produced in collaboration with Eline Benjaminsen, Sasha Engelmann and oneacre.online.
(July 2018)
oneacre.online
Witte de With
Den Haag and Rotterdam
#archives #storytelling

What began as a photograph of the Earth’s techno-geographies, is now textured by the electromagnetic conditions of the planet. An image borne of radio waves. An anti-pattern, a trace fossil.

At 0.2 Hz, scientists in the Finnish arctic listen for Very Low Frequencies that index industrial, military and cosmic activity. At 3 – 30 GHz the radio relays of financial traders converge and compete for lines-of-sight at the French port of Calais. At 2.4 GHz an NGO prototypes Wi-Fi kits for use in European refugee camps and by sea rescue vessels. This is a politics of radio. A parallel wireless world, modulated by intergovernmental treaties, corporate monopolies, ionospheric conditions, and the radio-active cycles of our Sun.

PDF

Concrete Flux × Sonic Acts Reader

Translator's diary.
(February 2018)
Sonic Acts Academy
#archives #storytelling

Translator’s notes

29 February 2018, Unstable transmission
An unnamed server in 香港 (Hong Kong) hosts 流泥 (Concrete Flux) magazine, as it answers a request from a client in nearby 深圳 (Shenzhen) the pitch of the cooling system’s hum rises.

The page requested is a photostory shot in 大裕庙 (Dayu Monastery) of a group eating lunch. In staccato bursts, image files are served. The first image is 5.638 kilobytes and 250 pixels wide. Blurred. Low fidelity. The client’s computer confirms receipt. The server responds with a larger file, 21.145 kilobytes and 250 pixels wide. Dithered. Medium fidelity. The exchange continues until a rich, high resolution, high fidelity file is received. The machine to machine conversation is not idle chatter, rather it is a fail-safe system designed to negotiate the so-called ‘great firewall’. It is an aesthetic strategy.

18 October 2017, The aesthetic journalist
There is dust trapped in the lens of the camera from her previous shoot in the 塔克拉玛干沙漠 (Taklamakan Desert) West China. As she removes the lens cap, a small portion of the desert falls to the floor.

Her presence as an aesthetic journalist is unsolicited. Those around the table are pleased by her attention but the focus of her video camera is unclear. Are her wandering shots a stylistic decision or unschooled impulse? The camera has been recording continuously for three hours, and only thirty minutes of battery life remains. She moves with a compulsion to document the group’s discussions. Their warmth and connectivity resonate with her own hopes of “tracing the not-yet-material potential of our moment”. Our “negative moment”. Inchoate and turbid.

Written as Concrete Flux in collaboration with Solveig Suess and in response to the work of Rectangle (Lizzie Malcolm and Dan Powers).

Experimental practices in the electromagnetic spectrum: Towards a material politics of radio

Masters dissertation. Multi-scalar and stellar stories from a material politics of radio in the Anthropocene.
(September 2017)
Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths
London
#storytelling

“Certain kinds of practices open worlds to us. Or open parts of worlds that are precluded by our normal habits of life. I think this applies to how you and I think about radio.” Sasha Engelmann, geographer and friend, in conversation at Goldsmiths College in 2017.

American media theorist, Mark Hansen, proposed radio waves as a trigger for the Anthropocene.* Yet the Anthropocene is a geological project, model and instrument. As such, it is rendered legible through “stratigraphic signals” in rock, soil and sediment.** How then do radio waves – ethereal, diffuse, noisy phenomena – register in the Anthropocene? What are their material traces?

BELOW Multi scalar stories from a material politics of radio in the Anthropocene. (A section of the text was included in Radio Techno Fossil: This is an Image Borne on Radio.)

[extract]

Oaxaca, Mexico, 2011 at 850 MHz
In 2011 the Mexican village of Talea de Castro had no mobile network coverage. Calls could only be made via a costly landline whose wire traversed the Sierra Juárez mountain range. This was not abnormal for geographically “isolated” communities in the Oaxaca Highlands, whose population is 65% indigenous and, in the last census, accounted for over half Mexico’s total indigenous language speaking population. [43, 44, 45] Talea de Castro had its own ways of communicating at a distance. There was a community radio station, Didzah Kieru (Zapotec for Our Voice) and important announcements could be made over the village’s tannoy system. However, the tannoy could not reach the remote “crops fields” let alone the village’s large diaspora in North America. For these purposes and others, the community wanted a mobile phone network. [46]

In Talea de Castro, the local municipality had already approached one of Mexico’s largest telecommunications providers, Telcel, to ask that they connect villages in the region. Telcel responded with demands that the village could not meet. It required the community to install an antenna at a high point, with an electricity supply and highway access. Moreover, that there be 10,000 potential clients in range of the new network. [52] Talea de Castro was the only community that would be in range and its population was on average 3,000. A 2016 report published by the world’s largest mobile telecommunications trade body, the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA), declared that “in order to be viable a site needs around 3,000 active users on a daily basis.” [53] The message was clear, it is not in the interest of large telecommunications providers to offer coverage to rural, low density and low-income areas.

[…]

On 18 June 2012, an alliance 25 indigenous communities in the Juarez Sierra, represented by the municipal authorities, sent a letter to the General Director of Telecommunications and Broadcasting Policy from the Communications and Transportation Ministry. It requested support for the operation of an experimental and community-owned mobile telecommunications meshwork to cover municipalities and indigenous communities in the region. The letter was the outcome of a year of discussions between community representatives and a newly formed non-governmental organisation (NGO, Rhizomatica.

The Mexican government recognition of the communities’ shared ownership of a future network was critical to the proposal’s success. There were two reasons for the condition: in the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca private ownership of land and other resources is not customary. [63] Thus private ownership of a spectrum license would not be on the terms of the indigenous communities. Second, the project would be rendered unsustainable if each village wanting to set-up a network had to apply separately. A meshwork that used a single frequency band was the only solution.

Centre for Research Architecture, 2017 at 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz
When the idea of an obtaining a spectrum license was mobilised in Taela de Castro, it became a hybrid, material, technoscientific, legal, political and social cause.

In a roundtable discussion at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College in London, I asked the theorist of political aesthetics, Esther Leslie, to describe the proliferation of radio in the Anthropocene. Her response was simple: “It is an intense agitation all around us”. [64]

The condition has been conceptualised differently by various disciplines. In her stories of “spatial products” and politics, the architect, Keller Easterling refers to our radio environment as “microwave urbanism” or “C-band urbanism”. [65] C-band refers to the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that was initially allocated to satellite communication and includes microwave frequencies used for contemporary telecommunications. Easterling’s move to account for radio in urbanism stresses its spatial dimension and prompts us to think of it as an architectural material. It also echos Buckminster Fuller’s call, almost a century earlier, for an architecture tuned to what he understood as the becoming radio of the world. [67]

More recently, in The Shock of the Anthropocene the French historians, Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, refer to the Earth’s radio skein as a “second atmosphere”. [68] Bonneuil and Fressoz’s description is spatial yet diffuse. Here atmosphere implies something to which we have a reflexive encounter, through the vital and involuntary mechanism of breathing. Read together with news reports on the atmospheric changes affecting ozone levels and the Earth’s climate, such an understanding might conjure fears of environmental ensnarement. [69]

While I am stressing is the absolute saturation of Anthropocene with electromagnetic radiation, the stories I am recounting document the force of radio in things that are not radio: corporate monopolies, national constitutions, federal laws, large-scale infrastructure, highways, mobile devices, code and social formations. For these reasons, I choose Leslie’s turn of phrase, that is, “an agitation all around us”. The word agitation is able to move between technoscientific, legal, political and social registers. Put differently, it has a multiple belonging.

The political and social definitions of “agitate” are similar: to arouse public interest in a concern, to trouble or be troubled. In scientific language its meaning is to stir-up, to unsettle or disturb. Agitation is also a reference to the wave-particle duality of the photons that compose radio waves. In other words, unlike sound waves that are mechanical, electromagnetic radio waves do not displace material they excite it, which is to say, they agitate it.

I propose that a material politics of radio is occupied by how this radio frequency agitation unfolds across different scales and registers as “cascades” or “dangerous ideas”. [70]

Oaxaca, Mexico, 1917 at 850 MHz
In the letter sent to the Mexican Communications and Transportation Ministry by the indigenous communities, as legal footing, the group’s lawyers drew on Articles 2 and 8 of the country’s 1917 constitution and article 50 of Federal Telecommunications Law. The most important reference was to Article 2, Section B VI: [71]

[end of extract]

Sections not included:
New Zealand, 1999 at 700 MHz
Oaxaca, Mexico, 2013 – 2016 at 850 MHz

For the sound component of the work see: Lore of The Radio Fossil

Footnotes
[*] Hansen, Mark. ‘Triggers: Introducing the Technosphere’. 100 Jahre Gegenwart. Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. 2015.
[**] Hecht, Gabrielle. 2017. Interscalar Vehicles for the African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence

[43] (“México en cifras: Oaxaca,” 2017)
[44] Throughout Mexico 50,000 communities do not have access to landline or cellular telephone services of any kind. (Claudia Magallanes-Blanco and Leandro Rodriguez-Medina, 2016)
[45] To provide some context, worldwide the number of people not connected is estimated at 4 billion, well over half the world’s population. (GSMA [Groupe Speciale Mobile Association], 2016)
[46] (Claudia Magallanes-Blanco and Leandro Rodriguez-Medina, 2016, pp. 334–341)
[52] (Claudia Magallanes-Blanco and Leandro Rodriguez-Medina, 2016)
[53] (GSMA [Groupe Speciale Mobile Association], 2016)
[63] “In the communities of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca, the private ownership of land is almost non-existent. Land is communal and decisions about its use are made by an assembly of community members (asamblea de comuneros), which is composed of family heads of the agrarian group.” Peter Bloom. Own translation. (Huerta, 2016, p. 6)
[64] (Esther, 2017)
[65] (Easterling, 2005)
[67] (Wigley, 2015, p. 29)
[68] (Fressoz and Bonneuil, 2017, p. 61)
[69] See Peter Sloterdijk’s texts on atmosphere, politics and war, namely the book ‘Terror from the air’ (2002) and short essay, ‘Atmospheric politics’ (2005)
[70] “cascades” (Thomson and Engelmann, 2017) (Barad, 2007) and “dangerous ideas” (Stengers and Prigogine, 1984, p. 190)
[71] (“Mexican Constitution of 1917 (with 2015 amendments),” 2017, p. 5)

Lore of the Radio Fossil

Script co-written with Sasha Engelmann. We follow a satellite image as it traverses the bounds of Earth’s surfaces, elements, atmospheres, and technogeographies.
(September 2017)
Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths
London
#archives #open-weather #storytelling

We follow a satellite image as it traverses the bounds of Earth’s surfaces, elements and atmospheres. The story itself is a technique for attuning to a parallel wireless world with the aim of witnessing a radio-active Anthropocene.

This exercise in collaborative writing prefigured open-weather. Lore of the Radio Fossil was first exhibited at Goldsmiths, University of London in the Centre for Research Architecture’s Masters Show in 2017, and later broadcast live on Radio Tonka 92.0 Den Haag FM on 5 July 2018. An online version with audio ‘tuning forks’ was published in Temporary Art Review in 2017. Datscha Radio Berlin performed and broadcast the work as part of the festival, Listening to the Universe – Radiophonien des Alls, in 2020.

The original sound was designed by Daniele Guerrini and Matthias Girardi (Cage Suburbia), with field recordings compiled by myself and Sasha Engelmann.

The script was co-authored with Engelmann.

Special thanks to following people who so generously answered our questions and sent field recordings: Bill Liles (NQ6Z), Thomas Ashcraft, Jyrki Manninen (Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory), Anatol Guglielmo and Oleg Dmitrievich Zotov (Borok Geophysical Observatory), Mélanie Legru (ESA), Laura Rocchio (NASA), James Thieman (Radio Jove/NASA), Larry Dodd (K4LED), Timo Sukuvaara and Timo Ryyppo (Finnish Meteorological Institute).

PDF

Spectral topographies

Essay. Lines of algorithmic capital and the mass migration of people flow together at Calais.
(May 2019)
Migrant Journal
Calais, France
#archives #storytelling

In 2016, denied entrance to the UK, around 7,000 people took shelter in makeshift camps on the outskirts of the French port city of Calais. The camp formed in the “microwave shadow” of the high-frequency trading relays which connect London to financial exchanges in continental Europe. One relay, owned by the Dutch firm, Custom Connect, cut directly across the tarpaulin-covered tents.

Spectral Topographies is a collaborative investigation by the Norwegian photographer, Eline Benjaminsen, and began as an exercise in shifting focus from the familiar structures and bodies that populate space, to their electromagnetic radiation and its infrastructural traces. The work is driven by an urge to understand our increasingly “dense, politicised and codified” electromagnetic milieu.

Text and photo story first published in Migrant Journal in May 2017 and reprinted in February 2018.

PDF

Calais, capital and an electromagnetic commons

The electromagnetic spectrum is an example of a 'resource' held in common that is governed in different ways, to very different effect. Calais' electromagnetic milieu tells of the extreme environments of financial capitalism and the people, resources and infrastructures that weather them.
(September 2017)
Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths
London
#storytelling

Summary

This essay inhabits the shadowy relations between two flows that converge over the Calais: those of microwaves and of bodies. It is a reading of the extreme environments of financial capitalism and the logics, resources and infrastructures that weather them. I focus on the electromagnetic spectrum as an example of a resource held in common, which is governed in different ways, to very different effect.

If we understand the division of the spectrum as, in part, producing its applications, the reverse can be possible. Economists such as Lessig in the US and Richard Thanki in the UK, have lobbied governments to recognise the importance of licence-exempt frequencies using the example of innovation in the 2.4 GHz band. Thanki was part of the group who installed a WLAN at the informal Calais camp nicknamed, the “Jungle”. Interventions such as the installation of informal or community owned telecommunications networks or meshworks are a form of resistance against the private, controlled and striated spaces that propagate within our “electromagnetic commons”. I argue that choices occur at all levels of our electromagnetic environment, and these present opportunities to act. Interventions which protect and expand access to the 2.4GHz and 5 GHz commons are a move towards an “ecology of frequencies”.

The project was inspired by a series of conversations with a heterogeneous group of activists and economists. Also, the anthropologist, Alexandre Laumonier, who kindly shared with me his map of the High-Frequency Trading microwave relays in Europe.

Visual guide authored in collaboration with Richard Thanki and Jangala.

See the sister text written for Spectral Topographies.

Think twice before you think

Zine. A publication and conversation between participants and co-organisers of Parallel School, Utopia School, Free Cooper Union and Relearn. Written, edited and designed with Toni Brell.
(November 2015)
A Feral Studio
Berlin
#participatory-works #storytelling

Documentation of the Inside Out School workshop and the conversations which led to and succeeded it, including a discussion between the participants of Parallel School (Berlin), Utopia School (New York), Free Cooper Union (New York) and ReLearn (Brussels).

Written, edited and designed in close collaboration with Toni Brell.

The political theorist Chantal Mouffe claims institutional critique is best executed from within. Only by engaging with institutions is it possible to create dissent, and so bring to the fore alternatives to the current ­system. Based on her concept of conflict and ‘agonistic pluralism’, she promotes the idea of ‘agonistic spaces’. Conflict is not a problem to straighten out. It is the very basis for politics and decision­­­­-making. Real conflict leaves space for alternatives that acknowledge the other’s right to exist, and by that agree to disagree. True antagonism is the ability to make a choice between multiple, opposing factions, in a seemingly undecidable terrain. Therefore, conflict should not be seen as an obstacle. It should be seen as the common ground between two adversaries. This is what ultimately brings them together and makes the friend/foe relationship potentially interesting and desirable. So maybe it’s time to stop being efficient and cause some conflict.

Which brings us to Inside Out School. In our experience, public education usually comes with a lot of privileges, such as libraries, studio space, time to explore your artistic interests, critiques, free working material, access to workshops. Even though this framework can be very helpful in some respects, it should not be forgotten that it is equally restrictive. Art schools such as the GSA are highly regulated spaces. Not only in terms of their facilities, but also content. Students are usually directed towards a standardised agenda of what is relevant, a canon that they are supposed to follow. There is a consensus about how and what we learn. With our workshop at the Glasgow School of Art, we wanted to create an awareness of this situation, create a space to question what was there, and so disturb the accepted education paradigms and look for possible alternatives.

We created ‘agonistic spaces’: spaces that were inappropriate, even against the rules, and thus bound to cause conflict. We occupied the art school, building barricades, obstacles and temporary classrooms. We transformed the common and familiar into something odd, erratic and unknown in an effort make visible the mechanisms and hierarchies that the institution relies on, which we so often take for granted (such as security staff, emergency routes, house rules, etc.). By changing what we knew we hoped to set free a potential not only for conflict but more importantly for discussion, friction, and possible failure.

Biography

My name is Soph or Sophie (they/them). I am based between Durham (UK) and Vienna (AT).

I develop projects and ways of working that prefigure more just, equitable and collaborative worlds.

My work combines visual, aural and spatial storytelling with investigatory and participatory research methods. Past outputs include digital archives and tools, models, installations, works of fiction and workshops. I document how I work, as well as what I work on.

Together with geographer Sasha Engelmann, I co-lead open-weather. Open-weather is a feminist art, tech and pedagogy project about our changing relations to weather and climate. The project uses and develops inclusive DIY tools for collectively imaging and reimagining the earth and its weather systems.

Previously, I founded the now dormant Feminist Open Source Investigations Group (read more), and have more than a decade of experience working with arts and justice-based groups, from Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab to the Glasgow Women’s Library.

I studied Visual Communication at The Glasgow School of Art, before completing a Masters in 2017 at the Centre for Research Architecture in Goldsmiths, where I briefly worked for Forensic Architecture. From 2020–2021, I was an Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

UNOFFICIAL

Hello! I enjoy making internet friends. If you want to share work, co-conspire about other worlds or say “hello”, the best way to reach me is over email. When busy my response time can be slow.

MIND THE TYPO

I am dyslexic and it isn’t always possible for someone to proof what I write on this website.

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Postscript. A rolling list projects yet to be realised or in process:

Weather Patterns, Climate Footprints. (fundraising stage, open-weather 2024)

Year of Weather. (fundraising stage, open-weather 2024–5)

War in High Frequencies: A project working with textile weaving and intercepted High Frequency radio communications to produce a contemporary tapestry of invasion of Ukraine.

Atmosphere as Archive: An ionogram showing how percussive violence from aerial bombing campaigns can register hundreds of miles away as changes the Earth’s ionosphere.

Radio mirrors for Earth Observation satellites. Outdoor sculpture

Antenna Poems.

Denial Poems: A collection of poems generated from clauses extracted from declassified US military civilian casualty reports and assessments.

How the US military’s campaigns shape Google Earth.

Radio Mirrors: Zine. A photo series of bodies of water in the path of Earth Observation Satellite downlink transmissions, which due to their size act as radio mirrors, reflecting the earth-images back into space.