Welcome to this satellite-based workshop during BEKs symposium The Only Lasting Truth is Change: Voice, Seed, Brutality 2025.

About the Workshop
Over one day, participants will learn how to ‘see’ cyclones in the sky and in satellite images. Informed by Bergen’s wet location at the end of the Jet Stream and its special significance in meteorology as home of the so-called ‘Norwegian cyclone model’, we will spend the day assembling different knowledges of how to sense and interpret storm systems.

Sophie Dyer from the feminist collective open-weather will introduce their unique Public Archive of more than 3,000 satellite images and share the basics of DIY satellite imagery reception. In the afternoon, guided by the expertise of climate scientist Camille Li (University of Bergen and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research) and meteorologist Ellen Viste, as well as our own experiences of weather, we will attempt to recognise, read, and model cyclones.

This workshop is framed by the larger, speculative question of how our different relationships to weather are and must change with the climate.

The workshop takes place on 21 November 2025 10:00-14:00 and it’s free and open for all. No prior knowledge is required to participate. The presentations and conversation on satellite imagery by Open-weather & the Bjerknes Centre take place on Saturday 22 November at 14.15 at Bergen Assembly. The presentation is streamed at vimeo.com/bekdotno

About the workshop hosts

open-weather
Open-weather is a feminist experiment in imaging and imagining the earth and its weather systems using DIY community tools. Co-led by designer Sophie ‘Soph’ Dyer and creative geographer Sasha Engelmann, open-weather makes public tools, artworks, and workshops on the reception of satellite images using free or inexpensive amateur radio technologies. In the tradition of intersectional feminism, open-weather investigates the politics of location and interlocking oppressions that shape our capacities to observe, negotiate, and respond to the climate crisis. In doing so, open-weather challenges dominant representations of earth and environment while complicating ideas of the weather beyond the meteorological.

Sophie Dyer
This workshop will be led by Sophie (she/they). Their practice combines participatory and investigative methods to create digital tools and archives, evidentiary models and maps, and speculative fiction. Until 2023, Sophie worked in Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab where they led the organisation’s crowdsourcing initiative to create the first city-wide map of surveillance cameras in New York city, which then was used to sue the NYPD. Currently, Sophie is an Advisor to Forensic Architecture and teaches at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Design Academy Eindhoven.

Ellen Viste
Ellen Viste is a meteorologist, former climate researcher and non-fiction author working with climate science communication. She has a PhD in meteorology from the University of Bergen. In 2023 she published the book Vindens historier (Tales of the wind; in Norwegian).