Playing with Ancestral Waters: Community Portals along the Mahicannituck (Lower Hudson River) Watershed

Community Portal (2024–) is an instrument for embodied collaborative listening with local and ancestral waters. The Mahicannituck (lower Hudson River), a tidal estuary connecting upstate New York and the Atlantic Ocean, serves as an inspiration and site for this work. The cyclical movement of its waters constitutes a flow towards and away from Indigenous, colonial, cultural, and industrial legacies. This hybrid essay shares fragments of Community Portal’s co-development within these waters and across three participatory design playtests conducted by a community of artists, educators, and high-school-aged youth science fellows. Utilized in game design to elicit user feedback during development, playtesting is presented here as a methodology for the collaborative community design and development of assistive tools that adaptively re-use and re-imagine colonial technologies of science and media. Playtesting with and in these waters presents an opportunity for further collaborative development of technologies that unite social practice, science, and engineering, a process that this essay terms ‘visionary engineering.’