What Is This?
Community Portal is a pre-spiritual embodiment technology for site-specific and self-specific collective listening as an entry point for community dialogue, collaboration, and investigation.
Designed as a "liquid antenna," the work is comprised of a copper bowl and modified ground plane antenna bowl. Placing your hand into a water filled bowl puts you in direct physical contact with its watershed while also turning your body into a part of the antenna — amplifying a continuously received stream of quickly shifting local FM signals.
This creates the potential for a site-specific and self-specific message to come through for personal and communal interpretation. Additional hands placed into the bowl share and amplify the antenna's signal, as well as modulating the volume of the bowl's speakers, sharing agency and intention between participants and the watershed itself.
It is the hope that this real-time engagement of human and non-human collaborators across time and space makes accessible, if even only for a second, a space to "try yourself on" - to paraphrase the words of the artist and producer Sterling Toles, and improvise a sense of deep(er) connections stemming from this very moment and place. What feels right? What feels wrong? What feels connected? What doesn't make sense any more? Divining other(ed) ancestral imaginations is the name of the game here - acts of Ancestral Improvisation which I hope will feel empowering, informative, comforting and connective.
This is a survival tool from and for my own quests to understand and re-connect myself and my culture(s). It is designed in the shadow of the rise and fall of commercial genetic testing; the ancestral information it has restored to my family, the information it continues to be silent on, and the potential dangers the codification of this knowledge into "data" may hold now and in the future (and has certainly held in the past). This tool is of an intuitive, inquisitive, protective and open nature.
As the astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat has noted:
"I want you to remember that authenticity is a colonial invention.
You have the duty to seek a living connection to your own culture
You will reinvent your language using your living tongue.
You will revitalize your medicine with neighborhood weed.
You will make up new recipes with all of the old flavors."
Get in Touch
Questions? Suggestions? Collaborations?
email: communityportal@mailbox.org
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | \|/ \|/ | | <0> <0> | | +--+ | | | | | | __ / | __ | | / _ \ \ //|||| / / _ \ | | \ \ \ \ V |||V / / / / | | / / \ \ \ VVV / / / \ \ | | * / / * * * ~~~~~~~~~~~~~X~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ * * * \ \ * | | ) \ / / / AAA \ \ \ / ( | | \ / / / A |||A \ \ \ / | | \__/ / \\|||| \ \__/ | | \ | | | | | | | +--+ | | <0> <0> | | /|\ /|\ | | | | AAA AAA | | A |||A A |||A | | \\|||| \\|||| | | \ | \ | | | | | | | | | +--+ +--+ | | <0> <0> <0> <0> | | /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\ | | | | | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
Community Portal is a Collaborative Mechanic designed by Natan Diacon-Furtado, copyright 2025
This work, and everything that derives from it is licensed under:
GNU Free Documentation License (For instructions)
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (For all other text and media)