Entangled Ecologies is an augmented reality (AR) interpretive prototype for Smith Pond Shaker Forest in Enfield, New Hampshire, developed as an NEH-supported digital/public humanities prototype project. Working with John P. Bell, Damiano Benvegnù, Yadina Clark, and project partners connected to the site’s history, ecology, and public interpretation (Abenaki historians, Shaker Museum experts, Upper Valley Land Trust stewards), I helped shape a cross-disciplinary experience that invites hikers to encounter the forest as a living archive of glaciers, trees, water, weather, and human history. Through site-based video, photography, audio, and AR overlays, the prototype reveals how the landscape has been shaped over 15,000 years—from retreating ice and forest succession to Abenaki relationships with the Kwanitekw/Connecticut River, Shaker waterworks and craft traditions, storm events, chestnut blight, climate change, and contemporary stewardship. Rather than treating nature and culture as separate stories, the prototype invites visitors to see trails, ponds, trees, dams, and artifacts as interwoven traces of ecological and human memory.
My contribution focused on the creative and ecological design of the experience: developing the regenerative framing, shaping interpretive scripts, connecting forest, watershed, climate, and cultural histories, and helping translate complex place-based research into an immersive public encounter. An example of the completed prototype (demo below) uses immersive media to turn a walk through the woods into a layered encounter with place. AR elements imagine glaciers receding, forest species returning, chestnut burrs opening, birchbark canoes gliding through wetland paths, Shaker furniture emerging from trees, and climate signals appearing in the living landscape.
Yadina Clark, a graduate student I mentored, assisted with gathering historical research that supported the interpretive content. The project’s central question is not simply what happened here, but how we might learn to notice, care, and participate differently now. By combining interpretive storytelling with experimental media, Entangled Ecologies offers a regenerative model for place-based public history—one that helps audiences experience forests, watersheds, and communities as mutually entangled, fragile, and alive.
I see Entangled Ecologies as a collaborative model for ecological storytelling—using AR not simply to add digital content to a landscape, but to help visitors notice the interwoven traces of people, place, memory, and care, and to imagine how they might participate differently in the living systems around them.
These prototypes (more coming) are examples of hikers using their phones to trigger the QR code nested in the Maple leaf design. Once triggered, the code reveals historical and ecological audio information as well as photos, and sometimes music. The green transparent “Learn More” signs are all options to access more of the layered historical, cultural and ecological content linked to specific sites along the hiker’s journey.