At 2:45 p.m. on a sunny Wednesday in a plaza near the Flatiron Building, a crowd of a few dozen was watching, and appearing in, New York City’s most infamous new reality show.
On a round video screen, encased in a porthole-like structure behind a railing, they could see a livestream of onlookers across the Atlantic, in the center of Dublin. “They can see you just like you see them!” a staff member minding the exhibit told the crowd.
Therein lay the attraction, and the problem. The Portal, a two-way-video art installation, opened on May 8, then promptly closed down on May 14, because of “inappropriate behavior.”
On the American side, an OnlyFans model had flashed her breasts at Dublin, a stunt that, she later said, netted her a boost in subscribers worth tens of thousands of dollars. From the Irish side, people displayed images of swastikas and of the 2001 World Trade Center attack. The transgressions went viral, not the sort of global connection and sharing that the organizers were hoping for.
Who, besides everyone, would have thought that some people would behave badly given access to a public live camera? When the Portal reopened on May 19, it had new hours — 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. New York time — and new safeguards, including a “proximity-based solution” that would blur the livestream if anyone or anything got too close.
Today, the crowd was keeping it on, keeping it all on. At least on this side of the ocean. Onscreen in Dublin, a pair of high-spirited lads lifted their shirts and exposed their bellies to America. In a few minutes they graduated to full topless, whirling their shirts over their heads, before they were seemingly encouraged to leave by security.
The American contingent, however, was positively subdued. There were a lot of smiles and waves and hand hearts. The installation also offers visitors a means to express themselves — and maybe, to channel their enthusiasm in G-rated forms — with a bucket of signs to pick up and display. “We [Heart] Dublin,” the signs say, or “We [Shamrock] Dublin,” or, simply, “Hello!”
Some people came up with their own interactions. There were many rounds of trans-Atlantic rock-paper-scissors. A man in New York danced the Charleston with a woman onscreen in Dublin, then segued into a kind of Michael Jackson moonwalk. The minder alerted him when his energy carried him too close to the guardrail.
Mostly, though, people hoisted their own cameras — to take selfies, to shoot video, to take pictures of the picture of people across the ocean taking pictures, testament to the modern belief that there is no mediated experience that can’t be improved by being further mediated.
This, more than “global interconnectedness,” or whatever the official news-release aspirations of the installation are, is what is most striking about what the Portal does. Today, after all, most everyone already carries a powerful networked camera and video screen in their pockets. Yet the Portal makes a simple, jittery two-way image seem exciting, novel, unpredictable.
Certainly the smiling crowds in the two cities showed good will and connection. But the interaction, be it flashing or dancing, is also by nature an expression of power. I did this thing, then someone across the world did it because I did. I made a gesture and got a reaction. I made that happen.
That peek-a-boo impulse can be delightful and childlike. Sometimes it can be obnoxious and adolescent. “This is why we can’t have nice things,” people will say, but the material this artwork is made of is us. The thing is only as nice as we are.
The Portal is designed to make you feel, headily, like you are watching people in an exhibition while you are yourself part of an exhibition. That will, inevitably, yield exhibitionism. But it also promises a feeling of cross-border openness in a world that is increasingly closing itself off.
Constraining what people can do with the Portal and when they can do it is understandable, maybe inevitable. (There were plenty of kids on both sides of the screen.) But when you limit the expression, you necessarily limit the participants’ power and thus change the nature of the artwork. There is a difference between letting the best in people express itself and keeping people on their best behavior.
Not that the viewers enjoying a gorgeous day in front of a video wormhole seemed to mind. People laughed and lingered and blew kisses across the pond. They held aloft the preprinted signs and plunked them back in the bucket with satisfaction. They had fun. You can do worse things with a beautiful spring afternoon in this God-forsaken year of 2024 than watch a crowd of strangers be nice to another crowd of strangers just because.
But was the Portal closed down and then put under restrictions because it failed, or because it succeeded? It sought to let New Yorkers and Dubliners (and their respective tourists) see each other fully. And New York showed its viewers — well, it showed them those, yes, but also its spirit. Like it or not, what is more hustle-culture American than exposing one’s self to boost one’s social following? When you ask New York to reveal itself, it doesn’t reveal just a little bit. Ask anyone who ever watched “The Robin Byrd Show” on Manhattan cable.
The crowd started to thin out. In less than an hour, the Portal would go to sleep, in the city that doesn’t. Maybe, eventually, someone would find another way to misuse it, and people would again declare that trusting two cities to behave was an error. But in the words of one famous Dubliner, Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” errors “are portals of discovery.”
