This, as some will say, is why we can’t have nice things. The Lithuanian artist Benediktas Gylys has set up an installation that creates a “portal” between a street in Dublin and one in Manhattan. A giant sculpture containing an eight-foot-wide circular screen has been erected on a busy thoroughfare at the heart of each of those towns.
The screens show a livestreamed video, 24/7, of what’s going on at the other end. You walk down a drizzly Dublin street in the afternoon and there, shimmering ahead of you on the pavement, is an eight-foot slice of New York in the morning sun. You can wave through this portal to a stranger, going about his or her day, 3,000 miles away. And he or she can wave back.
Imagine the possibilities. A kiss across the ocean. A connection between the new world and the old one. Think of it as a Colm Tóibín novel without all the boring old words. There’d be curiosity and laughter, glinting interactions between strangers amid the play of happenstance and the quotidian events of an ordinary day. We’d all revel in new possibilities of human connection.
Except, no, that wasn’t what happened; or, at least, it wasn’t all of what happened. “Portal to hell,” was what the New York Post called it: “Live Dublin-NYC video art installation already bringing out the worst in people with lewd displays.” It reported with a mixture of feigned dismay and barely repressed glee that “middle-finger exchanges and other lewd gestures are a common means of communication on both sides of the portal”.
The portal had only been open for a few hours when the Gardai had to forcibly remove a young woman who was “grinding her bum” on the screen on the Irish end of the connection. Drunken Dubliners have taken to waving swastikas or images of the burning towers of the World Trade Center at their American counterparts. In response, an American TikTokker flashed her breasts, claiming she wanted to show Dubliners her “two New York home-grown potatoes”.
Those of us for whom capitalising the word “Portal” immediately conjures the brilliant videogame about a laboratory experiment run by an insane computer will have sniffed trouble from the off. Likewise, those of us who have ever found ourselves in Dublin at pub kicking-out time. But even those who don’t have either of those reference points should have been able to see it coming.
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