Having just come back from the Ireland side of things, I can tell you, it was getting a good amount of attention, as much as it was seemingly just a place where people were congregating. But as one had to expect, some “inappropriate behavior” occurred at “The Portals,” a mere week after it opened.
The two, round lens-like public-art installations, pretty much reminding me of the “Guardian of Forever” from the famous Star Trek episode, The City on the Edge of Forever (original series, 1st season, thank you very much) is a 24/7 real-time streaming hook-up between New York City and Dublin. The link-up debut just last week, May 8th to be exact, and then was turned off just a week later, this Monday in fact, over some naughtiness perpetrated by folks from both sides.
And I say…is anybody surprised?
No audio is included with this hook-up, but a few incidents are being blamed/considered for the shutdown. OnlyFans model Ava Louise is claiming closure by flashing her tatats (from the Dublin side), while some New Yorkers were said to have shown images of the Twin Towers.
“While we cannot control all of these actions, we are implementing some technical solutions to address this and these will go live in the next 24 hours,” the Dublin City Council said in a statement. The Flatiron Nomad Partnership, on the New York side, claimed it would install software updates “to limit such behavior appearing on the live stream”.
The Portals are the brainchild of Lithuanian artist Benediktas Gylys. In July, Dublin hopes to connect to places like Poland, Brazil, and Lithuania. That’s if appropriate measures can be put into place to stop people doing what we all had to pretty much know people (no matter their city of origin) would be doing.
Again, as I passed by the day before the closure, I found the area interesting, but not much more than a curiosity where Dubliners seemed as much engaged in the portal as they were in just hanging out. As in any busy city, something new will catch people’s attention for a while, then it just becomes part and parcel of everything else bustling and hustling around the populace. Given time, I am sure we all would have seen a few more instances of flashing or maybe some political messages held up on signs (the Monday after I landed, Trinity College had to be closed because of protestors, so nothing much is different anywhere, really) but all this drama would all have just become the white noise of life as it is these days, I am sure.
Let’s all raise a pint and have a laugh.
(by the way, I don’t drink, at all, but my buddy PJ kept this pint ‘warm’ for me. What a tropper!)
