Video portal in New York City, Dublin closed over inappropriate behavior

It started with an optimistic vision of a high-tech art installation acting as a virtual bridge between Dubliners and New Yorkers.

But within days, some visitors began sharing violent and explicit images and making rude gestures.

Now the Dublin City Council is temporarily pulling the plug.

After being open one week, the Portal is being temporarily switched off to investigate “possible technical solutions to inappropriate behaviour by a small minority of people,” a Dublin City Council spokesperson told The Washington Post on Tuesday.

“Dublin City Council had hoped to have a solution in place today, but unfortunately the preferred solution, which would have involved blurring, was not satisfactory,” the spokesperson said.

The Dublin Portal will go dark at 10 p.m. local time Tuesday, but it is expected to resume live-streaming later in the week.

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Videos shared on social media have shown Portal visitors miming snorting cocaine, throwing up their middle finger, holding up videos of explicit sex and flashing their breasts. One visitor in Dublin pulled up an image of 9/11 that showed the twin towers burning and held it up to the Portal’s camera while onlookers jeered from New York.

Visitors to the technology art sculptures by Lithuanian entrepreneur and investor Benediktas Gylys have described them as functioning like giant FaceTime video without audio where people at the Dublin and New York Portals could at any moment step into or view a 24/7 — and unfiltered — live stream.

The Portals were placed at bustling and tourist-heavy hubs in each city. Dublin’s Portal faces O’Connell Street, a main thoroughfare in Dublin, and shows the city’s famous General Post Office building at the Spire, while New York’s sits at Manhattan’s Flatiron Plaza at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street.

At the May 8 unveiling, the Portals received a warm reception, with Dublin Mayor Daithí de Róiste sharing his hope that the project would “bring communities from across the world closer together and to allow people to meet and connect outside of their social circles and cultures.”

In the first few days of the installation, the Portals drew a mix of preplanned displays, like a corps of Irish dancers performing a short routine for intrigued New Yorkers, and heartwarming interactions. Strangers would wave hello through the Portal or hold up signs expressing love or greetings for the other city. Long-distance pen pals met face-to-face through the Portals, while a pair of twin brothers reconnected while 3,000 miles apart. Sky News even reported a successful marriage proposal at the Portals.

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Portals Organization, the company behind the installations, said in a statement to the Irish news organization RTÉ that it did “not intend to suggest people to interact with portals in any particular way.”

“Our goal is to open a window between far away places and cultures that allows people to interact freely with one another,” the Portals Organization said. “We encourage people to be respectful and from our position as observers, we see that the absolute majority of experiences is on the bright side.”

The Dublin City Council spokesperson noted that while the Portal was temporarily going dark after reports of inappropriate behavior, “the overwhelming majority of people interacting with the Dublin Portal have behaved appropriately.”

The Dublin and New York Portals come three years after the first Portals installation in the Lithuanian city of Vilnius and the Polish city of Lublin. Dublin’s mayor said in July that he expects to connect his city’s Portal to counterparts in Lithuania, Poland and Brazil.

The installation is scheduled to remain in place until the fall.

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