Portal Combat

The first time I visit the Portal, I stare at my own sour face as it is reflected on the surface of a blank screen. At the top of the eleven-foot disc, a tiny camera eye blinks red: Though the cluster of people at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and Twenty-Third Street couldn’t see any moving images, we are being recorded and displayed in real time. Whoever is standing at the identical Portal in Dublin can see us squinting, confused.

On May 8, the Portals opened on Flatiron Plaza and off O’Connell Street in Dublin, inaugurating a 24/7 video-only livestream between the two cities that had no apparent purpose other than that of an entertaining gimmick. Tens of thousands visited in the first five days, and almost two billion more followed their antics online; by May 13, the Department of Transportation shut down the Manhattan attraction, citing inappropriate conduct. “It was the other side doing funny business,” a private security guard tells me. “You saw them with the 9/11 picture? You can’t be doing that to New York.” As he talks, he leans against the protective barricade that renders the Portal’s sleek steel platform—the perfect stage for a viral dance routine or a marriage proposal on bended knee—pointless. An Irish lad had pulled up an image of the burning Twin Towers on his phone and raised it over the camera; someone else had typed a bunch of expletives on their Notes app and showed it to the all-seeing eye. Meanwhile, Dublin’s City Council complained of an OnlyFans model pulling up her shirt to expose her “New York homegrown potatoes.”

On May 19, the Portals flicker again with activity. I drop by Flatiron Plaza the next day, to find a jolly scene. “It’s on!” a woman screams. She’d passed by on a very early jog and encountered a dark screen—to accommodate security measures, the New York Portal is now live only from 6:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. A Portals.org employee does a sort of “step right up” routine (you have to stand between the blue circles painted on the sidewalk to be in the frame) and an endless stream of pedestrians, many of them tourists, wave at and photograph their Hibernian counterparts, who appear slightly laggy and pixelated but not so much that they can’t play rock-paper-scissors or etch their phone number into the air. (I guess the newly acquainted can connect over WhatsApp?)

I also find thirty-four-year-old Lithuanian angel investor Benediktas Gylys, the man responsible for this spectacle, milling about. “I’m here to make sure everything stays family friendly, but as an artist, I’m here to be a witness,” he tells me. “I’m not here to tell anyone what they should feel or what they should do. We are doing very human things and it reflects our current state of humanity.” As I’m talking with Gylys, I catch a Dubliner on the screen pointing at me, miming his heart pumping out of his chest, and I tug my dress hem lower.

Gylys dreamt up the Portal concept in 2016, after he had a “mystical experience” that steered him away from his lucrative career in tech (he built one of Lithuania’s biggest dating websites). That year also saw the election of Trump, Russian election interference, the Brexit vote—to Gylys, this was “global disconnection” on an unprecedented scale, and as someone who identifies his race as “human,” his politics as “freedom,” and his religion as “love,” he wouldn’t stand for it. In 2021, he installed the first two Portals, in Vilnius and Lublin, Poland. He now says it is his life’s mission to bring the project to every corner of the world. (On his wish list are Kyiv, Singapore, and a place so rural that the feed would mostly be of grazing cows.) So, when the controversy arose, he says, “part of me was worried that it might interfere with my dreams. At the same time, it was extremely interesting to see how humans are trying to gain value, gain attention, gain clicks, shift the narrative. We are all writing the story of the Portal and it’s still being written.”

He describes the Portals as sculptures, but the presence of one in New York is thanks to a confluence of unartistic factors. Jim Simons, the hedge fund manager ranked the fifty-first richest person in the world, took notice of the Vilnius Portal. The Simons Foundation reached out with interest, connecting Gylys’s team with the Flatiron NoMad Partnership, the entity responsible for the yellow-tabled plaza that the suits use as an Eataly cafeteria outpost. The Irish Foreign Ministry caught wind of the scheme and proposed Dublin be the partner city. “The chemistry was there, but it took us a long time to deliver,” Gylys says. “Hopefully [the Portals] will stay here forever.” (The NYC–Dublin Portals are scheduled to be on view through the fall.)

Speaking to the New York Times, the president of the Flatiron NoMad Partnership divulged that the Simons Foundation paid “a few hundred thousand dollars” to have the New York Portal fabricated. (Simons died two days after the installation opened, at age eighty-six.) As with so much public art, the motivations for the Portal are opaque. Is it a tourism campaign, a corporate research initiative, a plutocrat’s vanity project? It’s a natural impulse to push the limits of the social contract, to find the cracks in civility (see Rule 34 of the Internet). But bare arses and cocaine vials aren’t part of the polite image that cities with multibillion-dollar tourism industries want to project. Portals.org even proposed AI capabilities that would censor inappropriate stunts, though that hasn’t made it into the software update yet. If it did, when a Dubliner lifts up a keffiyeh as a symbol of a free Palestine, would the feed blur them out? Who determines the bounds of “family friendly” behavior?

At 2:56 p.m., a man starts filming a woman as she slowly applies lip gloss while facing the Portal. She recaps the tube, then blows a kiss. They do it again, and again. They’re filming an ad for e.l.f. Cosmetics. Just before she’s about to do another kiss, a gesture someone on the other side is vociferously reciprocating, the clock strikes three and the screen goes dark: “Portal is asleep—back up soon.”