The live video portal linking Dublin, Ireland, to New York, New York, has reopened after unruly behavior got the modern art sculpture temporarily shut down.
The two installations making up the Portal – created by the Lithuanian artist Benediktas Gylys – host a 24/7 live stream in both cities so people can see and interact with each other. One installation is located in the Flatiron district of New York, and the other is on Dublin’s popular O’Connell Street.
Organizers of the exhibit have implemented a “proximity-based solution” with additional fencing and spacing decals to prevent the art sculpture from being stepped on. And if someone tries to obstruct the camera, the live stream will automatically become blurred for people on both sides of the Atlantic.
The city of Dublin took additional precautions and limited the hours of the Portal to be used only between the hours of 11am and 9pm in Dublin and 6am and 4pm in the Big Apple.
In New York, the Portal will have on-site security during all hours of operation.
“In less than a week of operation, the Portal has attracted tens of thousands of visitors and garnered nearly two billion online impressions. The overwhelming majority of people who have visited the Portal sculptures have experienced the sense of joy and connectedness that these works of public art invite people to have,” the Dublin city council, the Flatiron NoMad Partnership, and Portals.org said in a joint statement.
Unveiled earlier in May, the visitors attracted to the installations in both cities were seen smiling and waving with their American and Irish counterparts.
The Portal is meant to be a symbol of “global interconnectedness”, Gylys said.
But a minority of visitors took advantage of the opportunity to introduce chaos at the Portal.
After too many instances of public indecency, drug use and rude behavior, organizers and the Dublin city council decided to shut the Portal down on 14 May. Some women in the US flashed their breasts to onlookers in Ireland. A man revealed his rear end to people watching on the other side. Another threw eggs at the portal. Others pretended to snort cocaine.
One New Yorker shared a photo of a potato at the Portal, an apparent reference to the Great Famine that Ireland endured between 1845 and 1852. Meanwhile, one visitor in Dublin showed a photo of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City.
“We were thinking about some potential incidences, and took some approaches, but now we see they were not enough,” Gylys, 37, told the Guardian after the Portal’s temporary shutdown.
Gylys said he intended for the Portal to be family-friendly.
A similar portal was opened in 2021 linking Lithuania and Poland.