The portal between two cities mirrors many technological advances, as it encompasses a full range of human behaviour, from the uplifting to the inappropriate, and eventually to the mundane.
MALACHI O'DOHERTY reports
SCIENCE fiction loves the idea of a window or portal between two distant places.
And now there is a real one connecting Dublin and New York.
I'm not sure that SciFi anywhere predicted how people would use a facility like that but now we know.
They dance in time with people on the other side. They hold up messages and greetings and they flash bare flesh.
Within days of the portal coming live there were serious doubts being aired in the media about whether Dubliners in particular could be trusted to behave themselves more decorously in the full view of New Yorkers.
Not that some people on that side of the portal were any less inclined to flaunt uncovered curvy bits.
One Dubliner was caught on camera mooning, that is, baring his behind. He was whisked away by an officer of An Garda Síochána, even though his offence was against people outside the jurisdiction.
On the other side, a young woman lifted her top and bra and wriggled vigorously. She says she has since received death threats from people who lack a sense of humour.
Experience tells us that many big technological developments come with playful, fetishistic and morally dubious opportunities and the inevitable attendant outrage.
The invention of the video tape brought pornography and extreme violence into the home. Previously you would have had to visit a cinema club in a seedy part of town where the danger of being spotted by a neighbour or colleague might have deterred you from going.
The internet went even further and now it is estimated that almost a third of all online traffic is from pornography sites.
It’s nice to be able to sit at home and read The New Yorker or the Sydney Morning Herald from the comfort of your study but perhaps none of this would be possible if the expansion of the internet hadn’t been driven largely by the desire also to watch unlikely and athletic naked intimacies between professional performers.
The Portal in Dublin follows this same pattern of technological evolution.
First there is a great idea. We can have a window between New York and Dublin. People on either side can watch people on the other side going about their daily business.
But, naturally enough, there was also an instant appeal to the mischievous and the lewd.
So now the screens are to have AI filters that will blur inappropriately uncovered body parts.
Presumably the computer programmed to do that has to familiarise itself with diverse images of body parts which are hardly uniform throughout the population.
I think that it’s a pity it has come to this, not because I want to see people flashing on the street but because generally people don’t, and I would like to try an experiment in trusting people to learn to behave with strangers in foreign cities in much the same way they do in their home towns.
I would like to see the Portal evolve beyond novelty and I think it can.
The inventor of the Portal is Benediktas Gylys, and the Dublin/New York set up was his third after Lithuania and Poland. He is idealistic. He says the portals ‘invite people to meet above all labels, all narratives’.
Portal technology isn’t new.
In the early days of the internet some enterprising young women set up webcams in their bedrooms and allowed followers to pay to watch them live out their lives there.
Out of that same technology we got Skype and Zoom, online meeting, face to face conversations across continents.
I have been watching one webcam streaming from Philadelphia. It’s called Street Souls. The camera operator just walks the streets and broadcasts images without comment. We see the derelicts and the addicts with their bundles, huddled in doorways and looking after each other. The broken pavements and big shiny parked cars are the perfect representation of contrasting wealth and poverty, in a country that doesn’t look after its pavements let alone its people. What the webcam gives you, that the documentary doesn’t, is a feeling of sustained immersion in that ghastly place.
I don’t know that a portal there showing those people life under better conditions wouldn’t make them feel worse, if anything could.
I have a vision of the near future in which the portal will be much bigger and we will have them everywhere.
We could have screens the size of a gable wall on which we could watch life going by in New Delhi or San Francisco, wave to people there and see them wave back. Screen technology will continue to improve so that the images are as sharp and detailed as real life and indistinguishable from it.
We could have screens on the Belfast peace wall so that the people in the Protestant and Catholic communities, segregated from each other could get acquainted. At first some would wave flags make rude signs but they’d settle down.
One day the Peace Portal would be taken down and nobody would notice.
Then again, maybe we could just replace the current solid opaque walls with bullet proof glass which would do the job just as well.
