“Portals are an invitation to meet people above borders and differences and to experience our world as it really is – united and one,” said Benediktas Gylys, the Lithuanian artist who conceived the installation, when the screens were unveiled to fanfare.
But just days into a run that was to have continued into the fall, the portals were shut down Monday night after videos spread on social media of people behaving badly – from an OnlyFans model in New York baring her breasts to Dubliners holding up swastikas and displaying images of New York’s Twin Towers burning on September 11.
Footage shared on social media also showed Dubliners mooning at and “grinding” against the portal, while others in view appeared to be drunk or taking drugs.
The screens, which only broadcast video with no audio, were back up Tuesday morning but were to be powered down again Tuesday evening, according to officials in New York and Dublin.
Michael Ryan, a spokesperson for the Dublin City Council, said exhibit organisers are looking into “possible technical solutions” to address the inappropriate behaviour. The displays are expected to return later in the week, he said.
“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,” Ryan wrote, declining to elaborate. “The Portals.org team is now investigating other options.”
Zac Roy, a spokesperson for the Flatiron NoMad Partnership, a local Manhattan business group, stressed the “overwhelming majority” of people interacting with the city’s portal have behaved appropriately.
Roy said there’s been around-the-clock security and barriers in place at the New York location since the exhibit launched.
Dublin and New York have a history of people-to-people ties, in large part because of high levels of emigration from Ireland throughout the 19th century, when it was ruled by Britain, as well as in the 1950s and 1980s.
Both Portal videos were to remain connected until autumn this year, while Dublin was to be linked in the meantime to portals in Brazil, Lithuania and Poland, the homelands of tens of thousands of recent immigrants to Ireland.
Additional reporting by dpa