The Portal Puffery

So let’s be honest: those shiny “mystical portals” people drooled over? Please. They were basically public FaceTime in a circular display. A glorified selfie backdrop in the middle of a city—no different than the giant bean in Chicago or whatever abstract chunk of steel your town council calls “public art.” All this hype about “cosmic doorways” or “mysterious artist statements” is just a dressed-up visual prop— and a disrespectful affront to the notion of real portals!

1. The Illusion of Unity—But Where’s the Substance?

The Portals—huge round livestream sculptures connecting cities like New York, Dublin, Vilnius, Lublin, and now Philadelphia—are marketed as “bridges to a united planet,” inviting us to transcend borders through body language and video screens. But let’s get real: slapping up screens and calling it “unifying humanity” is more flimsy PR than meaningful art. True art moves hearts and stirs the minds—not just broadcasting people waving or dancing for a fleeting novelty. Then he calls it a damn portal to boot. Yea, ok.

2. The Techie-Artist—A Little Too Slick

The "mastermind", Benediktas Gylys, describes a mystical 2016 experience that sparked this project. Yet the execution read more like a tech startup’s pitch than an artist’s opus—shipping containers, global livestream rotation every three minutes, rotating feeds between four cities. It's a performance in spectacle, not soul. Moreover, it damn sure aint transcending, you know, like an actual portal. So, was that really art, or was it an elaborate, glossy piece of tech theater mugging for TikTok?

3. When “Unfiltered” Gets Ugly Fast

The project may claim to be about shared humanity—but in practice, it became a dumpster fire of bad behavior. Adults flashing nudity, people projecting images of 9/11, using drugs—immediately after launch the Chicago-... oops! New York–Dublin Portal had to shut down due to rampant indecency. Big surprise. Their “solution”? Add fences, blur technology, limit hours—security theater at best. Unity or sanitation? More like turning a dumpster fire into a contained trash fire.

6. Real Portals May Be in Our Hands All Along

Here’s the kicker: most of the world’s population already holds in their hands a portal far more powerful than these oversized steel circles—the cell phone. A slab of glass and circuitry that collapses oceans, erases borders, and lets us peer into each other’s lives in real time. You don’t need to trek to Philadelphia or Dublin to wave through a metal frame when FaceTime, WhatsApp, or a dozen other apps have already made this “portal experience” as common as your morning scroll.

But here’s the irony—this is only the cusp. That cell phone is the primitive ancestor of what’s coming: the beginnings of technology that hints at future leaps—portal jumping, time-travel interfaces, or instantaneous presence across space. The everyday device we treat as disposable is actually the embryonic stage of true interdimensional connection. And compared to that staggering potential, these so-called “Portals” are little more than glorified tourist traps dressed up as high art.

In closing:

The Portals project is a flashy tech-powered dance meant to feel like "global unity." Yet, under the surface, it's a superficial stunt built on novelty, not depth. It solves nothing deeper than "how do we make cool livestream sculptures?"—and yeah, it sparked some chaos, not community.

https://www.portals.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_%28sculptures%29
https://www.portals.org/history
https://www.portals.org/news/portals-org-announces-the-relocation-of-the-viral-nyc-portal-to-philadelphias-love-park
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York%E2%80%93Dublin_Portal
https://www.businessinsider.com/portal-new-york-dublin-nyc-livestream-video-closed-reopen-2024-5
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/two-lads-one-bike-the-portals-view-of-dublin-is-deflating-cct07m3mn
https://www.wired.com/story/new-york-dublin-portal-reopening
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2024/10/23/the-new-york-dublin-portal-which-had-closed-for-inappropriate-behavior-relocates-to-philadelphia/
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-dublin-portal-reopens/
https://www.irishcentral.com/news/dublin-philadelphia-portal
https://www.thesun.ie/news/14055391/dublin-portal-new-york-shuts-new-location-major-city/
https://www.portals.org/news/famed-portal-sculptures-now-uniting-four-countries-with-rotating-livestream

4. Scale Over Substance

Promoters boast thousands of visitors—Flatiron foot traffic jumped nearly 47%, hundreds of thousands of views, “billions of impressions” But wow, you drew attention—does that make it good art? You can’t just duke it out for views and call it profound. Portal? WHERE, THOUGH?! Art deserves more than likes—it ought to challenge, to elevate, to resonate. Streaming bodies waving across 3,000 miles is gimmickry, not gravity.

5. Stunt or Sculpture?

Maybe this is just what experimental “works” look like in our tech-saturated era—but let's call it what it is: a stunt. It trades on novelty, spectacle, and media buzz. Art isn’t a moving screen that broadcasts cute interactions—it’s a mirror that reflects deeper truths. Indeed, if you believe—and I do—that art should inspire, provoke, transcend, then you must call out this tech-driven fluff masquerading as profundity. Portals are neat. Portals are clever. Portals go viral. But they’re not art that gets plucked away.