We Were Always Going to Moon the Portal

Photo: Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock

The Portal opened last week near the Flatiron Building, a giant, eye-like sculpture embedded with a livestream connection to Dublin, Ireland. By the following Tuesday, it was kaput. At least temporarily. The reason? “Inappropriate behavior.” Who did it? Well, everyone. People flashed images of the Twin Towers, middle fingers, and, in the case of an OnlyFans model who had previously filmed herself licking a toilet seat, boobs.

This portal was created by Lithuanian artist Benediktas Gylys as an attempt at something like international diplomacy. “In a world of increasingly polarizing narratives, it is essential to remember that we are all together on this tiny, beautiful spaceship called Earth,” the Portals website explains. “Portals are an invitation to meet fellow humans above borders and prejudices and to experience our home — planet Earth — as it really is: united and one,” the site continues. But were the butts the thing uniting us all along?

Go back hundreds, if not thousands, of years and you’ll find plenty of outward-facing displays of public lewdness, from the graffiti near Hadrian’s Wall that, uh, resembles genitalia, to rumors of a woman’s many lovers in Pompeii. A glance at the city’s recent cultural history bears out the same impulses: In 2008, a similar project to the Dublin portal called the Telectroscope, this time connecting Brooklyn to London through a spyglass-looking feed, resulted in a lot of awkward waving between cities and people taking their shirts off. Or consider the slightly better-regulated Hole in Space that connected Los Angeles to New York in 1980, in which “one group in Los Angeles arrived on its second evening with a large image of Ronald Reagan, to which a New Yorker crassly responded by turning around and sticking his behind in the air, exclaiming that president is the ‘biggest charade [he’s] seen all year.’” The possibility of being seen in these particular ways seems to attract us to trouble-making. You can’t go past the ABC News desk by Lincoln Center without someone sticking their tongue out or flipping the bird. When the High Line first opened, the windows of the Standard Hotel became a venue for public sex, a tacit agreement, maybe, between watchers and the watched.

While no one is defending the swastikas or anything that has wound up devolving into actual hate speech at the installation, there is a shared, perverse camaraderie in witnessing this type of behavior. When Gylys’s website announces his portals exist to show that we “all share more than what separates us,” maybe what we share isn’t, like, love and peace and kindness and friendship across the oceans — or at least not just those things — but also the urge to do something very stupid. A year ago, Gylys installed a portal that connected his hometown of Vilnius and Lublin, Poland. The Reddit comments about those portals feel sweet and familiar: “I was in Vilnius with my two friends. There was just one person on the other side waving … so we gave them the finger.”

Organizers have said they intend to get the portal back up and running by this weekend. The Dublin City Council said in a statement that it’d be implementing some technical solutions to solve bad behavior, and the Flatiron partner promised it would install software updates. (To do what, exactly — make an AI that prevents people from flipping the bird, transforming the middle digit into a finger heart?) But there’s something at least a little charming about this collective urge toward obscenity. The portal worked, in a way. The middle finger proves itself as cross-cultural. How beautiful is that?