Styled as the kind of ‘sufficiently advanced technology’ that’s ‘indistinguishable from magic’ which Science Fiction and Fantasy has rehearsed for decades,[1] the Dublin/New York Portal—an interactive public video installation—represents a sincere artistic effort to flatten the curvature of spacetime by bringing together cities geographically distant and temporally out of synch, while, in the process, encouraging people to ‘rethink the meaning of unity’.[2] A freestanding 3.4 meter circular screen livestreaming images across the world, this ‘technology art sculpture’[3] is one of several envisioned by Lithuanian artist Benediktas Gylys (with the object itself designed by engineers at the Creativity and Innovation Centre at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University).[4] The Dublin Portal on the city’s North Earl Street was established with the collaboration of Dublin City Council in May 2024. Its corresponding screen was initially placed on the Flatiron South Public Plaza at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23rd Street in New York City (though it has now been moved to Philadelphia). Yet the Portal’s name, though evocative, is misleading. This may seem a petty, even pedantic observation (shout-out to fellow academics!), but it is a worthy consideration insofar as, had it been framed or discussed differently from the outset, many of the issues which arose in Dublin could have been more readily predicted. Because, despite its name, the Portal does not allow us to physically transition from ‘familiar surroundings’ into ‘an unknown place’ (à la television’s Stargate, which it superficially resembles).[5] Indeed, in the case of the Dublin Portal, the on-street participant is firmly enmeshed in their mundane reality and instead of the movements of ‘entry, transition, and exploration’, the installation relies instead on ‘the illusion of presence’ generated by a real-time video link.[6] It thus teases us with the possibility of stepping through but in fact denies us the satisfaction of the threshold moment; we can walk right up to it, but we can never cross its event horizon. Or at least we could walk up to it until bad behaviour put an end to that, and so we are doubly denied. Triply denied, even, insofar as what the Portal does offer is an alluring mirage, mere echoes of real people manifesting without corporality like so many ghosts of the Gothic tradition.
So, if it is not a portal, what is it? Certainly columnist Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times was on to something when he identified the sense of ‘magical smoothing of time’ and ‘frictionless fusion of spaces’ as the Portal’s key characteristics.[7] Such an appeal to the language and imagery of speculative fiction unlocks a useful critical apparatus for interpreting this project. Indeed, in applying these resources we can see that the Dublin Portal can be identified as, to use the terminology of Farah Mendlesohn in Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008), the physical manifestation of an intrusion fantasy.[8] The Dublin Portal in fact fits Mendlesohn’s description quite neatly:
The trajectory of the intrusion fantasy is straightforward: the world is ruptured by the intrusion, which disrupts normality and has to be negotiated with or defeated, sent back whence it came, or controlled.[9]
It is, of course, unconventional to apply a rhetorical or even poetic analysis to a physical object ‘hosted in the primary world’ (meaning, in this case, our reality), however there are grounds to do so in how Gylys’s circular installation is clearly informed by speculative fiction and deliberately appeals to its terminology and imagery.[10] It permits a slice of asynchronous space and time to impinge upon everyday life in a manner which mimics aspects of not just the Stargate, but also Galadriel’s mirror in The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek’s Guardian of Forever—which, not for nothing, also had a connection to New York City—as well as the portals of Doctor Strange, and many, many others. Second, to deploy Mendlesohn’s rhetorical analysis in discussion of a physical object is to embrace her own assertion that a critical study should ‘open up new lines of inquiry’ and even ‘lay down new challenges’.[11] This is especially true given how the sense of rupture, disruption, negotiation, and control typical of intrusion fantasies are all present in an account of events in Dublin. Finally, though the Dublin Portal is not a narrative, it is consciously offered as a medium for narrative, and, somewhat fulfilling Mendlesohn’s observation that intrusion tales tend to be club stories (those being ‘tales told within an enabling frame-story to a group of companions in a sheltered venue’), we can note how the Portal was portrayed as having a social and communicative significance.[12] Gylys, through his non-profit foundation, constructed a narrative around the project by which he convinced partner organisations, such as Dublin City Council, of the merits of the portal installations. Indeed, this careful cultivation of the Portal as a vehicle for narrative (even entertainment) helped the project avoid the contested reception of some other public art installations in Ireland (particularly those involving technological apparatus; the river Liffey’s ill-fated Millennium Clock, 1996, is the obvious example).[13] As such, the Portal makes manifest a series of stories, on the one hand the story of contemporary visitors interacting with each other across the screens/world and, on the other, the longstanding connection between two distant locations (Ireland and New York, the latter historically a kind of Fantasyland for the Irish working class or even, to borrow another of Mendlesohn’s categorisations, an immersive fantasy of sorts for them, but that is a topic for another day).
Viewed in this light, it is clear how the Portal ruptures the epistemological mesh in which the day-to-day lives of Dubliners are embedded via an intrusion-style sense of ‘two world-layers interacting’ (with the ripples of this percolating like interference waves across the country and beyond through media coverage).[14] The appearance of New York on a Dublin street appears to break physical laws of space and time as a precursor to breaking the accepted norms of common decency—the poor behaviour of some people before the Portal—which in turn upset the ‘moral universe’ on which Gylys’s fantasy of connection is predicated.[15] In the process, it makes strange what Mendlesohn calls ‘the intimacy of the relationship between people and their surroundings’.[16] We must literally negotiate the material presence of this large object on the street by walking around it but, more than that, we must cognitively negotiate its presence by thinking around it. We must account for its disquieting attempt to destabilise the “now” by linking, if only virtually, two different time zones—Dublin by night, New York by day—both of which have an equal claim to the primacy of the present moment. We must parse the unexpected visual dissonance—a yellow taxicab on a Dublin street, for instance—which wrongfoots our brain’s ability to define North Earl Street as a single physical location. We must reconcile how the installation’s position on a public throughfare grants it a communal quality yet also allows it to casually violate the privacy of the passing individual who may not wish to be seen on a screen by someone five thousand kilometres away, like Samwise Gamgee leaning over Galadriel’s mirror, seeking ‘a glimpse of what’s going on at home’.[17] For, as well meaning as it may be, this intrusion is a carrier wave for eyes, for voyeurs, and for the judgement of others (always a particularly disruptive occurrence in Ireland). It is, in some ways, the ultimate twitching curtain.
More pointedly, of course, an intrusion in speculative fiction is usually ‘the bringer of chaos’, and this too is true of the Dublin Portal. Indeed, this is where our identification of the installation with Mendlesohn’s description becomes most pronounced.[18] Or, to borrow the variously attributed genre adage, this is where we realise that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not just the automobile but the traffic jam. In this case, the Dublin Portal quickly became ‘a magnet not just for passersby but for exhibitionists. Flesh has been bared. Drugs have been performatively consumed. Provocative images have been held up for display. As a result, the portal [was] temporarily closed’.[19] The human element thus problematised O’Toole’s ‘frictionless fusion of spaces’ in headline-grabbing fashion as the transformative power of many a charmed circle to make us all into performers exerted itself in edge cases which nonetheless dominated the discourse.[20] During its first weeks, the Portal took on—in the broadest understanding of these terms—the ‘sense of threat, of waiting’ which Mendlesohn identifies with intrusion narratives; it enabled bad behaviour which became, with a beautiful sense of irony, symbolic of exactly the stereotypical Irish inability to conduct ourselves which the installation’s openhanded gesture towards global interconnectedness sought to reject.[21] The ringlike structure of the Portal simultaneously offered ‘a sense of a protected space, one that cannot be ruptured, and a sense that such a rupture is imminent’.[22] It created the impression of a gap in spatial and civil reality, a vacuum into which the people seen through screen seem to withdraw from us into two-dimensional representations. They are a mystery (yes, even if they are a friend or family member whom we have arranged to “meet” through the video link). They are unreal, an uncanny personification of absence, indeed of lifelessness, which many sought to combat in uninhibited fashion.
Videos circulating online included clips of a man “mooning” and others apparently pretending to take drugs. A caller to [Irish national broadcaster] RTÉ told of a woman suspected of being under the influence of alcohol being led away by Gardaí [the Irish police] after dancing provocatively against the portal screen.[23]
In this way the initial delight surrounding the Portal’s presence soon became concern. Concern quickly became fear. And, to paraphrase an observation by the great Roz Kaveney, ‘intimacy of seduction’ became ‘intimacy of disgust’.[24] The latent potential for bad behaviour soon became ever present at the Portal site, such as when The Irish Times attended it to find that ‘a group of twentysomethings were taking turns to post pornographic images up to the camera lens and laughing to themselves [but] there was no garda in sight’.[25] In intrusion fashion, the sensation that something just offscreen could burst into sight at any time began to define the experience of the Portal. In the worst instances, ‘some people on the Irish side have thrown eggs, flashed body parts and displayed images of swastikas and the twin towers burning on 9/11’, promoting one New York tabloid to melodramatically declare it a ‘portal to hell’ (though, to be fair, body parts were infamously flashed from both sides of the connection).[26]
Such events—and the resulting press coverage—rapidly prompted both practical and symbolic efforts to negotiate with and control the intrusion. The solution of the authorities was, in fact, hilariously on the nose for how Mendlesohn describes intrusion fantasies as ‘structured around punishment and the danger of transgression’.[27] With the nonconsensual and inappropriately public display of body parts a particular issue, what was instigated was an almost Gothic style ‘punishment for sexual activity’.[28] This fix—which involved blurring the Portal screen once someone gets too close to the event horizon—ironically inverts the usual relationship between sight and distance; instead of proximity bringing clarity it now brings obfuscation. An Icarian visitor who peers too closely into the aperture now has the image hidden from them, and, again, it is remarkable how precisely Mendlesohn anticipates this appearance of latency: ‘the withholding, not of information, but of visuals or events’.[29] Such suppression represents a response to the unsettling concern of the Powers That Be that there is ‘always something lurking’.[30] Thus the imposition of a liminal space in front of the Portal—both by blurring algorithms in Dublin and by physical barriers on the New York side—places it further out of reach even as members of the public are steered away from the event horizon by literal gatekeepers ‘tasked with minding the portal to deter troublemakers and manage over-enthusiastic onlookers’ by utilising a phone app that ‘allows them to turn the portal on and off whenever they need’[31] (or, as Galadriel warned, ‘Do not touch the water!’[32]). What all of this does, however, is emphasise the manner by which the Portal ‘only transmits images’ and not sound.[33] Thus there is initially one crucial element of Mendlesohn’s intrusion definition which appears missing from the Portal experience. That is aurality, the manner by which an intrusion ‘creates response directly through the sound of the world, the sound of horror, of fear, or of surprise’.[34] Two points are, however, worth considering. First, silence is still an aural experience, and an often unsettling one at that. Insubstantial figures moving without sound and seeming to gesticulate in an obscure manner have, after all, long been a reliable ghost story trope. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Mendlesohn’s aurality can be readily transcribed onto the cacophony of media responses to the bad behaviour which the Portal engendered.[35] Like characters in a story, many in the media reacted in escalating mock horror to events on the edge of the intrusion: ‘Dubliners mortified by antics at capital’s transatlantic portal’, reported one article.[36] ‘Has the city “disgraced ourselves again”’ asked another.[37] Or, in the words of one Portal attendant quoted online, ‘it’s been a lot of ass’.[38]
The resultant pearl-clutching puts one in mind of another infamous reaction to an intrusion narrative in Dublin, the disorder which accompanied the 1907 opening performance of JM Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World (the play portrays a small west of Ireland village disrupted by the arrival of a stranger who fast becomes a kind of romanticised folk hero after claiming to have murdered his seemingly tyrannical father; the story quickly proceeds through the familiar pattern of rupture, disruption, negotiation, and control). This classic intrusion narrative resulted, like the Dublin Portal, in real-world public disquiet when a series of riots were instigated by those who deemed the play—which is amazing, you should see it—to be offensive to public morals, particularly in its mention of women’s undergarments (the resulting disarray in the theatre caused portions of the play to be acted out in dumb show, an eerie anticipation of the silent movements of the figures on the Dublin Portal screen). Yet while the city’s riotous response to art has evolved into op-eds and talk-show discussions over the past hundred years, a curious similarity can nonetheless be observed: an intrusion has permitted us to see not a distant land—be that rural Mayo or glimmering Manhattan—but instead has offered up a vantage on ourselves (and our undergarments… or lack thereof) as Dubliners saw their fellow citizens seize an opportunity to ape the disruptive bravado of the Playboy’s protagonist. Thus intrusion theory offers a measure of context for responses to the instances of acting out which occurred, and there we find the true benefit of reframing the Dublin Portal as the Dublin Intrusion. Like The Playboy of the Western World did for Ireland more generally, the installation offers a ‘mirror on a city’s soul’.[39] It does not show New York to Dublin so much as it shows Dublin to itself; what it allows for is critical introspection on the contradictions of contemporary Irish identity, a self-identifying progressive society still struggling with a historically conservative mentality and with more than a share of postcolonial angst. Here the issue of aurality acquires renewed relevance. The decision by Gylys for the Portal installations to transmit visuals from distant locations but not sound ensures that we cannot appeal to the other. It instead forces us—as good art always does—into dialogue with ourselves. Forces us, in fact, to confront ourselves.
Thus escalating in intensity in accordance with Mendlesohn’s description of the form, the intrusion made its presence felt far beyond North Earl Street as it moved ‘into the lives of very ordinary people’.[40] Families found themselves eating breakfast alongside the intrusion as its image saturated newspaper pages and television screens. People driving home from work found themselves carsharing with the intrusion as radio shows debated the antics it had inspired. Dubliners and regular visitors to the capital found themselves straying from their usual routes to see the intrusion with their own eyes. It has even begun to impinge upon contemporary fiction, making an appearance as a ‘very Star Trek-y’ object that ‘might have to be shut down on account of the carry on’ in a recent story by Mary O’Donnell.[41] Yet, in seeking to exorcise this intrusion’s more troublesome aspects from our public and private spaces, in seeking to control it with blurring algorithms and attendants, what exactly are we attempting to do? Are we seeking to preserve public decency (a slippery slope, though it should be noted that while there are consensual and age-appropriate spaces for some of the activities which occurred, such as bared bodies, a city centre street is not one of them)? Are we looking to safeguard transatlantic relations (‘it may be inflicting damage upon the general relations and public perceptions between the people of New York, the US, and the people of Dublin’, claimed one complainant)?[42] Perhaps we are attempting to maintain an idea of ourselves which has, Synge-style, been challenged more than we are comfortable with (‘What are people going to think of us?’ bemoans one character in O’Donnell’s story)?[43] All of these are, to one extent or another, part of our wider negotiation with the intrusion and with Ireland’s place in the globalised world which it makes visible, one that transcends technical adjustments or the hiring of onsite staff. Yet any such self-reflection on our motivation may benefit from also pondering ‘the naïveté’ upon which Mendlesohn sees intrusion narratives depending.[44] Though in this case, it is difficult to know who has been the most naïve. Perhaps it is the ‘idealistic’ artists and engineers attempting to ‘counter polarising ideas and to communicate that the only way for us to continue our journey on this beautiful spaceship called Earth is together’.[45] Perhaps it is Dublin City Council, who seem to have initially underestimated the potential for lewd acts and then scrambled to respond to bad press and bad behaviour. Or, just maybe, it is academics attempting to decouple rhetorical analysis from text in an effort to better understand aspects of the wider world. Next up, perhaps, the Dublin Port Tunnel as Portal Quest?
Val Nolan is a Research Fellow at Aberystwyth University. He is co-author of the SFFH writing-guide series Spec-Fic for Newbies (Luna Press, 2023, 2024) and author of the monograph Neil Jordan: Works for the Page (Cork University Press, 2022). His academic articles have appeared in Science Fiction Studies, Irish University Review, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Irish Studies Review, Foundation, Symplokē, and elsewhere. His own fiction has been published in Year’s Best Science Fiction, Best of British Science Fiction, Interzone, the ‘Futures’ page of Nature, and Andromeda Spaceways, among other venues. He writes the regular ‘Folded Spaces’ column for Interzone exploring the history of Science Fiction criticism.
Notes
[1] Clarke, Arthur C. Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography. London: Gollancz, 1989. This “law” was first mentioned in the revised edition of Clarke’s Profiles of the Future, 1982.
[2] Lyons, Kim. Vilnius, ‘Lithuania built a “portal” to another city to help keep people connected’, The Verge, 30 May 2021 <https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/30/22460964/vilnius-lithuania-portal-poland-connection-pandemic> accessed 20 January 2025.
[3] Portals Organisation. <https://www.portals.org/> Accessed 21 January 2025.
[4] Lyons.
[5] Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, p. 1.
[6] Mendlesohn, p. 2, 1.
[7] Fintan O’Toole, ‘Dublin portal reminds us that our capital has an uneasy edge of wildness’, The Irish Times, 18 May 2024, <https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/people/2024/05/18/fintan-otoole-dublin-portal-reminds-us-that-our-capital-has-an-uneasy-edge-of-wildness/> accessed 18 May 2024.
[8] Mendlesohn, p. 114.
[9] Mendlesohn, p. 115.
[10] Mendlesohn, p. 114.
[11] Mendlesohn, p. 246.
[12] Clute, John. ‘Club Story’. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Eds. John Clute and David Langford. Ansible Editions, 29 July 2024 <sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/club_story> accessed 5 February 2025.
[13] See this article for a summary of what happened with the Millennium Clock: Egan, Rory. ‘The Millennium Clock’. Irish Independent, 2 April 2006 <https://www.independent.ie/news/the-millennium-clock/26410316.html> accessed 6 February 2025.
[14] Mendlesohn, p. 120.
[15] Mendlesohn, p. 5.
[16] Mendlesohn, p. 129.
[17] Tolkien, JRR. The Lord of the Rings (50th Aniversery Edition), p 362.
[18] Mendlesohn, p. xxi.
[19] Editorial, ‘The Irish Times view on the Dublin Portal: mirror on a city’s soul’, The Irish Times, 16 May 2024 <https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorials/2024/05/16/the-irish-times-view-on-the-dublin-portal-mirror-on-a-citys-soul/> accessed 17 May 2024.
[20] O’Toole.
[21] Mendlesohn, p. 130.
[22] Mendlesohn, p. 117.
[23] Sharkey, Kevin, and McBride, Mike. A “small minority” ruining Dublin Portal experience’, BBC News, 14 May 2024 <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd1882x5xggo> accessed 23 January 2025.
[24] Mendlesohn, p. 144. Mendlesohn attributes the observation to a phone conversation with Kaveney.
[25] McGreevy, Ronan. ‘What now for the Dublin Portal? Has the city “disgraced ourselves again” over the art installation?’ The Irish Times, 18 May 2024 <https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dublin/2024/05/18/what-now-for-the-dublin-portal-has-the-city-disgraced-ourselves-again-over-the-art-installation/> accessed 24 January 2025.
[26] Carroll, Rory. The Guardian. ‘Dublin video portal to New York shuts temporarily due to unruly behaviour’, 14 May 2024 <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/may/14/dublin-video-portal-to-new-york-shuts-temporarily-due-to-unruly-behaviour> accessed 15 December 2024.
[27] Mendlesohn, p. 5.
[28] Mendlesohn, p. 125
[29] Mendlesohn, p. 116.
[30] Mendlesohn, p. 116.
[31] Maguire, Mairead. ‘”It’s been a lot of ass”: Reflections on 100 days of the Dublin-New York portal’, The Journal, 9 August 2024 <https://www.thejournal.ie/portal-dublin-new-york-dublin-city-council-6457979-Aug2024/> accessed 24 January 2025
[32] Tolkien, p. 362.
[33] Ikeda, Emilie, and Fitzgerald, Meagan. ‘Tears, laughs and bare butts beamed through portal linking Dublin and New York’. NBC News, 16 May 2024 <https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/the-portal-rcna152199> accessed 9 January 2025.
[34] Mendlesohn, p. 121.
[35] Sharkey and McBride.
[36] Gallagher, Fiachra. ‘”Move it to the South Side”: Dubliners mortified by antics at capital’s transatlantic portal’, The Irish Times, 25 July 2024 <https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2024/07/25/dubliners-mortified-by-antics-at-capitals-transatlantic-portal/> accessed 25 January 2025.
[37] McGreevy.
[38] Maguire.
[39] Editorial, The Irish Times, 16 May 2024.
[40] Mendlesohn, p. 141.
[41] O’Donnell, Mary. ‘Edna’, in Walking Ghosts (Dublin: Mercier, 2025), pp.139-143 (p.140).
[42] Gallagher.
[42] O’Donnell, p.140.
[43] Mendlesohn, p. 115.
[44] O’Toole.