A ‘Portal’ to the rest of the world
Residents can speak with holograms of foreign people
STAMFORD —A trip to the other side of the world is now as short as a drive to Latham Park.
A new interactive audiovisual installation called Portal has just opened at the downtown park, allowing residents and passersby to have an impromptu conversation with someone in a different country, continent, or hemisphere.
For most of the people who showed up to the soft opening on Wednesday, Portal was a brandnew experience. But not for Kristen Erickson, a teacher at Greenwich Academy.
She was the curator of a Portal at the school back in 2016 and is a believer in the installation’s power.
“It changed the way I saw the world,” she said.
From the outside, Portal looks
like a gold cargo container. Inside is a minimalist setup, comprised of a wallsized screen on one end of the container, a light to illuminate people standing inside, a camera, and walls covered from top to bottom with dark gray carpeting, to block out light and sounds.
The concept for Portal is simple. It allows for realtime interactions between people from different parts of the world by projecting a full-body image of the person or people on the other end, creating the illusion that you are standing faceto-face with someone else in the same room.
The Portal launches officially Thursday, at 10 a.m., with a connection with San Juan, Puerto Rico, and a 12 p.m. connection with Nigeria.
On Wednesday’s soft launch, the Portal had a morning connection with Stockholm, Sweden, and another one in the afternoon with Mexico City.
Ben Gordon, of Shared Studios, which is the company behind Portal, said the group will create programming throughout the year with the Stamford Public School system and other community partners.
Annette Einhorn, director of events and marketing for the Stamford Downtown Special Services District (DSSD), said there would be different events and activities planned for the portal, such as a hack-a-thon programming event, a beer tasting with a Portal in Berlin, as well as co-dinners, in which two groups in two different portals virtually share a dinner table.
“The possibilities are endless,” she said.
Representatives from the Ferguson Library, Avon Theatre, Palace Theatre, Stamford Hospital, and the Stamford Police Department were in attendance on Wednesday to discuss possible partnerships.
Sandy Goldstein, president of DSSD, which brought Portal to Stamford, said the installation is yet another effort to get more people to the city’s downtown area.
“It is just another method of activating the downtown, bringing people here, bringing kids here,” she said. “We look at this Portal as an amazing opportunity to expand our geographic and intellectual and emotional horizons.”
Ciela Herce, the curator of the Portal in Mexico City, talked to visitors of the Stamford Portal through the interactive installation Wednesday afternoon. She was inside a Portal currently located in Chapultepec Park.
In one conversation, she told visitors that up to 400 people have come to the Mexico City Portal on a weekend day.
The Stamford Portal will connect to the entire Portals network, of roughly 42 locations, including sites in Afghanistan, Honduras, Iraq, Jordan, Germany, Rwanda, and Mexico.
The Stamford location of the installation is made possible by a grant of $75,000 from CTNext and matching funds from DSSD.
The first Stamford Portal location is at Latham Park, but the installation will move to Columbus Park, Mill River Park, UConn Stamford and Harbor Point over the next 12 months. The exact dates will be announced later.
Lynne Colatrella, senior vice president of marketing and events for DSSD, was the person who pushed for the Portal to come to Stamford.
After hearing about the technology, she visited the Shared Studios office in Brooklyn and immediately fell in love with the product.
“I’m a world traveler,” Colatrella said. “This, if you’re not on an airplane going anywhere, is the next best thing.”
The intimate nature of Portal is what immediately connected with Erickson, who said she vividly remembers her first time stepping into a Portal in an art gallery in New York City.
During that first experience, she met two men in Afghanistan. They talked about their impressions of each others’ country. Erickson remembered the men saying they were shocked by the number of school shootings in America, and that they didn’t think all Americans were violent.
“I feel like it breaks down boundaries, real and metaphorical,” she said. “What happens when you’re in the Portal is that distance doesn’t exist anymore.”
When she was the curator of the Greenwich Portal, Erickson used the tool as a teaching device for her students.
“I have not found anything, that in kids, will promote or create such a genuine feeling of empathy,” she said.