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Portals NYC
Portals.org came to me because what they were trying to do was genuinely hard. The concept was already there: a permanent 24/7 live video portal connecting New York City's Flatiron South Public Plaza with Dublin's O'Connell Street. Two cities, one window, open all the time, no ticket, no app, just walk up and meet someone on the other side of an ocean. The vision was clear. The systems to make it real were not.
I was brought in to handle systems procurement, installation, and user experience through Smilesoft. I assembled and led the team that built and installed the infrastructure, working alongside fabricator Young Buk. The challenge was specific and unforgiving: build a system reliable enough to run continuously, outdoors, in two cities simultaneously, across a transatlantic connection, with no one managing it moment to moment. The technology had to be completely invisible because the entire experience depends on forgetting it exists. The moment you feel the infrastructure, the portal stops being a window and starts being a screen. Those are completely different things.
This is work I had been preparing for without knowing it. #LIVINGROOMTODAY proved in 2015 that real-time connection across countries could feel genuinely human if the system underneath it was designed with enough care. Brooklyn Mirage proved that the same principle could hold under the pressure of tens of thousands of people. Portals was the version that lives permanently in public space, with no closing time and no audience — just whoever happens to walk by.
Over 2 billion interactions since launch in May 2024. This same portal is still open, moving around the country connecting audiences. Now four plus cities, still connecting.