Middle fingers, bare bottoms and drug-taking are among the sights bystanders enjoyed on the twin screens linking people across the Atlantic.
An art project linking Manhattan and Dublin via livestreaming devices installed in public places has gone exactly how you would expect it to if you know the slightest thing about people.
Twin sculptures fitted with cameras and a large screen were fitted in each city last week with the wholesome aim of building a ‘bridge to a united planet’.
The installations enabled people to see what was happening in the other city 24 hours a day on a huge circular screen resembling a portal.
Organisers did not include audio feeds – officially to avoid ‘taking away from the essential experience’ of ‘connecting’ with others using body language.
But those limitations only fuelled mick-takers to concoct more ingenious ways to take the mick.
There have been sincere attempts to share culture and warmth: one Irish woman was filmed expertly river-dancing at the screen while New Yorkers clapped and earnestly attempted to emulate her.
Other images show employees from a local Manhattan company stood in front of the portal holding purposely-made signs saying ‘we love Dublin’ and ‘hello from New York’.
Of course, social media was soon awash with clips of people baring their buttocks at the screen, twerking, and making various lewd gestures.
One woman was filmed being dragged away by Garda law enforcement officers after grinding her backside against the screen.
A bystander said she was ‘very drunk’ and had been going at it for ‘about 20 minutes’ before the officers stepped in.
In another man, a man in Dublin can be seen brazenly sniffing what appears to be a bump of white powder, which he’d scooped out of a small plastic pouch onto a key, before looking up at the camera with a spirited look on his face.
There appears to have been considerably more activity, so to speak, on the Irish side – perhaps to be expected for a nation which so reveres ‘the craic’.
There were fewer images of stunts by New Yorkers, and most appeared to involve holding up a middle-finger.
Some of the pranksters clearly went too far, with one Dubliner holding up a swastika to the screen in one incident.
In one clip, another man holds his phone screen close to the camera with the message ‘RIP Pop Smoke’ in honour of the Brooklyn-born rapper shot dead in 2020.
Moments after he pulls away his phone, another phone is held up with an enlarged photo showing the second plane hijacked by Al Qaeda militants hurtling towards 2 World Trade Center while the other tower burned from the first strike on September 11, 2001.
Arguably the only surprising development is that it took five entire days for the trolling to reach ban-worthy levels.
On Monday morning, Dublin time, the screen was off and surrounded by at least five Gardaí.
The displays were supposed to operate until autumn, though it was not immediately clear whether they’ve been permanently deactivated or could come back online.
The organisers, The Portal, previously set up similar devices linking Vilnius in Lithuania and Lublin in Poland in 2021.
Benediktas Gylys, a Lithuanian artist who founded The Portal, previously said: ‘Portals are an invitation to meet people above borders and differences and to experience our world as it really is – united and one.’
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