Portals: interactive video boxes connect strangers world over
Interactive art project is connecting Americans with people in Iran, Cuba and Afghanistan - breaking down psychic as well as physical barriers
Nick Meeker recently made a new Facebook friend. Her name is Mahsa Biglow, and she is a 25-year-old Iranian graduate student in photography at the University of Tehran. They met on the internet - but not in any of the usual ways.
Unlike most friendships formed online, theirs did not start with instant messaging or social media. Meeker met Biglow in a portal.
It is not quite a wardrobe to Narnia or Harry Potter's Platform 9¾ at King's Cross Station, and it certainly will not take you through outer space or back in time. But if you walk through Woodrow Wilson Plaza in Washington it is hard to miss. Spray-painted gold on the outside and equipped with Wi-fi-connected audiovisual technology on the inside, it is a used shipping container that has continued to bridge distances long past its expiration date.
"Please do not open this door unaccompanied," proclaim dark letters stamped on one corner of the box. Emblazoned on another, in partially faded text: "When you enter, you come face-to-face with a stranger abroad."
Several passers-by - mostly men and women in business suits heading to lunch - pause to gawk at the gold mass. A wide-eyed woman, ignoring the bold signage, pokes her head inside the entrance and asks: "What's in there?"
Meeker, a 30-year-old sports consultant from a Washington suburb, is standing in the container's pitch-black interior. He faces a wall displaying a full-body live video of Biglow, who is standing in a similar room in the Iranian capital.