Photos by Glenn Asakawa (Jour'86).
An external view of the portal.
Last April, a golden shipping container appeared on the brick plaza by Folsom Stadium. For a month, students, professors and community members streamed in鈥攕ome for 15 minutes, others for a class鈥攖o face a life-size, technology-enabled screen and talk with strangers on the other side of the world.
More than 500 people from CU 麻豆影院 and the community struck up conversations with people in similar high-tech shipping containers鈥攐r portals鈥攊n Erbil, Iraq; Mexico City, Mexico; Kigali, Rwanda; the Gaza Strip; Herat, Afghanistan; and other locations.
Nicoli Bowley (Comm鈥�17), participated in a two-hour talk with three college students in Kigali who formed MyStory, a social organization that uses stories to inspire, connect and enable young people. 鈥淎lthough we come from such different backgrounds, they鈥檙e 20-year-olds just like us. It was kind of like talking to friends across the world,鈥� says Bowley, who initially wondered what they would talk about for two hours. 鈥淚t flew by.鈥�
, a CMCI center, sponsored the project as a way to promote dialogue and connect with communities around the world.
Sara Cooley, a journalism major, talked with three students in a refugee camp in Erbil as part of Assistant Professor Leah Sprain鈥檚 communication class, Discourse, Culture and Identities. She appreciated a fuller glimpse of the lives of people in the refugee camps and found it to be 鈥渂roader than a lot of what is covered in the news.鈥�
Managed by Shared Studios, the portal installations were created in 2014 by artist Amar Bakshi, whose work focuses on how to integrate technology into environments across distance.
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Dean Lori Bergen and a group of students participate in a conversation with community members in Mexico City.