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 兔子先生传媒文化作品 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.