Until May 15, students will be able to video call activists, artists, professionals, students and teachers across the world from a “portal” located in Kemeny Courtyard.
The Dialogue Project erected these storage containers and will host 16 programmed video call sessions to Mexico, Iraq and South Africa, among others, according to executive director of Dialogue Initiatives Kristi Clemens.
Dartmouth’s portal container features a camera, microphones and a screen with a live stream that connects to a group of people in the paired site, Clemens explained. The container fits about 14 people, and each location on the video call features a moderator — one “Dartmouth person,” such as Clemens who moderated the first few sessions, and one individual on the other location. The two moderators will work together “to help facilitate the conversation,” Clemens said.
“Because the screen is so big and because you’re in this dark space, it feels much more immersive than just talking to somebody on Zoom,” Clemens said. “When you’re in the space, it feels like you’ve been transported.”
Dartmouth will join six other universities in the United States to have installed a portal on campus — including Stanford, Harvard and Yale — according to Shared Studios head of client relations Teun Hilte.
Shared Studios creates these portals to “give people an opportunity to meet someone they otherwise would never meet,” Hilte said. The company first implemented a temporary portal as an art installation in 2014, connecting New York City to Tehran, Iran and has expanded across the world and on college campuses.
“Portals are most effective and powerful in education, because through portals we can connect learners, students [and] faculty to people who can speak from lived experience about topics that they’re learning about,” Hilte said.
When determining what locations to partner with, Clemens said she asked her colleagues at the Dialogue Project what would “resonate” with Dartmouth students. She also relied on the manufacturer to help find locations across the world that already have portals installed.
“Dartmouth is an international place, and I think there’s something special about connecting community to community across the world,” Clemens said.
Speech professor Svetlana Grushina initiated Dartmouth’s relationship with Shared Studios when she suggested using the portals in speech courses. In her courses, Grushina’s students “deliver short speeches” to those on the other side and prioritize “personal storytelling,” she said. She remarked that interacting with such a “diverse” audience was “powerful, memorable and vibrant.”
Will Hall ’28, a student in speech professor Darlene Drummond’s public speaking course, spoke with university students in Rwanda during his class’ portal session. Hall noted that he “really enjoyed” his time in the portal and “hopes to experience it again.”
“It was super rewarding to hear about how the learning experience in different continents and countries is different from the United States,” Hall said.
Kishan Sreenivasan ’28 has not been inside the portal yet, but has noticed it [in Kemeny Courtyard] and finds the shipping container “kinda weird.”
“Having this shipping box in the middle of the courtyard is definitely a little odd, but if it’s actually a portal I might check it out,” Sreenivasan said.
