Shared Studios · Founder · 2014–present
I painted a shipping container gold and put a stranger inside it.
Shared Studios is a public art project and a global network of Portals: shipping containers painted gold, fitted with life-size real-time video, and connected to identical rooms around the world. Between 2014 and 2024 they linked about a million people across 77 sites in 43 countries.
Shared Studios started in 2014 as an art project. I put a gold shipping container in New York and an identical one in Tehran, fitted each with immersive audiovisual equipment, and connected them. You entered alone. On the far wall, life-size and in real time, was a stranger in Iran.
There was no agenda, no moderator, and no topic. People talked for twenty minutes about whatever they wanted, which turned out to be their children, their music, their work, what would make tomorrow a good day. Then they came out. And again and again, in different cities and different languages, they said a version of the same sentence.
The first moments and awkwardness gave ground to joy.
Gold book · New York ↔ Tehran, March 2015
That sentence is the whole thing. It is not a change of mind about politics. It is something more basic and harder to reverse — the recognition of another person as a person, which is the precondition for everything else.
Over a decade
Every Portal we built
Every Portal we ever built — 77 sites, 43 countries.
The gold books
At every Portal there was a book, and people wrote in it.
“Life has thrown me a gift — wrapped in a gold shipping crate.”
Visitor“Amazing how the first moments and awkwardness gave ground to joy.”
Visitor“I will be thinking about my conversation for a long time.”
Visitor
The Portals Policing Project
What happens when the method becomes research.
With Tracey Meares at Yale and Vesla Weaver at Johns Hopkins, we turned the Portals into a listening instrument. Residents in fourteen neighbourhoods across six cities talked to each other — not to researchers — about their experience of policing. It produced more than 850 conversations: the most extensive collection of first-hand accounts of policing in America assembled to that point.
In Milwaukee, the Portal stayed and became something the neighbourhood ran itself.
“We been utilizing the Portal in so many ways and it's been helping control the violence that goes on in these neighborhoods. It's been doing a world of a difference.”
Lewis Lee · Milwaukee Portal Curator
Research
Two doctoral dissertations took the Portals as their subject, and four peer-reviewed papers used them as a research instrument. The research →
Some of who came through
Case studies
What institutions actually used it for.
Twitter’s most successful consumer-facing campaign
Read the case study →
Deepening culture by connecting baristas to coffee growers
Read the case study →
Inspiring the next generation of STEM learners
Read the case study →
Connecting to a global network of game designers
Read the case study →
Exploring past and present of displaced communities
Read the case study →
Connecting Obama to social entrepreneurs
Read the case study →Global We · with UN Live
The network became a listening instrument for the United Nations.
In 2022 the Museum for the United Nations — UN Live — launched Global We, a live dialogue platform built to put normally unheard voices from the global majority in direct conversation with each other. It runs on UN Live–branded shipping containers fitted with the same life-size video and audio. Shared Studios executed it, alongside hundreds of local organizations in the portal locations.
The difference from our earlier work is what happens after the conversation. Sessions are captured, analysed, and carried upward — the perspectives and the emerging themes are brought to the formal leaders of the world, including UN leadership. Each month one question opens the exchange. What does home mean to you? What makes you hopeful?
With Cortico, the non-profit that works with the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, UN Live has gathered more than 2,900 recorded perspectives on climate action from 25 locations since November 2022 — the largest recorded climate conversation assembled to date. The portals are still running.
Host partners include the Anchorage Museum · HAP Services, Cox's Bazar · Wirred Barbados · Procomum, Santos · Parque Explora, Medellín · SPACE10, Copenhagen · Rotary Ethiopia · Science Gallery Bengaluru · Compound 13 Lab, Mumbai · the UNICEF Harsham IDP Camp, Erbil · Impact Hub Jakarta · Impact Hub Nairobi · Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City · RAUM, Utrecht · Mercy Corps and Gaza Sky Geeks, Gaza · Rwanda Build Program, Kigali · Victoria Yards, Johannesburg · Opportunigee, Nakivale. Supported by the IKEA Foundation and the Augustinus Foundation.
Partners and hosts
Museums, agencies, camps, campuses, brands.
What it became
Shared Studios proved that presence at life size changes what people are willing to say to one another. Noro is the commercial descendant of that finding — the same discovery about human presence, built into permanent walls for workplaces and schools rather than shipping containers in public squares.
PBS made a documentary about the Portals. It is the best single account of what the encounter actually feels like.
- Partners
- The United Nations · The Smithsonian · Google · NASA · TED · LEGO · Starbucks · The Obama Foundation · The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum · World Economic Forum
- Research
- The Portals Policing Project →
With Yale University and Johns Hopkins
Shared Studios
Bring a Portal to your community.
Shared Studios builds and runs Portals worldwide. The site has current locations, how to host one, and how to book a connection.