Amar C. Bakshi is an artist whose work focuses on how to integrate technology into environments and across pronounced distance to create new forms of digital-physical public spaces that challenge and subvert existing norms. In particular, he works to connect members of diverse communities who would likely not otherwise meet in intimate environments to create their own meanings.

Portals are spaces equipped with immersive audiovisual technology. When you enter a Portal, you come face-to-face with someone in a distant Portal live and full-body, as if in the same room. They are set up at diverse locations including museums, universities, technology hubs, refugee camps and arts centers across the globe: Afghanistan, Cuba, Jordan, Germany, Honduras, India, Iraq, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mexico, Myanmar, Palestine, Rwanda, South Korea, Spain, United Kingdom, United States. Together, Portal Curators form a trusted, global community of people who program dialogues, classes and events, lead local outreach and provide live language interpretation.

Shared_Studios is a multidisciplinary art, design and technology collective building an Internet you can walk through. With patented and patent-pending innovations in hardware, software, and design, Shared_Studios creates interconnected environments around the world that feel spatially continuous and through which participants can engage naturally, life-size, making eye contact. Their spaces include Shared_Portals, Shared_Playgrounds and Shared_Stages. Shared_Studios is creating a Shared_World, where we all talk, work, collaborate, debate and play across all forms of distance as if sharing the same space.

As an artist, Amar treats the formation of institutions as, themselves, sites of creation. Amar previously worked as a reporter at The Washington Post, an editor at CNN, and as Special Assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Amar, a Soros Fellow and Truman Scholar, holds a B.A. from Harvard University, a M.A. from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Among Amar’s new projects is a Portal Stage which can be opened lengthwise and coupled with jumbo-trons and outdoor speakers to engage tens of thousands at once.