A new must-see film for students of digital media: We Live in Public by Ondi Timoner, recipient of the 2009 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for best documentary!
Ten years in the making and culled from 5000 hours of footage, the film tells the story of Josh Harris, “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of”:
Harris, often called the “Warhol of the Web”, founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network during the infamous dot-com boom of the 1990s. He also curated and funded the ground breaking project “Quiet” in an underground bunker in NYC where over 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days at the turn of the millennium. With Quiet, Harris proved how we willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire, but with every technological advancement such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, becomes more elusive. Through his experiments, including a six-month stint living with his girlfriend under 24-hour electronic surveillance which led to his mental collapse, Harris demonstrated the price we pay for living in public.
We Live in Public will be released for download this coming Monday, March 1st, and on DVD March 2nd. In celebration of the online release, the film will be simulcast in six theaters worldwide (including the Egyptian in LA) followed by a Q&A with Timoner from her home base in Chicago. All six events will stream live on the film’s website, weliveinpublicthemovie.com. I can’t wait!
2 responses so far ↓
clio // 8 March 2010 at 10.23 am
Wow, that looks really interesting. It really is a a direct precursor to reality television. I think the only difference is now we’ve commodified and censored reality tv, so it’s become a scripted and “safe” version of reality. The viewer isn’t forced to observe any real emotions, and it’s based on superficial connections to “real” characters. Most reality shows have story boards and producers, who have cast members reenact scenes, and feed them lines in order to get desired reactions.
jori // 8 March 2010 at 11.03 am
I wonder if Harris is debuting this film in 2010 on purpose. The ideas he is exploring in 200o are completely different ten years later. Perhaps, in looking back at what we thought of these technologies at the onset, we can better evaluate how ingrained surveillance and living in public have become.