We Live in public
Cast And Crew
Theatrical Release:8/28/2009
Director:Ondi Timoner
Production Credits Credit
Jeff Frey Co-Producer
Ondi Timoner Producer
Meagan Keane
Cast (Credited cast)
Tom Harris
David Amron
Alex Arcadia
Zero Boy
Brett Brewer
Owen Bush
Jason Calacanis
Cal Chamberlain
Tanya Corrin
Jeffrey Deitch
Reviews
About the Internet's revolutionary impact on human interaction as told through the eyes and artwork of maverick web pioneer, Josh Harris.
Flickr and Facebook have nothing on the social networking experiments of pioneering Internet guru Josh Harris, whose ingenious and unsettling exploits fall under documentarian Ondi Timoner's penetrating gaze in "We Live in Public." Like Timoner's "DIG!," this astounding new docu burrows into the thin and darkly funny spaces between artistry and vanity, isolation and community, collaboration and exploitation, sanity and madness. Although the Warhol-esque Harris may put off some viewers infuriated (or intimidated) by his immodest brilliance and borderline sadism, others will be turned on by a provocative pic that deserves an audience as expansive as MySpace.
Timoner, a bright young docu talent, seems to share the obsessive artistic methods of her eccentric subjects, including the dueling pop icons of "DIG!" "We Live in Public," edited for maximum pulse-quickening by Timoner and Josh Altman, is culled from thousands of hours of footage collected over a decade. Some of this material was originally captured by Harris, a compulsive videographer who suffered a nervous breakdown at the tail end of his own wired "Truman Show" -- the 24-hour-a-day multicam Internet broadcast of his stormy relationship with live-in g.f. Tanya Corrin.
"Public" also makes extensive, bone-chilling use of Harris' other major work: the late-1999 New York underground hotel-cum-performance space that, complete with surveillance cameras, interrogation rooms and live gun range, he operated under the name "Quiet." Officials shut it down in the first hours of the new millennium.
Timoner's portrait of the visionary Harris grounds his main theme -- that humanity will soon become a race of gadget-obsessed, agoraphobic zombies -- in the artist's own lonely, TV-saturated '60s childhood. But the viewer's sympathy for Harris often is strained by his use of friends as virtual-reality guinea pigs.
Some will feel that just desserts have come to the control-freak streaming-video innovator who squandered an $80 million fortune on bacchanalian "aphrodisiac parties" and ill-advised business decisions as the dotcom bubble burst. (Harris, aside from venturing to Sundance, has been in semi-seclusion for the better part of a decade.)
An intensely immersive, even draining film, "We Live in Public," which doubles as a short history of the Internet, is technically tops on every level -- including its volume. Much of the film is set to an ear-splitting cacophony of moody pop-rock, as befits a character as loud and abrasive as Harris.
Pic's end credits find Harris thanking fellow art-pranksters Marcel Duchamp and Ray Johnson, who might well have appreciated his prescient vision of the virtual world run amok.
On the 40th anniversary of the Internet, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells the story of the effect the web is having on our society as seen through the eyes of "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of", visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner ("DIG!"), documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade, to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives. Josh Harris, often called the "Warhol of the Web" through the infamous dot.com boom of the 1990's, founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network and created his vision of the future, an underground bunker in NYC where 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days over the millennium. He proved how in the not-so-distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire. Through his experiments, including a six-month stint living under 24-hour live surveillance online which led him to mental collapse, he demonstrated the price we will all pay for living in public.We Live in Public is the story of the Internets revolutionary impact on human interaction as told through the eyes of Internet pioneer and visionary, Josh Harris. Though once considered the godfather of the downtown Internet scene in NYC in the 90s, known far and wide for his outrageous parties, innovations in chat, streaming audio and the creation of the first online television network, Harris is but a footnote in history at this point all because he took his experiments with the Internet and media consumption too far. Award-winning filmmaker, Ondi Timoner, has been documenting his incredible experiments, and his ups and downs, for over a decade from puppeteer to puppet, from millionaire to exiled and broke. Timoner sets out with We Live in Public to tell the story of yet another walking cautionary tale in Josh Harris who, as Anton Newcombe did for artists everywhere in DIG!, will inevitably shake us all to the core about what the future brings for all of us as we increasingly live, work and love through media and technology.
The film charts the rise and fall of the man who, as far back as the early 1990s, predicted a future dominated by life online, where people will be actively willing to reveal all aspects of their private lives as significance and fame become more accessible, only to find themselves trapped in virtual boxes. Josh Harris foresaw online social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, and created the companies that serve as the direct predecessors to these fabulously successful ventures. But as Josh says, "The first guy gets the arrow, the second guy gets the castle.
Founder of the first Internet market research company (Jupiter Communications), and the first Internet-based television network (Pseudo.com), Josh Harris told his brother, I have to do this, or someone else will do it first. It didnt matter that less than 1% of the population had broadband when he unveiled Pseudo, so very few people could watch his 10 channels online. It mattered to him that he did it, and showed anyone who was watching, the future. Called by many the Warhol of the Web, Josh has spent his life coming to terms with his vision of the future and how media and technology affects social interaction and the development of personal identity.
How Harris became a media casualty provides the emotional core of our story. The youngest child of seven, and neglected by his parents, Harris was a lonely child, nurtured, as he says, on the electronic calories of television. He claims to have been raised by the tube and found his spiritual family in Gilligans Island. After several successful business ventures in the first dotcom boom, Harris set out to make up for his lonesome childhood by surrounding himself with people and cameras, creating his own island.
Theories that first made Harris a wealthy and successful Internet pioneer during the dotcom boom of the mid-90s are the same ideas that eventually drove him towards a mental collapse. Harris continued to place himself and the people around him in the middle of a not-so-distant future where he believed we will all want to live in public, using the media and technology to publicize our lives and create our virtual selves. He created an underground bunker in the heart of NYC at the turn of the Millennium and had over 100 people move into his living human Petri dish an artificial society where they lived in pods, each with their own surveillance camera and channel in a closed circuit network, and subjected themselves to artillery training and interrogations in order to be on camera. It was busted by FEMA as a Millennial Cult on January 1st 2000, where upon, Harris decided to take the experiment a step farther
This time, he was the guinea pig. He had his loft rigged with 32 motion-controlled surveillance cameras from the toilet to the bedroom, and announced weliveinpublic.com A live, 24/7 look into the lives of Harris and his girlfriend, Tanya. They set out to broadcast every aspect of their lives for six months, and even hopefully to conceive in public! The experiment backfired as the chatters began to control the Harris life, resulting in the deterioration of his personal relationship as well as his mental state. After having lived under complete surveillance while losing the majority of his money in the dotcom crash as well as his mind, Harris fled into seclusion on an apple farm in upstate New York for the next five years. He cut himself off from all the media and fame he had been obsessed with, to shed the electronic calories hed been consuming through that media his whole life - and find himself.
During his exile, Harris visionary predictions about technology and online social networking were manifesting in companies like Friendster, and then MySpace and Facebook, among others.
Harris returned to the tech world with his newest creation "Operator 11, an online streaming video hub where users could create and broadcast their own content never found an audience. This time he was too late. YouTube had already cornered the market with its slogan broadcast yourself.
Having sunk the remainder of his money into Operator 11, Josh Harris was now broke. With no money and the burning desire to finally prove himself as the greatest artist of the 21st century, Harris vanished to Ethiopia while the world he so succinctly predicted blows up around him.
Sundance Award-Winning director Ondi Timoner and Interloper Films have been chronicling Harriss story since his peak in 1999. As with Timoners previous films DIG! and JOIN US, We Live In Public takes us deep underground into a world we would never otherwise have access to. Told through visually-stimulating vérité footage woven into a dramatic narrative, the film then takes the power of documentary cinema one step further thanks to Harriss obsession with constantly documenting himself and the world around him. We are currently crafting an exciting hour and a half adventure out of the 3-4000 hours of footage accumulated for the project over the last ten years. The result will without doubt be a visceral ride through our recent history, back to a time not so long ago when life was markedly different for most all of us, before the decade between web 1.0 and web 2.0, before the greatest invention of our lifetime had taken hold of our lives, and according to Harris - were only seeing the smoke on the horizon.
