WE LIVE IN PUBLIC
Ondi Timoner’s fascinating documentary about the man who was ahead of the internet curve is a typical rise and fall narrative of someone perhaps too carried away by their own brilliance. Josh Harris is a neglected child, left in front of the TV for too long where he develops a particular fascination with Gilligan’s Island and a talent for emerging technologies.
Harris, not unlike myself, arrived in New York City in the glorious 80s, just when desktop computers and internet connections were emerging. By the 90s he had started an online television company called Pseudo.com which is where director Timoner first encountered him. By this time Harris had transitioned from engineering geek to artist or artist wrangler, a la Warhol and was putting together various performance projects.
One of the centerpieces of the film and perhaps Harris’ greatest masterwork is Quiet: We Live in Public which Timoner came back to shoot in 1999. For 30 days a group of strangers is housed in a bunker with a dormitory bed set up. Harris rigged cameras everywhere so that every move is recorded: the bathrooms are open, the shower is transparent, there is a communal table. He also set up a sort of rubber room psychological torture chamber where people are asked the most personal questions and made to confess to all sorts of “crimes.” It seems reminiscent of Big Brother or MTV’s Real World, except with many, many, more people and entirely unscripted. Ultimately the fire marshal broke the whole thing up and Harris moved on. For his next project, he turned the cameras on himself, and his girlfriend capturing every aspect of a disintegrating relationship as well as the moment when he, sitting on the toilet, is informed that he has no more money, a negative bank balance.
Of course these sorts of experiments with living in public fail: we see it every day but even 10-15 years ago it was incredibly new. Harris left New York and did a back to the land stint as an apple farmer but the siren call of technology was not to be ignored. When his last internet venture left him bankrupt he took off to Africa where he, for now lives a relatively quiet life.
The sheer manic energy and self-delusion combined with obvious brilliance is something to watch and witness, if guiltily as one watches a train wreck or better yet a friend who has fallen in love with the wrong guy/girl. I’m not sure we come away with any great moral other than what we have all probably already discovered: technology is fascinating and attractive as well as frightening and loaded with unanticipated consequences like people who you don’t want to be friends with “friending” you on social networking sites. That’s maybe the same thing Harris’ and my own mother wondered about as they plopped us in front of the boob tube back in the 60s. Maybe the lesson is that we should be a lot more fearful than we apparently are: that the consequence of unending exposure to the web is a virtual life rather than a real one. Let’s hope that Josh Harris, in Africa, is finally living a real one.
We Live in Public opens September 25, 2009
Written and directed by Ondi Timoner; produced by Ondi Timoner and Keirda Bahruth; edited by Josh Altman and Ondi Timoner; score by Ben Decter and Marco d’Ambrosio. Released by Interloper Films and Abramorama.
