Last night, I attended the closing night presentation of The Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual "New Directors, New Films" series. The two-week showcase of fresh voices in cinema concluded with the New York premiere of Ondi Timoner's documentary, "We Live in Public," in the city which the director called the film's "home."
"We Live in Public" is an entertaining and revelatory film about Josh Harris, an internet pioneer who founded the first market research company to mine the wealth of consumer data in internet traffic, and Pseudo.com, the first online entertainment network. With his earnings from various internet ventures (the net worth of Pseudo.com amounted to $80M when it went public) he conducted a social experiment with ("on," to be more precise) 110 artists of variegated stripes called "Quiet" in an underground bunker beneath Manhattan in 1999. It was either an extreme environment constructed to investigate technology's impact on the formulation of the Self or the craziest party ever. Perhaps both. The 110 volunteers were thoroughly vetted through a registration process that included a 320-question personality test. The food and amenities in the "Capsule Hotel" (including a fully serviced cereal bar, a church and the use of a firing range!) were free of charge, but Harris retained the right to their images, documenting them in every conceivable light and during their most intimate moments. Sure, it was fun but, as the saying goes, it's all fun and games until the cops crash the party. Weeks into the experiment, the atmosphere of complete freedom devolves into an exercise in sado-masochism. The cameras have imperceptibly changed the relations between people. Of course, the mandatory psychological interrogations do not help matters, but the mere presence of a camera registering every waking moment of the pod dwellers' lives--including the interrogation process--produces an environment of shameless exhibitionism, which Timoner believes is symptomatic of where the "global village" is heading.
The film's subject is ostensibly Josh Harris and the delusions that fuel his visionary genius. After the police raid the underground bunker on Y2K, Harris, along with then-girlfriend and Pseudo.com host, Tanya Corrin install 32 motion-controlled cameras and 60 microphones in their home, broadcasting their lives to 1,000 online users (Did we learn nothing from the bunker experiment?). Almost simultaneously, he watches his finances, love-life and the number of Pseudo.com viewers dissipate. He then travels to San Francisco, becomes a farmer, and ends up coaching youth basketball in Africa. But the scope of the film moves beyond documenting the driving force behind one man's search for fame and acceptance by tapping into the artificial reality of television. "We Live in Public" is a harbinger of the changes that will continue to occur to our concepts of privacy and human interaction as they are being accelerated by technology. In the film, Harris updates Andy Warhol's prophetic words on fame for the digital age of blogging, microblogging, and texting, with an emphasis on the way our obsession for exposing ourselves has accelerated with the times: "Everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame everyday." In interviews, Timoner has stated that this film was intended as something of a "cautionary tale." "We Live in Public" asserts that as we stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into us.
Click here to read a CNN article about Josh Harris and "We Live in Public."
The New York Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with The Film Society of Lincoln Center's "New Directors, New Films" series held its first live webcast last night. Watch the footage below.
No comments:
Post a Comment