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We Live in Public

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We Live in Public - Ondi Timoner's 2009 documentary about losing privacy in the Internet age and the Internet pioneer Josh Harris, the man who has predicted it back in '90s.

Synopsis

The film details the experiences of "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of,"[1] Josh Harris. The dot.com millionaire founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network during the infamous tech boom of the late '90s. After achieving prominence amongst the Silicon Valley set, Harris became interested in controversial human experiments which tested the effects of media and technology on the development of personal identity. Ondi Timoner documented the major business-related moments of Harris's life for more than a decade, setting the tone for her documentary of the virtual world and its supposed control of human lives.[1]

Among Harris' experiments touched on in the film is the art project "Quiet: We Live in Public," an Orwellian, Big Brother type concept developed in the late '90s which placed more than 100 artists in a human terrarium under New York City, with myriad webcams following and capturing every move the artists made.[2] The pièce de résistance was a Japanese-style capsule hotel outfitted with cameras in every pod, and screens that allowed each occupant to monitor the other pods[3] installed in the basement by artist Jeff Gompertz.[4] The We Live in Public website states, "With Quiet, Harris 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 another 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."

Awards

We Live in Public was screened six times at the Sundance Film Festival before being awarded the Grand Jury Prize award in the U.S. documentary category at the Sundance Film Festival.[5] Timoner is the first director in the history of the Sundance film festival to win the grand jury award twice. [6] Her first win was in 2004 for the widely acclaimed documentary, DIG!

References

  1. ^ a b http://www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com
  2. ^ http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2009/01/enduring-a-tota.html
  3. ^ http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2008/01/josh_harris_we_live_in_public_operator_11_01-print.php
  4. ^ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/luvvy.html
  5. ^ Source: http://festival.sundance.org/2009/film_events/films/we_live_in_public
  6. ^ http://edendale.typepad.com/weblog/2009/01/sundance-2009-we-live-in-public-rough-aunties-take-jury-prizes-ondi-timoner-makes-history-as-women-f.html

Reviews and General Press:

Awards
Preceded by Sundance Grand Jury Prize: Documentary
2009 		Succeeded by
TBD
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