We Live in Public – a movie

Someone tweeted about this film’s trailer yesterday.

The filmmaker’s bio describes it this way: a chilling view of the Internet

this sentence caught my attention: where technology and media dictate human social interaction and define our personal identity.

It sounds like it will be an interesting film to watch and discuss the implications of the emerging participatory panopticon. Maybe we can have a conversation about it as part of the IDMedia Review Group at IC.

This is the description from the website.

Calling all voyeurs and exhibitionists! Internet pioneer Josh Harris has spent his life implementing his unique vision of the future, where technology and media dictate human social interaction and define our personal identity. At the turn of the millenium, Harris launched an art experiment called Quiet: We Live in Public . He created an artificial society in an underground bunker in the heart of New York City. More than 100 artists moved in and lived in pods under 24-hour surveillance in what was essentially a human terrarium. They defecated, had sex, shared a transparent communal shower—all on camera. On January 1, 2000, after 30 days, the project was busted by FEMA as a “millennial cult.” Undeterred, Harris struck again, this time as his own subject. Rigging his loft with 32 motion-controlled cameras, he convinced his girlfriend to allow him to record streaming video of every moment of their lives from the toilet to the bedroom. The project backfired, his relationship imploded, and Harris went broke. Mentally unhinged, he fled to an apple farm in upstate New York. Sundance award winner Ondi Timoner (#_5_ won the Grand Jury Prize in 2004) chronicled Harris for a decade, culling through thousands of hours of Harris’s own footage and coupling it with rousing vérité of her own. The result is a fascinating, sexy, yet cautionary, tale where we all become Big Brother.

From the Tomorrow Museum

Alana Heiss of PS.1 and MoMA came by to inspect his experimental art project/millenium party “Quiet,” eventually calling it “one of the most extraordinary activities I’ve ever attended anywhere in the world.”

“The image I have in my mind is a concentration camp,” he says about the bunker built for the experiment. Staged on six floors of two buildings on lower Broadway, it was, “part rave, part Stanford Prison Experiment,” as Hanas writes. A hundred “pod people” were recorded from their Japanese capsule hotel beds (each equip with a video camera,) to the dining room, to the dance floor. There was a machine gun firing range, chess tournaments. Sex was filmed, even showers and toilets were set against the wall with no partitions. Participants were interrogated in a stark white room by a team of artists known as the Bureau.