Photo Gallery
But then doesn't everyone? Aren't Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube just the capitalistic answer to a public, gluttonized on reality television and celebrity gossip, that needs its fifteen minutes of fame every five minutes? This is the chief quandary of both Harris' life and Timoner's film, which won the Grand Jury prize at this year's Sundance.
Beginning with Harris' move to New York City, Timoner traverses the two decades it took for the internet to go from a small monastery of devout worshippers to the grand cathedral of projected existence it is today. Elsewhere, it chronicles Harris' rise with the dot-comers and his string of 'art projects,' which began with Pseudo, an early construct of streaming video channels, and ended in financial ruin and his flight to Ethiopia.
The most well-documented and well-scrutinized of these art projects is 'Quiet,' an apocalyptic underground bunker under 24-hour surveillance that would make George Orwell blush and MTV salivate (though today, they might find it just a bit passé). Since Timoner had a camera, she was allowed complete access. Of the more atrocious activities, there's an interrogation room, conceptualized by Harris and an ex-CIA specialist, where 'pod members' are psychologically broken down. Everything from heroin abuse to suicide attempts to a lover's quarrel becomes public consumption; the equivalent, one participant quips, of living inside the internet. The project was shut down a few minutes into Y2K and, bored with simply controlling the experiment, Harris turned the cameras on his then-girlfriend and himself. The titular project cost him his fortune ($80 million) and the love of his life. But like every emotionally scathing moment of his life, Harris describes it as another 'project,' referring to the girlfriend as 'pseudo.'
Part character study, part cautionary thriller, We Live in Public provides one of the more effective if not profound looks at the colonization of the internet at the expense of individuality, but its aim is not solely to look towards this late 20th century advent. Harris often refers to his childhood love for television as sanctuary from a distraught home life -Gilligan's Island as a modern remedy for parental neglect. At moments like this, Timoner dangerously skirts an overly sympathetic view of this deeply troubled, inscrutably fascinating character. Luckily, she never lets his longwinded diatribes on his prophetic 'artistry' get too far. She documents not only Harris' chillingly close predictions of our 'imagined community,' but how the concept of art is often used to deflect inner turmoil. We Live in Public may not say enough about modern life on the web and on camera, but ignore what it does say at your own peril.
