Posted: October 20th, 2009
Screened at Granville 7, Vancouver International Film Festival on October 14, 2009
Director: Ondi Timoner
By Robert Shaer
I made a quick moment for Twitter minutes before the Vancouver International Film Festival screening of Ondi Timoner’s award winning documentary of lesser-known internet pioneer Josh Harris;
#VIFF #WeLiveInPublic.
21 quick characters shared with those who follow my Twitter and FaceBook feeds to let them know where I was at that moment, regardless of their interest. The telltale reflection of smartphone screens on other faces in the audience suggested I wasn’t the only one taking a moment to broadcast with others what we were up to.
Described as ‘the greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of’, Josh Harris’ path through the 90’s, from .com millionaire to web-casting visionary to financial refugee, hiding in Ethiopia from US creditors, is painted across Ondi Timoner’s film with great candor and remarkable fairness for Harris, who left a wake of alienated and estranged relationships when he left the map at the end of his fall.
Though the curious madness of Harris owns the spotlight of ‘We Live In Public’, the film charts the rise and fall of the wild financial speculation that surrounded the internet in the 1990’s and serves as a portrait of this era. Harris, like so many others experienced an Icarus-like fall after meteoric growth. Though he remains an obscure figure among many better-known names from that era, Harris’ experience is unique owning to his wild curiosity for human relationships caught on camera and a tremendous archive of footage from projects Pseudo.com, Quiet and ‘We Live Public‘ from which Timoner found the name for her film.
With intimate and long term access Timoner draws on footage culled from Harris’ personal archive and almost a decade of her own footage for her 90 minute exploration of the early days of user-generated content years before FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube started to broadcast our lives via broad band connections. Timoner presents for her audience a vision of Harris as a social pioneer and an early adopter of technology driven by creativity and vanity desperate for personal validation through virtual relationships.
Running from the financial success of Jupiter Communications with a net worth of nearly 80 million dollars, Harris went on to launch Pseudo.com in 1993, a webcasting network and competitor to traditional TV. Offering streaming programming on any variety of subjects, Harris attracted presenters cast from the guest lists of his notorious parties which enjoyed a reputation for bringing together nearly naked supermodels and Doom-playing computer nerds and everyone in between.
With a reputation for providing carte blanche for presenters Harris created a creative environment often compared to Andy Warhol’s Factory. Pushed to the technological limits of dial up internet access, Timorer portrays Harris as growing bored and frustrated with the limitations that hampered the continued growth of Pseudo.com. Increasingly restless, Harris’ bizarre behavior and appearances as Luvvy the Clown served as an impetus for his next project and his departure from Pseudo.com. Quiet would bring together more than one hundred participants under the supervision of hundreds of video cameras for a thirty day experiment ending prophetically with the arrival of the New York City Police on New Year’s Day 2000.
Quiet emerged from the depths of a Soho basement a combination of the Stanford Experiment, Survivor, Big Brother and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. With her own camera rolling, Quiet participant Ondi Timoner captured what would become among the most compelling chapters of her film ‘We Live in Public‘. Quiet would go on to cost Harris millions of dollars, descend in to social chaos and end with the controversy of police involvement.
On the heels of Quiet, Harris and his new found girlfriend, former Pseudo presenter and Quiet participant Tanya Corrin turned the cameras on themselves in a New York loft wired for 24 hour broadcast. Unlike Quiet, there was no creation of a community, only the slow and painful to watch collapse of their relationship played out for a dwindling number of viewers. Corrin leaves and Harris’ search for validation through this latest project comes to an end on the toilet with a phone call from a banker to tell him he was broke, having lost all that he had left following the burst of the .com bubble.
In the mid 90’s Harris emerged from the .com crowd with a vision for the future of not only the internet and what it would be capable of, but also of human interaction and what it would become. He envisioned then what would be commonplace a decade later, but unfortunately he lacked the technology that was years away and the discipline to find a lasting foothold after the collapse of the Nasdaq in 2000. Without the language to describe it, Harris laid the ground work for the network of social media that has become so a part of our daily lives.
With ‘We Live in Public‘, Director Ondi Timoner succeeds in being provocative without being a provocateur like so many of her documentary contemporaries, a role she rightly preserves for her subject, Josh Harris, self professed to be one of the “first great artists of the 21st century. Armed with the conviction that everyone’s window for fame would grow from 15 minutes to 15 minutes a day Harris was driven by creativity, vanity and his search for validation, and perhaps his experience, writ large should be the watchword for our individual experiences writ small. Timoner brings her film to a close with warnings about how FaceBook, MySpace and Twitter have created public forums for our private lives.
