“We Live in Public”: Life in the Participatory Panopticon

“We Live in Public”. It’s an apt tagline for our times, and the title of Ondi Timoner’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning documentary which premieres in New York on April 5th.

The film captures the heyday of internet pioneer Josh Harris, who amongst other things founded the world’s first web TV network, Pseudo.com. “We Live in Public” documents a series of strange performance art experiments that explored, in extreme ways, what it meant to live in full scrutiny of the whole world, all the time. For more, watch the film’s trailer below.

The Moment explains:

Harris’s greatest folly, however, was an art experiment called “Quiet: We Live in Public,” in which 100 participants in orange uniforms lived together for a month in a bunker under 24-hour surveillance, during the turn of the millennium. Models, artists, techies and hipsters watched each other online while they slept, ate, had sex and went to the bathroom. Soon after, he turned the camera on himself and his girlfriend, allowing their relationship to be discussed by plugged-in viewers. The constant public scrutiny eventually led to Harris’s mental breakdown — which, in retrospect, makes his story a compelling cautionary tale for a society obsessed with posting practically all of our lives on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al.

The Moment: “Coming Soon | ‘We Live in Public”