‘WE LIVE IN PUBLIC’ / ROGER EBERT review from 2009 (!!)
when a little slice of the hard-core downtown art scene – was WIRED !!!!
and I mean . . w-i-r-e-d in every great way & sense of the word / you can imagine.
from 24/7 surveillance, (wired) to public real-time monitors (wired) . . to outrageous art & thought, beyond the beyond !!
wired . .
beyond your wildest dreams.
talk about . . spinning out.
guns, quilts, & orgies to . . light shows, politicians, extreme video games, and goths.
survival, comfort, Americana – before it hit / Calvin Klein & RAF SIMMONS 2018 . . big.
‘bio’ drives, zen gardens, & interrogation rooms,
and always, lots & lots of that green stuff / as Cardi says: money money money !!!!
open bars on every floor, and a 4 star chef in the kitchen.
talk about . . wired !! this was so wired.
and,
way, way before . . YOU were wired !!, on your cellphone, FB, SNAP & IG / believe it.
while, catching up with ‘WE LIVE IN PUBLIC’, this review by the renown movie critic ROGER EBERT, popped up.
published back in OCT 14, 2009 – it makes some interesting insights.
JOSH HARRIS . . in the MARIA ALEJANDRA GIUDICI / MARIANO AIRALDI transparent, communal shower at ‘Quiet’ – the millennial party / downtown art residency . . that kick-started ‘WE LIVE IN PUBLIC’.
it starts off:
“I’d never heard of Josh Harris, who is billed in ‘We Live in public’, as “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.’ I can be excused for thinking Harris was the fictional hero of a pseudo-documentary, until the film quickly and obviously became authentic. It’s not often you see a doc that’s been filmed over a period of 15 years.
Josh was involved in the early days of Prodigy, back in the CompuServe era, and in 1993 founded Pseudo.com which forecast audio and video Webcasting, YouTube, Hulu and countless other streamers. he was, to put it kindly, ahead of his time. In 1993, 300-baud modems were commonplace, and 1200 was fast.
Harris was a myopic visionary, a man who saw the future more vividly than his own life. He was a prototype nerd, a lonely kid who raised himself while planted in front of an old black-and-white TV set, using ‘Gilligan’s Island’, as a vistual famly . . .
In the 1990s, he became one of the early dot.com millionaires , a celebrity on New York, where he threw lavish parties intended not so much for the famous as to attract brilliant and artistic kids to work for him.”
correction: Mr. Ebert gets his $$ facts a little confused here / although he does real good with the gist of it. It was Josh’s first company ‘JUPITER.COM’ . . the very first internet / trend tracking service . . which Josh started with $700, & went on to sell, shortly thereafter for $81 million dollars (!!) / then those mega $$$$ funds when into ‘Pseudo’ – which was to become the multi-channel incubator online streaming endeavor & which threw the real wild parties.
this is true: “Pseudo.com is remembered from that time as Nerd Heaven, with good pay, perks, free creature comforts — demanding only your body and soul”, and this was esp true for the other side of the Pseudo game plan – the artists who put on the outrageous parties.
this also true, when modified: He sold Jupiter, not Pseudo . . for something like $80 million dollars, and that was the end of his good timing.”
well, financially.
he did go on to become the star of a Sundance winning doc, & is still being hailed as the godfather of ‘social media’, for better, or for worse. and now his story is about to become a bonafide Hollywood feature directed by BEN STILLER, ‘Escape From Dannemora’ (!!), and the super bad / super hot . . JONAH HILL will play Josh . . !!
Josh always claimed his goal was to be known as an artist, so if it took losing it all – so be it.
down with good timing, & up with the creative respect & social media ‘props’.
ok – back to the review !!
excerpt: “The filmmaker ONDI TIMONER had already started to document Harris’ life,”
(ps: Josh hired her after seeing ‘DIG! – nancy / for all you Brooklyn ‘DIG!’ fans ),
“and was on the scene when he began a notorious project named ‘Quiet’. Try to imagine this: About 100 of the best and brightest he could find agreed to live 24 hour a day in a cavernous space below street level. They would be under video surveillance every moment. Their lives would be streamed on the web.” (remember, this is 1999 – dial-up internet !! – nancy)
“They shared dining and recreational (!!!) facilities and even a shooting range. They were given state-of-the art computers . They lived in cubicles with the square footage of perhaps six coffins.” (actually much less, maybe 2 coffins – nancy)
“These were stacked atop each other like sleeping pods in a Japanese airport.”
“And this was to be the future, in which we would all live virtually on the Internet.”
& my fave line of all:
“Remarkably, no murders claimed any of Quiet’s eager volunteers; whether any births resulted is not reported.”
& one last correction: we were NOT volunteers – we were paid, and . . well !!!
no wonder the well, ran dry.
performance artists ? I guess so, but certainly – not scripted !!!!!!
damnit, I can’t do your homework, all the time.
well, here’s the link: go read it for yourself !! – ROGER EBERT REVIEWS ‘WE LIVE IN PUBLIC’.