Three Little Worlds: Screening – We Live in Public

Following Jimenez Lai's own residence within Three Little Worlds, We Live In Public was screened in response to the installation's investigations into performance and voyeurism, exhibitionism and storytelling, alternate realities and architectural form.

We Live in Public

USA, 2009, Dir. Ondi Timoner, 90 mins

Before Big Brother, Facebook and Twitter, on the eve of the millenium internet pioneer and 'Warhol of the web' Josh Harris conducted Quiet; a live-art experiment into living in public and through technology. Offering in many ways a prescient metaphor and Orwellian parable for the virtual lives many of us lead today, where the internet has become quasi-public-space, Harris converted an underground Manhattan bunker into a capsule hotel with 100 willing participants - participants whose every desires were catered for in exchange for their succombing to constant video surveilance. Quiet explored the way we willing trade our privacy in exchange for connection and recognition, something which has become ever more apparent through the onslaught of social media that followed Harris' experiment over the course of the next 10 years.

Following Quiet's shutdown by police, Harris turned his experiment indoors and onto himself, as he live-streamed the minutiae of his and his girlfriend's life over the internet; rigging his apartment up with an arsenal of webcams to make them the first ever couple to 'live in public.'

Ondi Timoner's Sundance Grand Jury winning film offers a fascinating window onto Harris' projects, and a retrospective window into the dawn of our move to exchange a life lived in physical space, for the virtual.

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