May 8th, 2009
Hot Docs: We Live in Public and Winnebago Man
By Jacqueline Whyte Appleby // No Comments
In 1999, Josh Harris began working on QUIET, an underground bunker city eventually inhabited by 100 willing participants who lived, played, crapped, and screwed on camera for a month. Was this an art project? A social experiment? Was it merely pathological gratification for Harris, a multimillionaire who clearly took pleasure in controlling his subjects?
When Ondi Timoner began filming the six floors of hedonism, which included a cereal bar and a shooting range, it was not with the finished product, We Live in Public, in mind. While the QUIET exploits are, on their own, fascinating to watch, what drove Timoner to make a film about Harris, and what ties the narrative together, is the way in which Harris was able to conceive of an internet landscape that, while obvious to us now, did not yet exist in the late 90s. In QUIET, where everyone can watch everyone, and screens are an essential way of interacting with those around you, Harris created what he imagined to be "a perfect anaology of what the internet will be like," or, as Timoner puts it, "a physical manifestation for the way we share our lives now."
Harris is not the most likable of the dotcom nerds, but he is probably one the most innovative. After moving to New York in 1984, Harris started Jupiter Communications, built platforms for Prodigy, and in 1993 founded pseudo.com, a pioneering internet TV station. What made Pseudo special was the way that the shows' audiences could participate in real time with the hosts through a chat box. Harris saw this kind of television as the inevitable future: the audience could be easily controlled, and marketing could be tailored to very specific audiences. "I'm going to sell you your life back to you," he promises, rather ominously. Last time I logged onto Facebook, the sidebar informed me that there were free Uggs available...but only for twenty-three year olds. Luckily, I'm twenty three! After QUIET was broken up by the police (who'd been informed that it was a Y2K doomsday cult, but found more than a few fire infractions), Harris started weliveinpublic.com, a website that streamed footage taken from dozens of cameras mounted all over the apartment he shared with his girlfriend. From there his story only gets weirder.
We Live in Public wants to tells us a lot of things at once, and occasionally feels aimless, perhaps because the project was filmed over ten years but, Timoner states, only became focused in the last two. None the less, Harris is a fascinating sociological study, and his projects are worth getting to know.
And once your life is in public, what then? Josh Harris chose to make his every moment known to the world. What if your worst moment becomes an internet meme of epic proportion, loved and laughed at by millions all over the world without your permission, or even your knowledge?
If you haven't seen Winnebago Man I....well, I don't know what else you've been doing. The well-edited outtakes of a foul-mouthed Winnebago salesman unable to deliver his lines were originally filmed in 1989, and passed around on VHS for years before hitting the mainstream in 2005 on YouTube. The Angriest Man in the World suddenly had a lot of fans.
But who, exactly, is a "fan"? As director Ben Steinbauer searches for, locates, and befriends the reclusive,verbose, and still crude Jack Rebney, we are asked to consider what it means to be a viewer of unconsenting one-sided hilarity. Why do we love such dumb shit? Repeatedly? Are we enjoying the humiliating spectacle because it is happening to someone other than ourselves, perhaps the way that we used to enjoy public hangings? Is it possible that we are appreciating the situation on a deeper level, empathizing, or even relating to, the events portrayed? Winnebago Man is a heartfelt and very funny look at what it means to lose control of your identity in the vastness of cyberspace, but also of the power of personal connections, often forged across this same vastness, to redeem it.
Winnebago Man screens Saturday at 9:30 PM at the Bloor.
Photo by thms.nl.
Interact
Sorry, comments are
closed at this time.
Rate this post
Loading ...
Comments
Neither the author nor Spacing necessarily agree with the comments posted below. Spacing reserves the right to edit or delete comments entirely. See our Comment Policy.
