We Live in Public

In 2004 Ondi Timoner directed ‘DiG!’, and this year won a prize at Sundance for this eye-opening profile of internet entrepreneur Josh Harris, dubbed ‘the Warhol of web TV’. After making a mint in web research in the early 1990s, in 1993 Harris set up Pseudo, a web TV channel on which he appeared in various guises, including a clown called Luvvy (above). In1999, he founded a 24-hour art stunt called ‘Quiet’, an exercise in living in front of cameras that was a thousand times more daring than ‘Big Brother’, but then he hit the skids in the 2000 dot.com crash. His pre-9/11 stunts seem both familiar – in that so many of us are now projecting our lives online – and a million light years away, in terms of the wide-eyed, dangerous edge he lent his experiments. The big question is whether we’re now living in a more pragmatic time – as suggested by the brush-off we see Harris receiving from a high-up at MySpace – or in another bubble that will burst and consign more like Harris to a past age?