WE LIVE IN PUBLIC (Ondi Timoner, U.S.). 90 minutes. Wednesday (May 6), 6:30 pm, Bloor May 7, 11 am, Isabel Bader. Rating: NNNN
Ondi Timoner follows her epic rockumentary Dig! with another story of an emotionally dysfunctional visionary.
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Here, it’s Josh Harris, an online pioneer who exploited the social networking aspects of the Internet a decade before Facebook and MySpace and may also have invented reality TV as we know it.
Harris spent a fortune on elaborate art projects dedicated to breaking down social barriers. His most ambitious was a Y2K-era scheme that placed 100 people in a bunker beneath a Manhattan warehouse for a month, eliminating all privacy through total video coverage.
Timoner was one of the participants, and her camcorder footage is astonishing, but not as fascinating as the psychological portrait she draws of a man utterly obsessed with seeing and being seen but never quite understanding what that meant.