As its possibilities enter people's heads, they redefine what belongs to me - what is me - and what belongs to the world. Harris' projects raise all sorts of fascinating issues about how digital technology is redrawing the boundaries of the self.
He and his girlfriend, Tanya Corrin, lived in an apartment where everything they did was broadcast over the internet to viewers who then commented on what they saw - including the couple's inevitable breakup. Harris himself was the one freaking out in his second project, We Live in Public. The result of this totalitarian exercise was a collective freakout.
The first was a hugely ambitious 1999 "be-in" called "Quiet", in which dozens of people spent a month living in a communal bunker where every piece of behavior - even going to the toilet - wasn't merely caught on surveillance cameras but could be watched on TV by everybody living there. Ondi Timoner's We Live in Public is a breathless film about Josh Harris, an early dot-com millionaire with aspirations to being an artist in the Warhol vein. They're both concerned with another major change in human character, one happening almost exactly a century after Woolf's great turning point. Woolf's words came back to me again recently when I put aside a very entertaining Brazilian novel in order to catch a prizewinning American documentary - only to discover they were both struggling with the same vast, if elusive subject. The show prompted Virginia Woolf to make her famous claim that "human character changed on or about December, 1910." After Cezanne, not to mention Freud and Einstein, people in the West never saw themselves in the same way. Viewers were startled, even shaken by the paintings by Cezanne and Van Gogh, which threatened and sometimes shattered their sense of the world's solidity. Near the end of 1910, London had its first big exhibition of post-impressionist art. The documentary We Live in Public tells the story of artist Josh Harris and his girlfriend Tanya Corrin, who lived in an apartment where everything they did was broadcast over the internet to viewers.
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