London Film Festival Preview : We Live in Public October 26, 2009

Double Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Ondi Timoner (Dig!) returns to the festival with her latest pacy and penetrating study, exploring the impact of technology on our interactions and our identities through the story of internet pioneer Josh Harris. Timoner gives us enough background to see a lonely kid whose personality was shaped more by TV by than by family or friends, who by the time he reached adulthood in the early 90s was predicting a future dominated by life online. After setting up and profiting from new media companies, he invested his cash in an 'art experiment', marking the turn of the millennium by cramming 100 artists into a New York bunker, and filming the bacchanalian results. After the project was closed down by the police, who thought it was a cult, he turned the cameras on himself, persuading his live-in girlfriend to agree to him fitting 32 web surveillance cameras into his loft apartment and streaming every aspect of their lives, however intimate or banal. Although often described as visionary, Harris's farsightedness didn't stretch to seeing that this was never going to end well, and the film raises timely questions for us all, not just concerning the morality of Harris's own experiments, but about how much privacy we're prepared to sacrifice in pursuit of other aims