Public Project
We Live in Public
Made the Top Ten Best InstallationsJOSH HARRIS, QUIET: WE LIVE IN PUBLIC, 1999On the cusp of Y2K, 150 participants lived together under twenty-four-hour video monitoring in a three-level loft in lower Manhattan, staging a deranged, dystopian social sculpture. In exchange for free lodging and meals, user-residents agreed to make every minute of their lives visible (via closed-circuit broadcast) to all others in the compound.This hydra of self-display, voyeurism, social control, and surveillance—masterminded by ’90s dot-com developer Josh Harris—anticipated the Internet’s coming deluge of realness, liveness, and simultaneity. Just as the new millennium began, Harris’s project imploded in all-out pandemonium. Twelve years later, clips of undressed, drugged-up subjects in baby pools humming off-key tunes haunt the Web like howling ghosts of the prophecy QUIET performed.View from within Josh Harris’s QUIET: We Live in Public, New York, December 31, 1999. Photo: Donna Ferrato
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