The Lonely City (27 page)

In fact, everything at Quiet was free. The price of entry into
the bunker wasn’t money, but rather a willingness to surrender control over one’s identity. There were surveillance cameras everywhere, even in the toilets, streaming to the web. Furthermore, each of the sleeping pods was fitted with a two-way audio-visual system, a camera plus television set. These devices converted Quiet into a panopticon and its citizens into both prisoners and jailers, at once the subject and the object of scrutiny.

They could look as much as they liked, flicking through the channels, settling on this or that pod, watching people eating or defecating or having sex. They could gorge themselves on feasts of the eye, but they couldn’t hide. They could watch whatever face or body took their fancy, but they could not protect themselves from being regarded by the camera’s unstinting gaze, though they could work to generate an audience, to acquire the glitter that comes from being regarded by multiple eyes, the high wattage sheen lent by mass attention. Quiet wasn’t just a metaphor for the internet. It was the thing itself, enacted by real bodies in real rooms; its feedback loops of voyeurism and exposure.

Like the internet, what seemed transient was actually permanent, and what seemed free had already been bought. In his understanding of this, Harris was notably prescient, something that can be seen when one contrasts Quiet with an essay written the same year by the critic Bruce Benderson about cybersex and the effect of the internet on communities and cities, entitled ‘Sex and Isolation’. In it, he writes: ‘We are very much alone. Nothing leaves a mark. Today’s texts and images may look like real carvings – but in the end they are erasable, only a temporary blockage of all-invasive light. No matter how long the words and pictures
stay on our screens, there will be no encrustation; all will be reversible.’ This statement captures the anxieties of the web 1.0, its now painful innocence, and fails to foresee what Josh did: the grim permanence of the web to come, where data has consequences and nothing is ever lost, not arrest logs, not embarrassing photos, not Google searches, not the torture logs of entire nations.

On arrival, the citizens of Quiet signed away the rights to their own data, just as we do when we persist in treating corporate spaces of the web as private diaries or zones of conversation. Everything recorded was owned by Harris, including information gathered by way of increasingly brutal and intrusive interrogations, apparently carried out by a genuine former CIA operative. These interrogations form one of the most distressing aspects of the documentary
We Live in Public
. Over and over, clearly vulnerable people are grilled by uniformed guards about their sexual proclivities and mental health, with one weeping woman asked to demonstrate exactly how she’d cut her wrists, the speed and angle of the blade.

It sounds like hell, and the footage looks like hell, the uniformed people fucking in their kennels, as a rattled-sounding Josh says on camera: ‘There’s all these people around you at close quarters and the more you get to know each other the more alone you become. That’s what this environment is doing to me.’ And yet most people seem on balance to have relished their time in Quiet, or at least to have been glad they’d been through it, though they also attested to increasing fights, as drug use and proximity and lack of privacy ate away at the inmates.

The party came screeching to a halt in the early hours of the
new millennium, when Quiet was raided and shut down by the police and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, apparently because of concerns that it was a millennial cult (the noise of guns being discharged, audible from the street outside, cannot have helped). The bust was part of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s clamp down on licentiousness and crime, his attempt to clean and order the city by way of what was known euphemistically as the Quality of Life Task Force, the same mechanism responsible for the sanitisation and desexing of Times Square. As dawn broke over Manhattan, as the twenty-first century began, the citizens of Quiet were thrown out into the street, the machinery of closeness abruptly shut off.

The sadism that makes Quiet appalling as a viewing spectacle also clouds its purpose. It reveals people’s greed for attention, yes, but the message of danger is diminished by the suspicion that a single person is manipulating the situation, ratcheting up the stakes. Watching the footage of interrogations, or of a group of orange-clad people ogling two strangers having athletic sex inside a shower, one has the sense that someone invisible is yanking the strings: someone who will do anything to generate effects, create drama, keep the viewer hooked. On some level, Harris must have grasped this, because his next project was simpler, more self-exposing and far more declarative.

In We Live in Public (the documentary takes its name from the work), Harris turned the cameras on himself and his girlfriend Tanya Corrin, a former employee and his first serious relationship. Having exposed people’s desire for participation, their frantic need to be witnessed, he now wished to assess the cost of this kind of
surveillance, to see the human effects of collapsing whatever boundaries exist between the public and the private, the real and the virtual. Again, let me restate that this is in 2000, three years before MySpace was founded and four years before the launch of Facebook, when social media had not yet begun, let alone become entrenched enough to generate the kind of anxiety that is familiar today. The television show
Big Brother
had recently begun on television, but that simply put people into a decreasingly comfortably appointed prison and let unseen viewers vote them out. What Harris wanted to do was open the channels, to let audience and show bleed into one.

That fall, he filled his apartment with sophisticated recording equipment, including dozens of automated cameras. For 100 days, he and Tanya would live entirely in public, come what may. The footage harvested was streamed on to the project’s website, where it appeared on a split screen, the other half of which was dedicated to discussion by a shifting online community, who not only watched but also responded and engaged. At the project’s height, thousands of people were logging on, watching Josh and Tanya eating, showering, sleeping, having sex.

At first, the relationship bloomed under these artificial lights, but as the scrutiny intensified cracks began to form. From the beginning, the watchers commented on what they saw, a relentless chorus, a talking mirror, by turns flattering and savage. What was being said? Better check, the two of them in separate rooms, assessing their feedback, comparing their popularity, tweaking their behaviour in accordance with demands. When they fought, the watchers took sides, generally Tanya’s, advising her on ways
of handling Josh, telling her to make him sleep on the couch, telling her to force him to move out.

Under this kind of barrage, this seeping of the virtual into the actual, Josh became progressively more isolated and embittered, not helped by the fact that his fortune was leaking away, the millions vanishing as swiftly as they’d materialised. 2000: the year of the stock market crash, the bursting of the dotcom bubble. Eventually Tanya left, a humiliating public separation, and he stayed on in the loft alone with a hostile crowd of spectators, trapped in a malicious room of knowing ghosts. Then the audience too began to dwindle, and as they melted away Josh felt the elements of his personality disappearing with them. Without the attention, without the scrolling responses, did he even exist? An abstract question, Philosophy 101, until you look at the footage of him moving between rooms, spooked and bloated, something blank about his face, like a man who has suffered a blow to the head.

*

I first saw the documentary
We Live in Public
in a way that would have been unthinkable ten years before. A friend I knew from Twitter, Sherri Wasserman, inaugurated a film festival designed for the internet. At first, the idea was to watch films about isolation while physically isolated but technologically connected. Over time, the focus shifted to prisons both real and imagined, among them the two designed by Harris.

There were six of us at the first Co-Present festival, scattered
across America and Europe, watching on our laptops and talking via Gchat. We got to
We Live in Public
last, after a triple bill of
Into the Abyss, Escape from New York
and
Tokyo Drifter,
which is to say blindsided by images, by hours and hours spent immersed in the glowing innards of our computers. All those films were beautiful and disturbing, relevant in different ways, but
We Live in Public
felt like confronting something personal, something ugly and increasingly uncomfortable. Looking at the chatlog now, we all sound stunned. SW:
this increasingly looks like the cocky internet startup mogul’s version of the Stanford Experiment.
ST:
I feel like I’m going crazy.
AS:
it’s seriously fucked.

I can’t speak for the others, but I was frightened by what I saw, and frightened by what it meant for me. Somehow, I’d woken up in the future. I think we’re all in Josh’s room now. I think the salient point about the new world we’ve been drifting into is that all the walls are falling down, everything blurring into everyone else. In this atmosphere of perpetual contact, perpetual surveillance, intimacy falters. Hardly any wonder Josh fled the city the day after We Live in Public ended, spending the next few years hiding out on an apple farm upstate, recovering or recalibrating his sense of boundaries, drawing his self back into the outer casing of his skin.

Collapse, spread, merging, union: these things sound like the opposite of loneliness, and yet intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying. In conversation after a screening of
We Live in Public
at the MoMA, the director Ondi Timoner said of Quiet that though it was in many ways a totalitarian space, ‘it didn’t matter . . . It was more important to get the attention
of the camera if at all possible, and there were 110 of them, so it was like a candy store for people who wanted to feel that they were part of something’, adding emphatically: ‘What I did not realise at the time was that this was what the internet would become.’ She saw the film explicitly as a warning, saying: ‘I think we have to be conscious of what we’re after when we’re posting our photo. I think we all have a desire not to feel alone and to feel connected and that’s a basic desire, but in our society celebrity has become the golden lamb . . . if I can get that, I won’t feel alone and will always feel loved.’

Love without risk. Love that is simply the dissemination of one’s own face, its incessant replication. In the Errol Morris documentary
Harvesting Me
, Harris muses on his life in a way that implicitly conflates identity with the experience of being watched. ‘My only friend was the tube . . . I’m a celebrity. There are people who watch me . . . I’ve got this Greek chorus watching me me me.’ It’s as if each extra set of eyes enlarges and reinforces the object of the gaze, that fragile, swollen
me,
though they are also capable of tearing it to pieces.

Once again, this recalls Warhol, who possessed a similarly intense desire to get inside the tube, using it as a way to broadcast himself, to seed his image throughout the world. Or, alternatively, to put other people in there, the better to enjoy them. All sorts of aspects of his work echo through Harris’s projects, as they do through the internet at large. Take the so-called boring films, with their gratuitously lingering glances, their static, silvery regard of people engaged in the ordinary, quotidian activities of their titles:
Sleep
or
Haircut, Kiss
or
Eat.
They testify to the desire to watch a body
perform its rites: the same urge that is present in cruder form in Harris’s endless recording of people defecating or washing, sleeping or having sex; an urge that has itself subsequently flowered out in vast profusion on the internet, that kingdom of self-portraiture, that enclave of the fetishised and the banal. Surveillance art, I suppose you could call it, made before the term was even in circulation.

The difference between Warhol and Harris, of course, is that Warhol was an artist, engaged in the production of something beautiful – a gleaming surface, an affectless mirror for the world – and not simply in social experiment and self-aggrandisement and what sometimes seems like unnecessarily cruel exposure. Though perhaps that last clause is not quite fair. Watching footage of Quiet, its sadism and manipulation, I was reminded more than once of Warhol’s nastier films, the ones in which he and Ronnie Tavel provoke mania or nudge the doe-eyed participants into humiliating acts. Ondine slapping Rona Page, Mary Woronov torturing International Velvet in
Chelsea Girls,
beautiful Mario Montez in
Screen Test No. 2,
ecstatically mouthing the word
diarrhoea
, his lovely face determined, anxious to please (at the beginning of the film, obsessively rearranging his luxuriant wig, the camera’s eye upon him, he confesses dreamily, ‘I feel like I’m in uh another world now. A world of fantasy.’)

If there is a current animating Warhol’s work, it is not sexual desire, not eros as we generally understand it, but rather desire for attention: the driving force of the modern age. What Warhol was looking at, what he was reproducing in paintings and sculptures and films and photographs, was simply whatever everyone
else was looking at, be it celebrities or cans of soup or photographs of disasters, of people crushed beneath cars and flung into trees. In gazing at these things, in rollering them out over curtains of colour, in reproducing them endlessly, what he was attempting to distil was the essence of attention itself, that elusive element that everyone hungers for. His study began with stars, with all those heavy-lidded, bee-stung divas, Jackie, Elvis, Marilyn, their faces vacant, stunned by camera lenses. But it didn’t end there. Like Harris, Warhol could see that technology was going to make it possible for more and more people to achieve fame; intimacy’s surrogate, its addictive supplanter.