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morganbelarus · 6 years ago

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‘We’re in the Business of Programming People’s Lives’

Josh Harris may have been the first internet millionaire in New York. As founder of Jupiter Communications and New York’s first online media portal, Pseudo.com, he rode the web 1.0 dotcom boom to a fortune of $85 million. But as the 1990s ramped up, his view of what the internet would do to us darkened, and he spent his fortune on a series of lurid social experiments aiming to demonstrate what he saw. The biggest was an ambitious millennial happening called Quiet, which Andrew Smith writes about in his new book, Totally Wired.

1999 …

Where to start?

Seventy-one IPOs in July alone, hundreds over the year. A veteran Silicon Valley investor describes meeting a young entrepreneur who was trying to raise money for a company called Funerals.com with the pitch “We’re going to put the fun back into funerals”; an online venture called Pets.com forgot to wonder how profit would grace a business selling $10 bags of cat litter that cost $20 to deliver—as did the New York–based online grocer Kozmo. com, which also traded on free delivery. More improbably still, a firm called Pixelon threw a $16 million IPO launch party in Las Vegas, with entertainment from the Who, Kiss, Tony Bennett, the Offspring, and Dixie Chicks, before anyone knew that its CEO, Michael Fenne, was really a fugitive con artist named David Kim Stanley and that the clients who spied its revolutionary “broadband” system had actually been looking at RealPlayer. Was this more outrageous than a loss-making two-year-old company called eToys.com being valued by the market at $4.9 billion on sales of just $100 million, when the $4 billion real-world valuation of Toys R Us was based on revenues of $11.5 billion? In 1999 it was impossible to say.

Simon & Schuster Ltd

Even before the big money arrived, those closest to Josh Harris felt a change in him. After 18 months of putting together deals no one around him properly understood, carrying the weight of all those people and their constantly heightening expectations, he was spent. Invited to speak at a conference in Japan, he took the former Pseudo artist V. Owen Bush to film his performance, but refused to leave his hotel room for most of the trip; just stayed inside eating room service and pacifying himself with bad Hollywood movies. Bush had never seen anyone shut down so completely.

In New York, Josh started turning up to the office as Luvvy the clown, named for the character Eunice “Lovey” Wentworth Howell from Gilligan’s Island. Tales of him crashing board meetings dressed as Luvvy turn out to be apocryphal (though he did often crash meetings as himself, which could be just as disruptive). Appearances by Luvvy, with its smudged makeup and cheese-grater voice, became common on Pseudo radio and TV shows and at parties where clients were present—and as Josh must have known, were a gift to his critics and doubters. The Pseudo presenter Jess Zaino was the first to encounter her boss’s new alter ego at close quarters, when it turned up on her radio show as a guest and, for 20 of the longest live-streamed minutes in her life, met all attempts at conversation with the exclamation “Boing! Boing!”

As planning for Quiet got under way, two significant outside events occurred. First, the Big Brother TV series hit Dutch screens, its name taken from the same Orwell novel Apple had used to promote its Macintosh computer 15 years earlier. Next, the increasingly autocratic New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, already at odds with his famously untamable citizens over crackdowns on drivers, cyclists, jaywalkers, street vendors, litterbugs, clubbers, drinkers, and almost anything that moved, spoke, or looked at him funny, took the next logical step and declared war on the art fold. Word is that he was inspecting a new Emergency Operations Center at the World Trade Center when a reporter asked for his view on the Brooklyn Museum’s Sensation exhibition of works by the so-called Young British Artists, who included Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Gillian Wearing. Specific to his ire was a painting of a black Virgin Mary by the black Brit painter Chris Ofili, which was carefully decorated with varnished elephant dung and in truth rather respectful and very beautiful. Without seeing the work, Giuliani (like the artist, a Catholic) pronounced it “sick stuff “and threatened to withdraw funding and evict the museum from its century-old home. Polls showed New Yorkers backing the museum two-to-one over the mayor, and Josh was far from alone in being incensed. The ensuing fight would feed Quiet’s intensity.

There are similarities between Big Brother and Quiet, but the dissimilarities are significant. Where Big Brother would be tightly edited, directed, and as stage-managed as The Truman Show, Quiet—at least in theory—would be feral, unedited, and interactive, with each participant given their own Japanese-style sleeping pod, fitted with CCTV camera streamed live to their own channel. The event would last a month in terms of setup and tributary spectacle, with “podwellians” arriving two weeks before New Year’s Eve. Instead of 10 or 15 participants, 60-plus artists would submit to an interrogation and, if accepted, register and move in, joining 30 or so event officials and staff. Podwellians were restricted to the cavernous subbasement and first floor of a former warehouse at 353 Broadway, with offices, exhibitions, and parties based upstairs and two doors north at a building known to staff as the “Luvvyplex.” As usual, the door to the street would be open, and the public was free to enter, gawp, join in.

Josh canvassed ideas from favorite artist collaborators, including many of his first Pseudo staff, as if reaching for that earlier creative innocence. Jeff Gompertz would design and run the “pod” hotel, V. Owen Bush a banquet hall serving 200 meals a day with his workforce of chefs, waiters, and kitchen staff, while Alex Arcadia designed and built an elaborate “Arcadian temple” at a cost that rose from ten to twenty to thirty-forty-fifty thousand dollars, with live mics and eerie chants—but which no one was allowed to enter.

As discussions continued, plans firmed. The only shower would be housed in a clear geodesic dome located next to the pods and in full view of the banqueting hall, close to actually public toilets and an interrogation room in which podwellians would be grilled to the point of breakdown, both upon entry and at the whim of an Interrogator. There was to be a toxic waste dump, complete with flammable chemicals, and a subbasement nightclub called Hell, in addition to the most extreme installation—an operational firing range with an armory of pistols, rifles, and submachine guns. In a nod to the art establishment, Josh also recruited Leo Koenig, the son of a leading German art dealer, to curate a series of more traditional exhibits.

With areas defined by inflatable walls, the stated essence of the experiment was that everything would be public, nothing private, with all life shared, seen, recorded … as if the idea was to test the human organism, version 1.0, to destruction in this new environment. After the Pseudo board refused to fund the event, Josh used his own money, flying into a rage-like mania in which observers describe him peeling $100 bills from a roll of notes, on the spot, $20 to $30K at a time, for anyone who approached with a half-plausible idea, or sitting at a table distributing checks like free school milk. At one point he paid an angry associate $10,000 to take an installation down and make space for something else. Another participant claims to have taken $20,000 he’d been given to create a life-size chess tournament and blown it on a three-day binge, yet been allowed to stay and work on the event anyway, becoming convinced that Quiet was designed as a tax loss. With New York obsessed by stock prices and material displays of wealth, spending on something so nebulous and conceptual appeared not just eccentric, but perverse. Owen Bush watched and worried about the Fitzcarraldo-like obsession of his friend, “Cos he was really out to lunch, not available to anyone at that point.”

New York magazine came calling and heard: “At Pseudo, I am just building my platform … The idea is to get the machine running well enough so that Pseudo will benefit from my success. I am the product, get it? I don’t want to be Procter & Gamble, I want to be Tide.” Blustery bullshit that betrayed a loss of faith in the new VC-expanded Pseudo, whose value to Josh was now restricted to that old standby, leverage. Yet there was intelligence at work too.

“The ties that bind us are virtual, not nearly so physical as they’ve been in man’s historical past,” he breezed to a TV camera, sounding clear and confident. “As that virtuality becomes increasingly sophisticated, there’ll be a fundamental change in the human condition.”

And:

“At first everybody’s gonna like it, like when the radio came, when the television came—this new human experience … [But] as time goes by, you’ll find yourself in these more constrained, virtual boxes.”

Then:

“The nature of the net is that people want their fame on a day-to-day basis, rather than in their lifetime … One day we’re all going to wake up and realize that we’re just … servants. What we’re really trying to do is figure out how to re-weave human relations.”

Warhol was wrong, he declared in another interview—15 minutes of fame in a lifetime will not do. “Our view is that people want 15 minutes of fame every day.” Citizens will be conditioned not just to tolerate surveillance in the future, they will expect and even demand it.

The cogito ergo sum of the 21st century:

I am watched, therefore I am.

In Josh’s eyes, Quiet was an analogy for what the internet would become, the net a guide to what we will become. “You ask me, ‘What are people gonna do here?’” he teased one journalist. “We don’t know. That’s the experiment. Don’t bring your money, everything here is free. Except the video that we capture of you … That we own.”

And when a European writer demanded, “Whatever happened to nonconformity?” he grinned: “It went out in the ’60s. The next century is about complete conformity. We’re in the business of programming people’s lives.”

There are two versions of Quiet. First is the one offered by Josh and his lieutenants, the edgy extravaganza in which people are thrown together and tested against the mass of others; where drink and drugs and deviant behaviors stack and build until “the bunker” is a fevered hell and civilization frays, falls apart … at which point the authorities intervene and shut the thing down. The moral? Too much freedom brought madness, cruelty, chaos. A dispatch from the front. This is our future.

A good story—but like most good stories, a cover for something else.

So here’s another view.

Far from being unregulated, Quiet was awash with rules—all imposed by the Programmer himself at nightly planning meets with the aim of producing dramatic footage for the film he hoped to make. Fearful of being shut down prematurely, the first 10 days were disciplined, full of calculated Sturm und Drang, mostly failing to cohere or rise above the gratuitously aberrant. The Inside.com journalist Greg Lindsay thought the Quiet experiment “fascinating and noble” and loved the evening banquets, where “it really felt like this big artistic thing you’d dreamed about when you came to New York, with this feeling that you could discover anybody … that this happening could go anywhere.” He also saw the significance of the fact that “they could stimulate the lab rats in two directions,” with podwellians being watched, but also able to watch each other, implying the question “Will this lead to self-policing or anarchy?” An important one for the coming age.

But the moment Josh took Lindsay on a tour of the space, chattering claims for the various installations, the spectacle seemed to deflate and crumple into a yawn of banners and shooting galleries and an awareness of how forced much of it was—how geared to provoking a reaction, any reaction, prior to genuine insight. The contradiction at the heart of “reality” TV, in fact. The screen needs drama: Drama distorts truth.

The distinguished New York photojournalist Donna Ferrato couldn’t resist signing up to this alternate world upon reading about it in New York and the Times. After passing the ritual interrogation and receiving her standard-issue gray shirt and orange trousers, she found a pod and settled in, but was surprised at the event’s tameness as compared to the bathhouses and swingers’ clubs, the scenes of New York street life, chemical abandon at Studio 54, and even domestic abuse shelters she’d studied in the past. At the very least, she’d expected something ungoverned, sexy, free. But that wasn’t how it went. “Everyone was very self-conscious, very careful,” she says. “They were like little kids, really—even the performance artists Josh surrounded himself with. They liked to be wild and crazy and funny, but to me a lot of it seemed childish, not sexy or dangerous or challenging in a serious way.”

This reflected Josh. Performance art had been a fashionable form of expression in the 1980s but had run its course by the late ’90s. Ferrato saw that he responded to and admired these edgy people who would do anything; who were so at odds with his own careful, strategized approach to life, but who also often had little to say. In the ’80s, the simple act of breaking boundaries had seemed worthwhile, but by 1999—post-web—most obvious boundaries had been broken. With the rest untroubled by a man with a plastic vagina.

As with other inmates, Ferrato did take pleasure in the day-for-night atmosphere; the way the city receded and time fell away as you slipped into this other world, with podwellians allowed to leave but mostly choosing not to—“as though it would break the trance” in the words of one. Some footage shot by an Englishman named James Walsh shows the firing range to be no more than moderately diverting, as a succession of beautiful (mostly female) urbanites step up to shoot guns for the first time, some rattled by the experience, others full of G.I. Jane suck-my-dick spunk. In other words … so what?

Against this, a nighttime tracking shot of the whole three floors is mesmerizing, seeming to go on forever and revealing the sheer scale of the Quiet interior, swathed in twilight and a distant pulse of music, screens flickering everywhere, and the day’s detritus settled like dew, as podwellians appear sporadically, naked or in pajamas … the occasional clang or call echoing as through a cavern, but no hint of chaos or aggression.

A camera crew drifts past; the videographer, hired by Josh to capture the proceedings, turns to smile as she coaxes a subject to put his face to the glass dome of the shower and scream. Something womb-like and magical in the atmosphere.

After Christmas, with a week gone and no sign of the Giuliani enforcers, Josh stepped up the pressure. Performances grew more extreme and salacious; relationships intensified as drug consumption ramped and moved into the open. The Pseudo presenter Jess Zaino had been asked to bring celebrities but was too caught up in her own show to commit to Quiet. She came but hated what she found. “It was scary. I remember walking through—I don’t know what I was on, I must have been on something—and seeing people lying in these Japanese hotel pods, then turning around and there was a light over a man playing a theremin, and I was, like, ‘Get me the fuck out of this Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole.’”

At Pseudo, she explains, Josh’s thoughts and ideas had always been mediated by other people. “But here it was like you saw the crazy inner workings, complete. It was out of his brain and actually happening.” She describes one room where a photographer was taking portraits of people on chemical trips. “So you’d have somebody on crack, at the climax, as they were peaking, at the height. You know, heroin, ecstasy—all of it. And he blew the photos up to wall-size, so you would go in and be staring at the huge eyes of this person that was on this intense drug. And it was amazing. Incredible as art. But at Pseudo there were people who had humanity, and here it was like they literally went into the fucking Matrix.”

She stops and shudders.

“I didn’t like it!”

For Zaino, Quiet’s art was about spending the money—such a loaded medium in late-’90s New York—in this reckless fashion. But in her instinctive way, she also understood that the event had really come to be about Josh himself.

He instructed his bouncers to rile and reject male visitors, and sex became more overt. Josh had lost none of his instinct for drawing a crowd, and competition for entry was fierce the night Luvvy the clown attempted to coordinate the orgasms of three couples in the nightclub—a Reichian folly that was never likely to gel. With the Pseudo celebrity Tanya Corrin roaming the space in a white gown distributing apples, Josh’s videographer describes capturing this as “the most depressing experience of my life,” at least partly in deference to the fact that (as one female Pseudo presenter delicately put it) “none of the guys could get it up,” the only erect penis-like object belonging to a pair of lesbians taking part. Luvvy had little to say beyond “Boing!” and the Londoner James Walsh was struck by how much the jarring alter ego looked and dressed like Josh’s mother Roslyn Harris. “It was a bit Norman Bates, kind of spooky,” he says, even while expressing awe at the way Josh handled Quiet as a whole. “With all that booze and all those drugs around, you’d have expected violence. All those people wanting attention, and no sleep … I’d have lost it. He’s really, really good with people.”

Elsewhere, one of the artists recruited a “porn star” to be “stump-fucked” by the stump-legged performance artist Mangina, and a young couple was planted in one of the pods to have sex, available to view on channel 36, a wheeze that set other couples off and “created a sort of intimacy” in the mind of Josh, who was captivated by the show, claiming afterward, “Now I know how to make a cult.”

Shells on the firing range floor were ankle-deep, and interrogations grew random and brash. Order fell away in the banqueting hall, where performers danced naked on the table, which most guests found irritating more than outrageous. Owen Bush declared, “People don’t know how to deal with free, and they can’t handle it … The freeness is turning people into beasts,” while for the performer David Leslie, the point was the intensity itself, the feeling engendered by such rare, socially sanctioned abandon. As the millennium approached, Josh issued an open invitation to Quiet’s New Year’s Eve party via the New York Post.

In one reality, this end-game push was about Citizens losing control and regressing in an environment with no boundaries; in another there was a much funnier and more compelling show playing out. Lost from official accounts of Quiet is the detail that Josh had recruited subjects on a promise of $100,000 for anyone who could survive to the end of New Year’s Day … meaning any or all of 60 struggling and somewhat desperate artists—including a generous number of performance artists, for whom shamelessness and immunity to attrition were not just matters of pride, they were job descriptions.

So, big surprise: By New Year’s Eve no one had bailed. Society had survived its fortnight of freedom.

And as a reminder, 60 x $100 K = $6 million.

Ulp.

Josh also needed a climax for his film and would not be the first storyteller to learn that there are no endings in nature. Unbeknownst to anyone but the Programmer himself, his beautiful Orwellian drama had become an Ealing-esque comedy, spun around a private central dilemma—namely, How the fuck do I get these people out of here in the next 36 hours?

Josh groped for a plan … Josh found a plan. Like the Cat in the Hat, he was going to need help. And his Thing A would be Rudy Giuliani.

So. That evening there was a sumptuous banquet involving two whole roast hogs, but through the fog of drink and drugs and constant prodding, paranoia was setting in. Owen Bush and his girlfriend Gabrielle Latessa, cocreator of the banqueting hall, had a vicious public fight over drug consumption and an alleged affair; Nancy Smith, Josh’s personal quilt-maker, knocked out and came close to killing a woman she suspected of having sex with her husband. A naked play-fight in the shower ran out of control, with spectators gathering and the man involved biting the woman’s ass before accidentally propelling her through the glass shell, sending Josh into a rage that surprised everyone—not least the woman, who was uninjured but contrite. Podwellians noticed Josh behaving eccentrically, chomping his cigar while he paced the length of the pods like a wolf, looking for something that wasn’t there, waiting for something that wasn’t happening … calculating, calculating, calculating. One onlooker recalls thinking he wanted sex, but that wasn’t it.

Josh was agitated.

Only 24 hours to go and no cops. What did a guy have to do to get raided around here?

Lord knows Josh had tried. First, he’d invited a group of downtown politicians in to play Risk, arranging for podwellians to act up and Alfredo Martinez to fire a gun close by, making the wonks jump like mice. But no raid. So he paid the flamboyant fashion designer Maya Hansen somewhere between $20 and $25K, he thought—he wasn’t even counting any more—to create a window display featuring scantily clad women on trapezes, to which he contributed a neon sign flashing “GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS XXX” in the direction of the courthouse, a reference to the mayor’s much-derided campaign to clean up the Times Square area. Josh might as well have stood on the sidewalk with a megaphone and yelled “Come and get me, Rudy!” The scene stopped traffic on Broadway, for fuck’s sake.

But still no raid. It was a disgrace! So …

Couple arrested performing fellatio in the storefront window.

No raid.

Undercover officers (who might as well carry signs flashing “FUZZ”) show and mingle, one quizzing Nancy Smith on whether they all plan to commit suicide at midnight, while seeming more interested in the issue of whether all this stuff really counts as art, you know, in the Aristotelian sense of the term—and she laughing, “Look, pal, I’m making 10 grand a week here—there’s no way I’m gonna commit suicide …”

He goes away.

No raid.

Josh was Michael Caine at the end of The Italian Job, booty over a cliff at the back of the bus. Arrangements had been made for him to reprise his simultaneous orgasm act at midnight, but better sense prevailed and he simply gathered the Citizens for a photo instead, unable to commit to the moment. Furthermore, after inviting the public to attend, he was now irritated by what one guest describes as their “tittering, voyeuristic presence,” scowling, “I don’t owe these people their New Year’s Eve; they haven’t earned it.” So he locked the gawkers upstairs and projected porn on to the walls.

If Josh had been hoping to spark a riot (“RAID ME!”), he was disappointed. The journalist Greg Lindsay took a couple of friends and remembers a “respectful and well-behaved crowd, who were all excited to be there.” He also remembers a tributary reason for choosing Quiet as a destination that night, this being a thought that, “If anything’s going to happen in New York on New Year’s Eve, with Y2K or terrorism, the best place to be is in a subbasement three floors below the ground.”

Was that a conscious consideration? Seriously?

“It was conscious. I worked at Time Warner at that time and I thought, ‘Shit, most of the American media complex is round here, so it’d be a good place for a suitcase nuke.’ People forget the degree of tension, the apocalyptic feeling that was there even before 9/11.”

Josh gave up. What could he do? He phoned the bloody police himself. Still no raid. More guests arrived. People partied until the drugs wore off and then went to bed in their pods.

When it came, it came with a ferocity that shocked even Quiet’s host. The first anyone knew of one of the biggest raids seen in Manhattan since Prohibition was when the door exploded and officers streamed over the threshold in riot gear, then fanned through the building like stormtroopers, yelling and pointing guns and blinding podwellians with flashlights. Through the cacophony, Citizens heard shocked cries.

“What the fuck?”

“Oh, gross, man.”

“These people are living like pigs!”

Hardly what Josh had bargained for: captains and officers from the local fire department and police force, agents of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and a rifle-toting SWAT team wading through cartridge casings and chemicals and moldering food, puncturing inflatable walls and watching the facade melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz …

I’ll get you, my pretty …

One witness describes a FEMA officer saying something to Josh that appeared to leave him shaken. Leo Koenig was woken and forced to trudge around the space cringing explanation. But who could explain? The game had turned serious. Addled and scared, podwellians were pitched into the morning. Some had homes to go to, others not, but a plan was agreed to reconvene at 1 pm. In the meantime many lingered, still in uniform and reluctant to break the trance, not knowing what else to do.

Good news: the Programmer had his operatic ending!

Bad news: His videographer, keen to see in the New Year anywhere other than the bunker, had dismissed her crew and left hours earlier. Seems the Poetic Justice Bureau had been right behind FEMA. Josh had his ending, but not on tape.

Needless to say, at 1 o’clock the doors remained locked. No Citizen would reenter, and Josh was long gone. Alex Arcadia and Owen Bush stayed on and lived in the building for a while, with Bush hiring a dumpster to remove shells from the firing range, shoveling them up like snow from a path. Gompertz and some of the artists lobbied hard for Josh to make Quiet permanent, turn it into a real-world TV environment, but Josh had had enough, seemed distressed, angry, disdainful of his subjects’ continuing need. For the Programmer, as for most workers and Citizens, there would be a “hangover” lasting months, although despite my best efforts, I can’t find a single person who regrets having taken part.

“It was a genius way of ending the event,” laughs Donna Ferrato, whose favorite photos of the raid are up on her website. “It was high drama, not least for the people who shut it down, who couldn’t believe what they were seeing—who couldn’t believe what had been going on right under their noses. This whole world had been created, without permits or permission.”

A wistful look comes over her when I ask what she liked best.

“I loved living in a world with no secrets and no sense of time, where we were little children, being taken care of. And also watching Josh, who to me was a fascinating creature. You can see him as crazy, but there’s substance to what he does. He’s always testing, seeing how far this will go and that will go, and what kind of reaction he’s going to get. And he always knows what everyone’s little weak spots and flaws are: He’s very perceptive like that. It was a movie set, but with no script, where it was just about being there.”

So the zany installations, the guns and chemicals and temples and games of Risk hadn’t been the point. Quiet had been convoluted by too many ideas: What power it possessed had emerged naturally from the math of connection, the jazz of human relations, with the rest just display, another blow job in the window. Josh was still finding his métier. All the same, Alanna Heiss of MoMA’s contemporary P.S.1 gallery would ultimately deem Quiet “one of the most extraordinary activities I’ve attended anywhere in the world,” which “should be thought of in the same way as Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball”—one of the most celebrated social events in New York history. She also gave Josh a nickname: Oz. The man behind the screen.

Four years before a Harvard undergrad named Mark Zuckerberg chanced on the idea for Facebook, Josh Harris had peered into the future and seen it, tried to anticipate what it would become. Ambitious as Quiet was, it had only hinted at the impact he envisioned. After a brief interval spent licking wounds, the Pseudo founder would return with a new template. And this would be the real thing.

Adapted from Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and the First Great Dotcom Swindle, by Andrew Smith (published by Grove Atlantic/Black Cat, March 2019).

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narcisbolgor-blog · 7 years ago

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Can VR Survive in a Cutthroat Attention Economy?

Last decade, the technology was questionable; this decade, the content. But today the greatest challenge for VR—as both an industry and medium—is no longer the tech or the content but the problem of time and attention. How, exactly, will or does VR fit into the collective human schedule? When and where will large numbers of people “do” VR, in a time when nearly every second of week is contested territory?

Today, I think only the deeply jaded would deny that VR has the goods, or is at least pretty close. The goggles could get better, but they work. Every year the creators of VR films and games produce a handful of stunning, memorable pieces (even if they haven’t always quite figured out the stubborn tension between narrative and interaction). Sundance is an important annual showcase—last year’s Asteroids, Miyubi and Chocolate were unforgettable—and this year brought new wonders like Spheres and Wolves in the Walls, among others. Sure, there could be more of it, and not all VR content is great, but something as simple as a VR tour of the Obama White House can be a memorable, affecting trip. But when or where will people actually spend the time to see this stuff? That’s the hard question, and one that has really burned VR over the last few years. Media history makes it clear that a commercial medium can only survive if it finds itself a reliable, repeatable place in the national schedule for significant numbers of people. (Those that don’t, like the 90s Web-TV efforts Pseudo.com and MSN 2.0, simply die after burning through lots of money).

Looking back, every successful medium has either “killed” a predecessor (in the manner that television displaced radio in the home, or that streaming video is chipping away at cable) or “colonized” time and attention that was unused or used for something else. However, that was somewhat easier when people actually had free time. Today, we live in a media environment where billions of dollars are spent fighting for the time spent “waiting at the bus stop."

Making matters even more challenging: unlike other newish forms of media, VR demands not just passing attention but the absolutely highest quality of devotion. Other media can target brains that are doing something else as well. That helps explain the success of podcasting, which has plundered the driving hours, or social media, which thrives on what Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed memorably called the “Bored at Work Network". Yet no one waiting for a bus pulls out VR goggles (at least not yet), and you still can’t turn to VR if you get bored at a meeting. Meanwhile, VR units face incredibly tough competition inside what we call our homes but are really more like media studios, festooned as they are with television, videogame consoles, computers, and phones, not to mention old-school interactive units like roommates or family.

All this points to an unexpected near-term future for VR. It wasn’t unreasonable to bet that VR would take over home prime-time hours, but that hasn’t worked out as planned—television and traditional gaming are just too tough as competitors. But the time that is open is the time people spend outside of the home, looking for something to do, alone or with friends. As Pete Billington, director of the critically acclaimed Wolves in the Walls, points out, good VR film experiences really aren’t that dissimilar from live, immersive theatre productions like Sleep No More or, especially, Then She Fell, both of which attract giant lines in New York City.

The solution, then, would be to focus on scaling up immersive theatre to the masses (perhaps focusing on character-driven VR, as Edward Saatchi, a co-founder of Oculus Story Studios, argues). It is the colonization of whatever time people might otherwise spend outside the home, one way or another—at theaters, movies, museums, art galleries, or even just bars—that holds the most promise for VR.

In fact, that’s basically what’s going on in places like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and across Asia, where VR palaces and arcades are springing up across town like so many bowling alleys or discos in the 1970s. In New York alone there’s the Cinépolis Chelsea, which charges $10 to watch any of four VR films; an IMAX VR center that offers a mix of multiplayer games and movie-based ancillary experiences at up to $15 a pop; and VR World, which bills itself as the largest VR center in the Western Hemisphere, with $39 buying a customer two hours to try out different experiences. (It sells cocktails and plays dance music.)

VR producers could also take a shot at the time many people think they devote to health, whether mental or physical. If people feel some need to spend time relaxing—and if some forms of VR, with their influence over the emotions, can leave one in a blissful and composed mental state after a mere 12-minute experience—perhaps some VR experiences may earn their way into our schedules that way. This also might help solve the problem of making people come back more than once, with exercise-driven VR starting to compete with, say, yoga.

It all suggests that VR, despite what everyone once thought, needs to succeed outside the home before it can succeed inside. It needs to be of value out there before people are convinced they need it in here. Hence, as unlikely as it may sound, a technology that once seemed destined to produce a new generation of shut-ins might play a part in getting people out of their houses.

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trendingprinter · 6 years ago

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lazylittledude · 6 years ago

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#Pocket #digg #ifttt

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clothinglennyco · 6 years ago

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This Guy Predicted Society's Thirst for Internet Fame—in 1999

This Guy Predicted Society’s Thirst for Internet Fame—in 1999

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Josh Harris may have been the first internet millionaire in New York. As founder of Jupiter Communications and New York’s first online media portal, Pseudo.com, he rode the web 1.0 dot-com boom to a fortune of $85 million. But as the 1990s ramped up, his view of what the internet would do to us darkened, and he spent his fortune on a series of lurid social experiments aimed to…

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taezhnaya · 7 years ago

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Видеотека: 8 любимых документальных фильмов куратора ЦДК Майи Кузиной // Видеотека

Моё первое столкновение с кинематографом не связано с документальным кино. Отец моей школьной подруги был увлечённым синефилом и периодически устраивал для нас киносеансы, проходившие в атмосфере невероятной строгости: разговаривать, есть, ёрзать и, как тогда казалось, даже дышать не рекомендовалось — потому что ничто не должно было отвлекать от Кино. Сейчас я вспоминаю об этом с улыбкой, но тогда мне, мягко говоря, подвижному ребёнку, хотелось саботировать процесс. Но из любви к семье и желания быть причастной я себя сдерживала, благодаря чему и сформировалась моя нежная привязанность к кинематографу, который стал потом предметом профессионального интереса.

Нашим кинообразованием подруга продолжила заниматься самостоятельно, предложив неокрепшим умам роковой набор из фильмов «Мечтатели», «Ускользающая красота», «Криминальное чтиво», «Повар, вор, его жена и её любовник», «На последнем дыхании», «Приключение» и далее по списку с условным названием «другое кино». Классическую коллекцию разбавили случайно найденная у друзей VHS-кассета с фильмом сомнительной репутации «Кен Парк» Ларри Кларка (вероятно, использовавшаяся как порно без оглядки на имя режиссёра) и практически одновременно с этим увиденные в полночь по телевизору «Шоугёлз» Пола Верховена. Оба эти опыта радикально расширили мои представления о жанровых возможностях кинематографа, а заодно избавили от снобизма и проложили ��уть к совсем разным фильмам.

К документальным фильмам я пришла уже в более сознательном возрасте, когда почувствовала острую необходимость в дополнительном знании о героях, явлениях и культурах, интересовавших меня тогда. Воспринимая док исключительно как источник справочного материала, я двигалась по восходящей: от архивных телерепортажей и хроникальных материалов с просторов интернета к признанным шедеврам мировой документалистики и работам смешанных жанров. В моём списке — фильмы, которые повлияли на моё восприятие документального и реального и обрисовали границы и возможности жанра.

The Summer of Rave 1989

Самым бесценным источником информации о мире для меня всегда были документальные фильмы BBC. Они задали особый формат культурологического исследования — впоследствии его адаптировали на разные лады современные режиссёры. Любимым было и остаётся кино об электронной музыке, особенно 90-х: это эпоха, в которую я родилась, но которая как будто существовала без меня, так что я смогла ощутить лишь последствия.

Скрупулёзный, почти академический анализ клубной культуры стал для меня откровением — как если бы в школьную программу ввели историю рейва. Самым интересным примером я бы назвала «The Summer of Rave 1989» об истоках рейв-движения в Англии: к такого рода документальным репортажам сегодня обращаются издания вроде Vice и Dazed — каждый исследует свою территорию современности.

GREY GARDENS, 1975

Серые сады

Великий фильм американских документалистов Альберта и Дэвида Мейзлсов, который рассказывает о некогда известной певице Эдит Бувье Бил и её дочери — бывшей модели и участнице светских раутов Нью-Йорка «Маленькой Эди» Бувье Бил; обе женщины жили в ветхой усадьбе «Серые сады» в Ист-Хэмптоне. Фильм был задуман как история Джеки Онассис и Ли Радзивилл, которые при��одились им родственницами, однако после визита в место детских воспоминаний и знакомства с его нынешними жительницами братья выбрали новых главных героинь — эксцентричных, живых и выдающихся, но уже не таких публичных.

Я всегда относилась к этой картине как к одному из шедевров документалистики и образцу метода «прямого кино». Но не так давно узнала, у что картины есть культовый статус и в мире моды. Экстравагантный стиль «Маленькой Эди» вдохновил не один десяток дизайнеров и фэшн-фотографов — например, Стивена Мейзела, чьи снимки появились в итальянском Vogue в 1999-м. Обычно игровое кино, связанное с модой, взаимодействует с документальным исключительно в формате «фильм о дизайнере». Для меня такое единение документалистики и фэшн-мира — яркий пример того, что реальность больше вымысла.

GRIZZLY MAN, 2005

Человек-гризли

Удивительная история о защитнике медведей гризли Тимоти Тредуэлле, которому удалось собрать уникальный видеоархив записей о нежных, но трагических взаимоотношениях с дикой природой — герой был убит медведем.

Несмотря на невероятность истории и новаторский метод того, как Тредуэлл использовал камеру для конструирования собственной реальности, я хотела бы заострить внимание на другом — том, как режиссёр поступает с сохранившимися аудиозаписями убийства героя и его девушки. В моей профессиональной среде как раз разворачивается дискуссия об этике в документальном кино и вопрос, уместно ли показывать смерть и страдания и как правильно о них рассказать, остаётся открытым — всё зависит от контекста и позиции, которую выбирает автор.

Херцог сделал в своё время поразивший меня выбор и мастерски нашёл художественное решение, которое на поверку оказалось даже более сильным и эмоционально заряженным. Он не открывает зрителю доступ к содержимому аудиофайла, а показывает, как меняется в лице близкая подруга Тимоти, наблюдая за режиссёром в наушниках. Мне кажется, главный вывод, который формулирует сам Херцог, таков: наличие в руках киноаппарата не превращает документалиста в бесчувственную камеру наблюдения, а также не снимает ответственности за свои действия ни перед зрителем, ни перед героями.

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC, 2009

Мы живём на людях

Слегка видоизменив главную уорхоловскую формулу человеческой природы на «Все хотят свои пятнадцать минут славы», в 1999 году интернет-пионер и предприниматель Джош Харрис пригласил больше ста художников в неприметный нью-йоркский подвал и обставил его видеокамерами, которые транслировали реальность героев на сайт с говорящим названием pseudo.com. Проект «Quiet: We Live in Public» стал настолько скандальным, что его пришлось закрыть. Однако на этом опыты Харриса по изучению влияния максимальной публичности на психику человека не закончились: на полгода он сделал героями себя и свою девушку.

Безумный эксперимент стал предвестником первых реалити-шоу. Предположение Харриса — о том, что люди легко променяют свою частную жизнь ради интереса публики и фиктивного ощущения любви и единства — оказалось настолько верным, что продолжает оправдывать существование современных социальных сетей.

1966

Взгляните на лицо

В короткометражной работе представителя ленинградской школы Павла Когана использована скрытая камера, наблюдающая за тем, как посетители Эрмитажа изучают «Мадонну Литту» Да Винчи. В 60-е появление этого технического средства открыло новые возможности для документального кино и позволило проникнуть туда, куда прежде не было доступа: к подлинным чувствам человека. «Взгляните на лицо» — галерея самых разных портретов, притягивающих своей чистотой и открытостью.

В прошлом году мне удалось увидеть фильм на большом экране, спустя почти десять лет после знакомства с ним. Тогда мне вдруг стало понятно, что в сегодняшнем мире тотального наблюдения за человеком представить такое безобидное и даже очаровательное использование такого мощного инструмента, как скрытая камера, практически невозможно.

SANS SOLEIL, 1982

Без солнца

Так получилось, что эту картину я впервые посмотрела без звука (она почему-то была фоном для беседы в гостях у приятелей), — случайность, которая помогла мне по-новому осознать чувственные и поэтические возможности изображения и монтажа. Картины из совсем других миров — в основном Японии и Африки — размеренно, а иногда резко сменяли друг друга и замирали, заставляя обратить на себя пристальное внимание и подобраться ещё ближе к экрану.

Чувственный опыт невероятной силы, полученный в тот момент от просмотра, сделал для меня очевидной почти обсессивную потребность в бесперебойном источнике новых уникальных образов и желании побывать там, где ещё не был. Этим, наверное, и объясняется любовь к кино, особенно к документальному. После просмотра фильма так, как он был задуман, мне стала ясна игровая рамка: несуществующие письма к несуществующей женщине, которые собрали текст и изображение в новые смыслы и превратили антропологические кинозаметки в путешествие памяти.

1990

Central Park

Вайсман определённо расширил мои представления о возможных масштабах документального кино: самые короткие, «короткометражки», как часто шутят коллеги, длятся минут шестьдесят, а «полнометражные» нередко приближаются в четырём часам. Фильмы-полотна, представляющие собой фиксацию происходящего методом fly-on-the-wall, рассказывают о жизни учебных заведений, государственных учреждений, коммун и районов: Вайсман берётся за целое и раскладывает его на детали, позволяя изучить его со всех возможных сторон, и не выключает камеру, пока в кадре происходит жизнь.

Такое погружение в другое измерение — как в чащу самых отдалённых зон городского парка — мне очень близко, а сам режиссёр дорог ещё и тем, что его ретроспективу мы делали в ЦДК пару лет назад, и нам даже удалось пообщаться, хоть и по скайпу. Центральный парк — с одной стороны отдельный мир в гигантском мегаполисе, а с другой — его уменьшенная копия, вместившая в себя его искусство, культуру, порядки, политические настроения и социальные отношения.

66 SCENER FRA AMERIKA, 1982

66 сцен из жизни Америки

В документальном фильме «Пять препятствий» Ларс фон Триер ставит эксперимент над своим любимым режиссёром и учителем — датским кинематографистом Йоргеном Летом — и предлагает пять раз переснять его самый известный фильм «Совершенный человек». Каждая попытка содержит в себе новое хитроумное ограничение, цель которого — разобраться в устройстве «совершенного режиссёра» Йоргена Лета так же, как тот пытался объяснить для себя механизмы человеческой природы.

В «66 сценах из жизни Америки» Лет использует тот же приём и раскладывает американскую жизнь на структурны�� элементы: дайнер, кока-кола, хайвей, Малибу-Бич, вечерний Манхэттен, кладбище кадиллаков, Энди Уорхол, поедающий гамбургер, красивая женщина, «Джек Дэниелс», красивый мужчина и, конечно, американский флаг. Получившиеся экспериментальные открытки, снятые неподвижной, будто застывшей от удивления камерой и не связанные никаким сюжетом, он собирает в энциклопедию главных визуальных образов и культурных символов Америки эпохи Рейгана.

#interview

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