Ondi Timoner’s documentary, We Live in Public, won a grand jury prize at Sundance Saturday. The documentary video looks at often overlooked Internet pioneer Josh Harris, a dot com millionaire who built a television network for the web, Pseudo Programs, back when most of us were still on dial-up.

Pseudo closed down in September 2000, and Harris moved on to his Quiet “lifecasting” experiment. In it 100 people were to live together for 100 days in a bunker watched over by dozens of video cameras. That footage, along with his We Live in Public project in which he and his girlfriend lived in a 24-hour broadcast of their loft, is the basis for the film.

The NYTimes:

It almost sounds fake, but the documentary makes for compelling viewing for many of the same reasons “Woodstock” is. In addition to featuring a fair amount of nudity and drug taking, “We Live in Public” offers a portrait of a moment in the culture when everything changed.

When Mr. Harris formed Pseudo Programs in 1993, personal e-mail addresses weren’t the norm, but Mr. Harris was convinced that lives would come to be lived not only on the Web, but in public as well. Among other prescient notions he suggested that the Internet would become the platform of choice for all media, much of which would be generated by the people formerly known as the audience.

I was a peripheral part of that late ’90s scene. I produced a series of segments for his Pseudo Networks and went to a few events. But the Quiet bunker held no allure for me:

Downtown heat seekers clamored to get in, handing over their Social Security numbers for the opportunity to eat, defecate, make love and fight for the benefit of those watching. Many were interrogated and scrutinized in a space that was part hippy commune — free food and free love — and part Stanford Prison Experiment. Mr. Harris stayed on the edges of the human ant farm, watching, gathering data, assigning roles. People called him Oz.

Via Fred Wilson, “If you are interested in the early days of the Internet and the guy who invented a lot of the stuff we now take for granted (streaming audio, streaming video, self publishing, etc), then you might also enjoy the film.”

The trailer for the film, which includes graphic language and images, is after the break.