How did people promote themselves, and express their video based creative output before YouTube?

Many may think that before YouTube, video online was restricted to that of a strictly corporate, or adult, nature.  However you’d be wrong.

In the mid-1990s, fuelled by the infamous dot-com boom, a New Yorker called Josh Harris developed a striking and monumental piece of live art.

Called ‘Quiet: We Live in Public’ the project turned a Broadway warehouse into a 24 hour, 7 day a week party for over a month.  “So what?” you may be asking, when a fair share of doc-commers were reveling in their newfound wealth and status, living a truly bacchanalian existence.

The difference was WLIP was broadcast online, live and streaming for its duration on Harris’ online TV portal Psudeo.com.  This in an era when big brother was still an Orwell novel, and minor celebrities didn’t flit from one reality programme to another.

WLIP was raw, untamed and totally new.  People queued round the block to get in, and once they were in they were filmed, in the words of Common, “fighting, f**king or dreaming”.  Anything went, drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, as well as the fun and frivolity that comes with people having a truly good time. 

With cameras in places even Endemol won’t film, military style bunk-beds, a shooting range, and a 24 hour party atmosphere, the project endured until closed by the police after one reveler leveled an assault charge on another.

So is Harris the father to modern Internet voyerism?  Yes and no.  Arguably, without WLIP YouTube could never have existed, as could much of what counts as TV these days.  And in a way, neither could twitter, facebook, or other social networking applications, which arguably have some debt to WLIP.

After WLIP closed, Harris installed cameras in the up-market apartment he and his then girlfriend shared, promising to share every element of their day with the public.  In chasing his next artistic dream, Harris unwittingly caused the end of his relationship and spent the last of his $80 million fortune (Harris made his millions selling his stake in Jupiter communications, a web research company he founded).

A film about Harris, and WLIP, is released this week – one I’m excited to see, and fascinated by the potential insight it offers into a true internet pioneer.

I’ll write a review once I’ve seen it, but maybe you should judge for yourself, as we all know what can happen when you share too much online.