Hacker Cinema
Secret Mall Apartment
2025 · Film · documentary · 92 min
Directed by Jeremy Workman
In 2003, eight Rhode Islanders created a secret apartment inside a busy mall and lived there for four years, filming everything along the way. Far more than a prank, the secret apartment became a deeply meaningful place for all involved.
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3 comments on Hacker News
"Secret Mall Apartment" is a documentary on Netflix that includes a lot of the videos that Townsend took during the whole project. (There's a few stills in the article.)
It's quite interesting to watch, because Townsend himself is quite the character. There's a scene where he's having an argument with his (now ex) wife that shows that Townsend has extremely different priorities than the typical person. (And why his first marriage failed, too.)
This quote brings to mind the movie "Secret Mall Apartment," which I watched last weekend:
> Art is absolutely an expression of yourself. But your art is not you. Try not to entangle your ego with your art. If someone does not like your art, that does not mean they do not like you. If they think your art is bad, that does not mean they think you are bad.
The movie is partly about an apartment built in secret in a mall as an art project, and partly about the lead artist, Michael Townsend. Townsend is generally the opposite of Marsh in that he isn't interested in money, to the point of pretty much having none.
Getting back to the quote about ego: There is a scene in the movie where Michael is having a conversation with his wife about building the apartment, and his wife is emphasizing that she's trying to set up their new home. Michael clearly had his ego entangled with his art, to the point where it caused his marriage to fail.
The Secret Mall Apartment documentary got significantly more collaboration from nearly everyone involved, including a dump of the significant digital video stash from the project. Lots of people have tried making this documentary but until this one, nobody's gotten anywhere close to this deep about it. I'm on the periphery of this particular art scene and have seen lots of the related stuff.