When to Keep Your Mouth Shut by Benjamin Kennet

The rise of various technologies that change our relationship with time-clocks, wristwatches, railways, telegrams, telephones, and the Internet included-has provoked anxiety about our ability to exist in the present moment. Is there a clock on top of the camera? Is he watching the seconds creep by, one by one?ĭespite its weirdness, I see Bennett's videos as engaging with widespread cultural concerns about our ability to appreciate time. I wondered how he keeps track of the time. In the video it was still morning, and the light was crisp in my room it was dark, and taxis picked up drunks from the pub outside my house. I had to go out and missed the last 15 minutes of #44 and watched them five hours later when I got home, now no longer live. She opened it and told me she hated it and closed it again.

I spent the time I had the feed open flicking around on my browser, checking Twitter, making coffee, instant messaging my friends. They came from Sweden and Poland and Australia and South America. In the chatbox next to the video feed, the same messages kept coming up: “Why?” “What's the joke?” “WHAT IS THIS!” I wondered who these people stumbling across this feed were, momentarily intrigued, then bemused, then elsewhere, looking for something more fun. When I started watching there were 11 other viewers about an hour later there were eight of us. On a cold afternoon in February I watched most of the second half of ' Sitting and Smiling #44' as it was streamed live. None of this seems to explain why he has spent more than 186 hours sitting still and smiling. For the whole thing there was no sound, just the silence of a webcam recording: a slight buzzing, or scratching, as if it were imitating a vinyl record still spinning after the album has finished. If I paid close attention, I made out his chest and shoulders contracting and expanding with his breath, and sometimes saw the vibrations of his head and neck as he strained to keep them straight. I saw the corner of his mouth droop slightly and rise again. I tried to watch through the video, ' Sitting and Smiling #25 ,' in real time, but I couldn't do it, and I ended up skipping around in it looking for any change, for hints that the video might be a loop, for some explanation of its purpose. He starts to smile at the beginning of the video and doesn't stop-or do anything else-for the rest of the four hours.

Each video is four hours long, give or take a few minutes, and each features a young man sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor of an undecorated room, with a big cheesy grin stretched across his face. The link took me to the man’s 25th video. Late one night in January, I found myself on Reddit and came across a thread titled, 'This guy streams himself sitting and smiling for hours. There are many ways to kill time on the Internet.

When to Keep Your Mouth Shut by Benjamin Kennet