Super Stream Me
Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul streamed their lives non-stop for 15 days on the Internet to investigate what our attention-based culture does to people. Inspired by Dave Eggers’s book The Circle, they completely removed the boundary between their online and offline worlds. What happens if other people are watching everything you do? What kind of human being do you become if your life is one long status update – anything for a “like"? The small cameras mounted on their bodies transmit live, uninterrupted images to the VPRO TV website, supplemented by data on their heart rates, their moods illustrated by graphs and maps of the routes they have taken in the past three hours. They share all sorts of stuff with the viewer: from private phone numbers to frank revelations during therapy sessions. They reflect extensively on their experiment in conversations on self-censorship, shame, vulnerability, wanting to make a good impression and feeling judged. Prompted by the Edward Snowden quote “Privacy is not about what you have to hide, but about what you want to protect,” they decide, one week before Super Stream Me is scheduled to end, that the experiment has gone far enough.