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<div>Hello all</div>
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<div>I’m still here with an ear to the wire, and glad for the listserv form even if including it in current flows takes a little more intention. Empyre continues to usefully connect and prompt, and I’m regularly happy and surprised to see who stops in to say
hello.</div>
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<div>It’s Martin Luther King Jr., weekend here in the States, when many gather to re-center on the collective through service and song. As a white American academic, I look through doubly-thick, even triply-thick glass, and like many of you perhaps struggle
to maintain the humbly empathetic posture and attentive senses called for by the world's present crises, and my role within them. Certainly an international list like this has been a help to that for me, especially when we risk the time to read closely and
write clearly.</div>
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<div>Here in Illinois, though some shifts in leadership on our campus left me holding a fuller plate of administrative responsibilities, I continue to proceed (slowly) with work on a few fronts:</div>
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<div>- Ned O’Gorman and I are finishing up a book on the role of film in America’s rise to nuclear hegemony, with an emphasis on the story of an Air Force film studio based in Hollywood.</div>
<div>- I’ve been contributing to another larger collaboration that tilts more toward the social-scientific, on perception of algorithms at work in newsfeeds such as those on Facebook.</div>
<div>- More in the realm of New Media Art, Katja Kwastek and I have been doing some thought and writing on slowness in new media aesthetics.</div>
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<div>Of interest to this list from my recent travels might be <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULTa42QCYL8">
an overview</a> of the Digital Humanities from a theory perspective I gave here at Illinois, or
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf8KZpotc-M">a first step</a> into some new work with Orit Halpern presented last Fall at MediaArtHistories in Montreal.</div>
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<div>I’ll also be taking a turn soon as Editor-in-Chief of the journal <i>Media-N</i>, where hopefully I’ll also be hearing from some of you through proposals for issues and articles.</div>
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<div>Wishing you all a good year, and looking forward to what empyre brings.</div>
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<div>Kevin Hamilton</div>
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<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;">
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<div>Professor and Associate Director, School of Art and Design</div>
<div>Senior Associate Dean, College of Fine and Applied Arts</div>
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<div>University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign</div>
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