[-empyre-] Kevin Hamilton: Resolution for Digital Futures

[Timothy Murray]

There must be an application for the iPhone designed to help one keep 
New Year's resolutions, and as 2008 ends I'm struck by the smoothness 
and high-definition of our technologies of self-maintenance. With 
ease and formal beauty, one's every action, hope and desire can be 
logged and transferred, producing new opportunities for surveillance, 
commerce, and apparently, political education and action. In my world 
- far from the traumas of war or slavery - 2008 was a year when the 
gaps between life's cinematic frames closed ever more tightly - we 
live at more frames per second, more moments and movements captured 
with each status update or rss entry.

I'm as seduced as anyone by the beauty of continuous flow, marveling 
at the Marey-like beauty of today's expert Twitterers. But in 2009 I 
hope to find more opportunities for conscious use or refusal in 
regards to such habits of technological being. Yesterday's "Blow up 
your TV" is today's "iPhone in a blender." There must be more ways of 
swimming than the strokes I see, ways that attend to the full economy 
of motion and energy spent, by whom and for whom.


Bio: Kevin Hamilton (US) is an artist and researcher at the 
University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where he chairs the New 
Media Program. 2008 saw Kevin tenured and on leave from the 
University, at work on projects about cybernetics, microcephaly, 
creativity, and atomic test films (not all at the same time.) He also 
has a short piece in the just-released book Re-Enchantment, edited by 
David Morgan and James Elkins.

-- 
Renate Ferro and Tim Murray
Co-Moderators, -empyre- a soft-skinned-space
Department of Art/ Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Cornell University