Kevin Hamilton

At the Interface: The Loaded Rhetorical Gestures of Nuclear Legitimacy and Illegitimacy

This essay examines an important icon of American nuclear modernity, the operator at the interface control panel, to show how the logic of nuclear legitimation in the Cold War has perdured into the contemporary world, and that nuclear terrorists and bomb-wielding “rogue states” can function as inventions that rationalize Americas claim to nuclear hegemony. Through a critical account of the “competent” gestures of the state-sanctioned nuclear operator at the interface, and the “incompetent” gestures of the state-repudiated nuclear terrorist, we argue that that the rationalization of nuclear weapons, in a psychoanalytic sense, has depended on rationalization in the Weberian sense.

Urban Computing and Mobile Devices

Learn about projects on participant-environment interaction, the leveraging of information from mobile sensors, user authentication, and urban computing navigation.

HCI and new media arts: methodology and evaluation

Successful collaborations between New Media Arts and HCI tend to develop hybrid techniques that promote balanced contributions from both disciplines. However, since many of these collaborations are one-off or highly dependent on the researchers/artists involved, systematic discussions of the role and impact of the various evaluation techniques and methodologies are missing. This workshop is aimed at practitioners from both HCI and the Arts as a venue to discuss the contribution that one anothers techniques have made to their own practice, evaluate critical issues in HCI/New Media Collaboration, and examine ways that existing approaches can be extended for a deeper role in practice, design, and research.

Tools in support of creative collaboration

Creativity support tools are set an especially difficult task when they are applied to art/science collaboration. Not because of any fundamental incompatibility between the disciplines, but because creativity support tools are rarely supple enough to manage dramatically shifting requirements at various stages of design or handle the diversity of artifacts that might be generated. Traditional methods of evaluation of collaborative support tools may not address these aspects. This workshop aims to examine three specific areas open to expanded modes of evaluation; the social aspects of tools and tool use, how artifacts are created and manipulated in support tools, and how the expanding contexts of art/science collaborations may be rapidly changing support tool requirements.

The Illusion of Control: Placebo Effects of Control Settings

Algorithmic prioritization is a growing focus for social media users. Control settings are one way for users to adjust the prioritization of their news feeds, but they prioritize feed content in a way that can be difficult to judge objectively. In this work, we study how users engage with difficult-to-validate controls. Via two paired studies using an experimental system -- one interview and one online study -- we found that control settings functioned as placebos. Viewers felt more satisfied with their feed when controls were present, whether they worked or not. We also examine how people engage in sensemaking around control settings, finding that users often take responsibility for violated expectations -- for both real and randomly functioning controls. Finally, we studied how users controlled their social media feeds in the wild. The use of existing social media controls had little impact on users satisfaction with the feed; instead, users often turned to improvised solutions, like scrolling quickly, to see what they want.

Visualities of strategic vision: Lookout Mountain Laboratory and the deterrent state from nuclear tests to Vietnam

This article considers two visual cultures of America’s deterrent state in the Cold War, the cinematic and cybernetic, by following the history of the 600th Photographic Squadron of the United States (US) Air Force in Vietnam and its 1950s progenitor, the 1352nd Motion Picture Squadron, or Lookout Mountain Laboratory. We argue that cinematic and cybernetic visual cultures were at the heart of a Cold War visual alliance that was also a Cold War visual contest, and cameras were situated at the centre of the contest. Specifically, the cinematic and the cybernetic represent two distinct visualities of vision, as the Cold War cameras of the Air Force assumed either transcendental or transcendent positions. The former, in keeping with a cinematic visuality, was oriented towards casting America as a sight to see in the context of its war on communism, with cameras operating as a condition of possibility for the construction of the ‘image’, whereas the latter, in keeping with a cybernetic visuality, was oriented towards the American appetite to see, to monitor and survey the world over, with cameras operating as processors of ‘information’. The history of the 600th Photographic Squadron and its progenitor, Lookout Mountain Laboratory, suggests that the transition from cinematic to cybernetic visualities of vision was part of a broader transformation in the US Cold War state from a nuclear deterrent state to a supra-nuclear deterrent state.

The cybernetics thought collective project: Using computational methods to reveal intellectual context in archival material

This paper discusses “The Cybernetics Thought Collective: A History of Science and Technology Portal Project,” a collaborative effort among four institutions that maintain archival records vital to the exploration of cybernetic history — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the American Philosophical Society, the British Library, and MIT. With recent grant funding from the NEH, the multi-institutional team is developing a prototype web-portal and analysis-engine to provide access to archival material related to the development of the field of cybernetics, which influenced the development of modern computing and provided a common language to articulate similar questions about behavior across disciplines — regardless of whether the subject of study was animal, machine, or social group. The project is also enabling the digitization of the personal archives of four founders of cybernetics — Heinz von Foerster, W. Ross Ashby, Warren S. McCulloch, and Norbert Wiener. Using computational methods based on advanced machine-learning algorithms to yield network and entity relationships maps from the digitized texts, this project seeks to create access to archival material that enables humanities scholars to better understand the development of cybernetic ideas and to enable scientists and engineers to reuse and access cybernetic data.

EG&G and the Deep Media of Timing, Firing, and Exposing

This article considers the pre-history and history of EG&G, Inc., a key contractor in Americas nuclear weapons programme in the Cold War. EG&G was co-founded by M.I.T.’s Harold Edgerton, Kenneth J. Germeshausen, and Herbert E. Grier after World War II in order to serve the nuclear weapons timing and firing needs of the U.S. Department of Defense and Atomic Energy Commission. The three men began their collaboration in the 1930s at M.I.T. with work on flash photography. Indeed, their partnership began in high-speed ‘stroboscopic’ photography in the 1930s, became focused on nuclear weapon timing and firing in 1945–50, and eventually re-focused on high-speed photography in the 1950s. Instead of emphasizing, as others have, the reproduction and circulation of photographic images of nuclear detonations, this article examines how the convergence of photographic and ballistic regimes was constructed around what we call the ‘deep media’ of timing, firing, and exposing.