Time is another interesting path which one needs to address as a part of Hamilton's message. The intolerance of being caught such that the view is in "slowtime" changes one's role and relationship to the piece. Kristen Palana's Net art review of Hamilton's 2003 online exhibition at Cinematheque at Media Centre comments that the "interesting depiction of a looping clip… creates an uneasy feeling of being trapped in time." "Slowtime," the exhibition title, "is meant to symbolize the range of possibilities of time-based medium," and it is indeed perfectly suitable for Hamilton's never-ending timepiece. Quoting from Hamilton's major influence, Søren Kierkegaard, "repetition is more intolerable with each repetition." (330) Kierkegaard wrote an essay on Repetition by compiling the correspondence letters between his pseudonymous author, Constantin Constantius and an anonymous young man. Kierkegaard, as himself, comments that "[R]epetition is all the more needed every time what is [occurred] is not received for appropriate action, has one more reason than previously." (330)

Kierkegaard and de Certeau frame Hamilton's work as well as the works of, several early video artists. Videos such as works by Bruce Nauman show the artists alone, performing some repetitive act in solitude. In Bruce Nauman's Stamping in the Studio, for example, Nauman rhythmically pounds out a musical beat in his studio which he increases, a "steady one-two beat [therefore] advances[s] to a syncopated ten-beat phrase." While Hamilton is influenced by earlier work like this, he presents work in contrast to Nauman's, as it is both inconsistent in time (becomes slower) and consistent in action, whereas the latter video is consistent in time, but inconsistent in action. Hamilton's video documents from a live performance then grows infrequent in action as the scene progresses.

Hamilton succeeds in consolidating his concepts of liveness and repetition together through his piece, Monitors. Live action, the ticking clock, is tied with activity which emphasizes the subject's retaining of power over space and time. Ironically, the solitary subject is mesmerizes audience as over. Each repetitive act unfolds fact that the subject in the video is driven and constructed to undertake certain actions becomes a control mechanism of interest to audience who continuously return for updates and see the different activity in the scene. Hamilton reverses the anticipated so the question remains how does time, which helps the watcher monitor the subject, become the control of the subject. It is this inversion of control between the puppet-subject and the puppeteer-artist that start to reflect on the concept an definition of what constitutes "free-roaming individual."*

Hamilton does not propose to answer these queries through his work. Rather, he leaves the viewers to contemplate the visual play and reflect on their own environment and definition of the self within the "cultural case." Monitor is the initial phase of Hamilton's four-part series that will focus on key activities including bouncing, smoking, pacing and circling. Kevin Hamilton is an Urbana-Champaign teacher at the University of Illinois, and earned an undergraduate degree from Rhode Island School of Design and a Masters in Science in Visual Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Footnotes:
* Quotes taken from the interview with Kevin Hamilton