KC Forcier on Looped Media at SCMS
KC Forcier received a Spring 2019 BCNM Conference Grant to help cover her costs attending the Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle, Washington. KC presented "Endless Images: Looped Media, Digital Temporality, and the Gallery." Read more about her experience in her own words below!
I was honored to receive a BCNM Conference Grant to support my attendance at the 2019 Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference in Seattle, WA. The conference took place from March 13-17 and featured over 400 panels, workshops, and roundtables. I presented a paper entitled “Endless Images: Looped Media, Digital Temporality, and the Gallery.” The paper, which draws on my dissertation, examines notions of networked temporality represented in digital installation art. My research was presented on a panel, Media In/And Spaces, featuring research into a variety of under-theorized media spaces.
As the largest gathering of media scholars, the SCMS annual conference presents a broad overview of current work in the field, from studies of nineteenth century audio-visual technology, to contemporary digital culture, with panels emphasizing a variety of approaches, including media theory, critical race studies, labor histories, audience studies, affect theory, aesthetics and representation, as just a few examples. Of particular interest to my research was a panel on digital temporality entitled “Now: Understanding Instantaneous Time, Boredom, and Delay in Digital Media,” with research presented on technologies such as Facebook’s “boredom detector,” and digital practices such as buffering. Also of interest were panels on “Invisible Images” - on lost, censored, or degraded images; and “Digital Processes and Racial Formations, Redux,” with papers on segregation and algorithms, white supremacy online, and virtual reality’s claims to promote empathy.