Faculty Fellow Lecture: Kaitlin Forcier

The UIC Institute for the Humanities presents a Faculty Fellow Lecture with Kaitlin Forcier, assistant professor of English, entitled “Stream, Flow, River: The Endless Visual Pleasures of Amazon Prime.”

Forcier will offer a media theory of streaming platforms through an examination of Amazon Prime. Embedded in a retail environment, much like multiplex cinemas attached to shopping malls, Prime Video is in some ways a continuation of the longstanding association between the transporting spectacle of window shopping and the pleasures of television or cinema. Yet with streaming video, televisual flow — the continuous stream of television programming — is transformed. The popular notion of affective flow — a state of interactive absorption — has been embraced by contemporary interface designers and platforms such as Amazon. This talk considers how the intertwining of circulation, absorption and moving images on the Amazon streaming platform diverges from its now-defunct predecessors: television and the shopping mall. Inextricable from the online retailer’s “all-you-can-eat” express shipping service, Amazon Prime Video is emblematic of how streaming platforms structure media consumption as endless.

An interdisciplinary media theorist, Forcier researches and teaches the visual culture of the digital age. Her first book project, “The Infinite Aesthetic,” analyzes iteration and endlessness in digital media and art, from the 1960s to today, as it intersects with the expansionist logics of new modes of capitalism. Her research has appeared in The Journal for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Afterimage and Media-N. She received her doctorate degree in film and media from UC Berkeley.

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