Friday, June 14th 2024, 9:30 – 17:00
Davidson Lecture Theatre
Lister Learning and Teaching Centre
University of Edinburgh
TikTok: Work, Time, and Play in a Platform Economy brings together papers that analyse emerging digital visual culture(s) and aesthetics through critical platform analyses. We are particularly interested in TikTok, as it is a platform where many dynamic digital subcultures proliferate and circulate.
Over the last decade, the internet has been subsumed by a complex of privately owned online services that call themselves ‘platforms’. This has radically altered the coordinates of the internet, from a peer-to-peer communications infrastructure to an extractive arguably ‘neo-feudal’ system.
In light of these recent shifts, the conference will rethink a number of questions about digital culture that were initially explored in the early 2010s, with the rise of Web 2.0. Papers will explore contemporary understandings of the construction of the self and collective identity, digital labour and cultural production, political discourse online, digital affect, and more.
Keynotes by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and Y7 (Hannah Cobb & Declan Colquitt).
PROGRAMME
WORK
Marsha Batubara & Lucia Bainotti: Reimagining Work and Domesticity: The Stay-at-Home-Girlfriend Phenomenon on TikTok
Most Dismal Swamp: “Scraper” and the Folkless Lore of Ritualised Prediction
Y7 (Keynote): A non-exhaustive, bird’s-eye view of TikTok culture(s) with hyper-specific examples (or, an ambiently-ironic endorsement of Donghua-Jinlong Best Industrial-Grade Glycine)
TIME
Ruba Al-Sweel (online): FIRST PHONE (2024)
Shiyu Gao: Artistic Resistance in the Era of TikTok/Douyin: Challenging Xi Jinping’s Surveillance Culture in Contemporary Chinese Expanded Media Art
Daniel Klug: Working Around the Clock App. Algospeak As Content Creation Strategy on TikTok (online)
PLAY
Karen Gregory: “Stich Incoming”: TikTok Tarot Reading and the Return of the Scam
Frances Breden: Counterspeculative Constellations: A card reading format to unsettle the use of tarot and astrology in queer feminist artistic practice
Sara Nuta: “This Message Is For You”: Decoding Angelic Interfaces and Images on TikTok
Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (Keynote): TikTok Capitalism
You can now download the full programme, including all abstracts and bios here
Organised by Content Providers: a research collaboration between researchers Ian Rothwell (University of Edinburgh), Idil Galip (University of Amsterdam), and Ingrid Luquet-Gad (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne).
