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TikTok: Work, Time, and Play in a Platform Economy
14th June 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM BST
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).
Full programme
09:00 Coffee and Tea
09:30 Content Providers Introduction (morning session)
09:40 “Working Around the Clock App. Algospeak As Content Creation Strategy on TikTok” – Daniel Klug
10:00 “Reimagining Work and Domesticity: The Stay-at-Home-Girlfriend Phenomenon on TikTok” – Marsha Batubara & Lucia Bainotti
10:20 “‘Scraper’ and the Folkless Lore of Ritualised Prediction” – Most Dismal Swamp
10:40 Break
11:00 “FIRST PHONE (2024)” – Ruba Al-Sweel
11:20 “Artistic Resistance in the Era of TikTok/Douyin” – Shiyu Gao
11:40 Q & A work and time
12:00 Lunch and Refreshments
12:50 Content Providers Introduction (afternoon session)
13:00 Keynote and Q & A- Y7
14:00 ““Stich Incoming”: TikTok Tarot Reading and the Return of the Scam” -Karen Gregory
14:20 “Counterspeculative Constellations: A card reading format to unsettle the use of tarot and astrology in queer feminist artistic practice” – Frances Breden
14:40 “‘This Message Is For You’: Decoding Angelic Interfaces and Images on TikTok” – Sara Nuta
15:00 Q & A play
15:10 Break
15:30 Keynote and Q & A – Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou
17:00 Drinks Reception
Please, register for attendance via Eventbrite before 7th June.
Content Providers is a research collaboration between researchers Ian Rothwell (University of Edinburgh), Idil Galip (University of Amsterdam), Ingrid Luquet-Gad (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne).
The conference is supported by The New Real and the Edinburgh College of Art, with additional funding from the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Science.
