What is remembered lives: Time and the disruptive animacy of archiving AIDS on Instagram

The immediacy and nowness of Instagram time

@theaidsmemorial’s disruptively animate potential for redesigning AIDS’ time politics emerges from the ways it might manipulate the affordances of Instagram’s features. At the convergence of Instagram time with AIDS time, @theaidsmemorial is poised to expose and rupture the harmful norms of endemic time that render AIDS static, dead, over. Temporality is about power, we experience it as a type of difference and privilege, one that places us either on the margins or in the center (Sharma, 2014). The privileged thus often fail in endemic AIDS time to register HIV/AIDS as contemporary. @theaidsmemorial can make AIDS representations powerfully alive, even for the privileged. In this section, I analyze the temporal ideologies embedded in the design, development, and uses that constitute Instagram time and shape its affordances, such as instant content delivery, constant availability, and hyper-interactivity. Even in Instagram’s name, a portmanteau of instant camera and telegram, a temporal consciousness is embedded (Instagram, 2014). Instagram time emerges from users’ actions and the hardware and software engineers’ build and the coding mechanisms they implement at stakeholders' behests. Instagram time’s immediacy and nowness, which make it affective, engender @theaidsmemorial’s potential for remaking AIDS time by shifting to become lively how HIV/AIDS is thought about and experienced.

Immediacy characterizes the values, features, options, and pacing encoded into the app. @theaidsmemorial could manipulate Instagram’s designed immediacy manifest in features promoting a disruptive animacy, a form of liveness including constant availability, real-time content delivery and connection, and enhanced interactivity. @theaidsmemorial could use this immediacy to showcase with material spatial and affective resonance HIV/AIDS’ ongoing immediacy. Instagram’s design shapes the behaviors, relationships, feelings, and temporalities of those who engage @theaidsmemorial and whose lives are implicated in its records. Using Instagram results in a sense that our daily lives are accelerated, instant, highly networked, and always-on. From constantly updating feeds to ‘stories’ that vanish after 24 hours, the app provokes the feeling that life now is fast and immediate, providing information and engagement whenever and wherever are desired. Instagram scholarship addresses images, their creation, content, and circulation. It links Instagram’s development to amateur (Champion, 2012) and camera phone photography (Hjorth, 2009; Hjorth and Hendry, 2015), and the ubiquity of mobile devices (Chesher, 2012; Vivienne and Burgess, 2013; Zappavigna, 2016). The cultural meanings visuals, including the selfie, generate are addressed (Hu et al., 2014; Schwartz, 2010; Tifentale and Manovich, 2015; Walker, 2005; Zhao and Zappavigna, 2018). Scholars have long recognized media technologies as time mediating (Kaun et al., 2016; Keightley, 2013; Parisi and Farman, 2019). Social media researchers note the significance of temporal functions in platform designs and on uses and users (Bayer et al., 2016; Kaun and Stiernsedt, 2014). This article advances emergent scholarship on Instagram’s temporal patterning and time scales (Hochman and Manovich, 2013), and the temporalities generated through its image-sharing practices (Zappavigna, 2016) through the novel approach of reading one account.

Instagram use is pervasive and habitualized, and it attempts to calibrate lived time to its patterns as it is integrated into the daily routines of millions. Instagram is shaping temporality, our individual and collective experiences and understandings of what time is, how it is constituted, organized, and mediated, and what it means and feels like to exist in relation to it (Sharma, 2017). Temporality, drawing upon Sarah Sharma, is a form of social difference embedded in historical, political, economic, and geographic contexts (2017: 194). The disciplinary expectation that users will realign our diverse temporalities to those of dominant digital technologies makes them vital in examining the implications of how time and our experiences of it are being redesigned. As of 2018, Instagram, owned by Facebook since 2012, has one billion active users (Constine, 2018) who create 95 million posts daily, most under 35 (Smith and Anderson, 2018). Since 2010, it has shared 40 billion photos (Clark, 2018). Instagram is a media object that has ‘temporal politics’, particular ways of moving within and mobilizing time (Adams et al., 2009: 251). The app forms the world into neat squares, colors our views of one another through a Valencia or Hefe lens, and refashions the affective rhythms of social relations. @theaidsmemorial creates meaning through the taking, or, more often the uploading of digitized photographs that are edited with filters, captioned with brief narratives about the memorialized subject, classified as AIDS archival images using the account’s hashtags, time-stamped, geotagged to locations (often physical AIDS memorials), and shared with networked users.

Instagram’s values, features, options, and pacing are party to the dominant cultural understanding of contemporary time as sped-up and ever accelerating (Crary, 2013; Gleick, 1999; Hassan, 2003; Sharma, 2014, 2017; Stiegler, 1999; Tomlinson, 2007; Virilio, 1986, 1999; Wajcman, 2015). Digital technologies constitute and make palpable such speed. Instagram time’s design also aspires to generate capital. Time has long been leveraged to the dominant social group’s advantage (Adams et al., 2009: 247). Under late capitalism, communication and leisure activities on Instagram are labor. Scholars demonstrate that the longer the engagement with a platform, the greater the exploitation and, thereby, profits (Fuchs, 2014; Scholtz, 2013; Terranova, 2004). In addition to attracting new users, social media’s business model depends on encouraging users to extend use duration and increase its frequency (Nguyen, 2017). Provoking immediacy supports these aims. Instagram, for example, encourages me to reopen it throughout the day, pinging notifications of likes and comments across my devices. The proprietary algorithms that construct Instagram feeds, including whether @theaidsmemorial’s content appears and the frequency at which it does, provide users with personalized and constantly novel arrays of visual content for rapid, compulsive consumption. Acceleration governs through features that encourage and broadcast individualized expressions at seemingly real-time intervals (Hassan, 2003; Lash, 2001; Sharma, 2014, 2017; Stiegler, 1999; Virilio, 1999; Wajcman, 2008, 2015). The sense of immediacy advanced by digital media informs speed’s cultural ubiquity. Immediacy exposes how acceleration is naturalized and promotes norms of instantaneous delivery, constant availability, direct contact, and instant gratification (Tomlinson, 2007). Mobile photography’s integration into daily life establishes norms of synchronous posting that users’ experience as real-time engagement, a technologically mediated visibility (Thompson, 2005) that visually provides temporal and spatial copresence. Instagram users’ immersive temporal experiences emphasize ephemerality, ‘liveness’, and flow (Bolter et al., 2012; Gerlitz, 2012). New images continually appear in Instagram feeds, pushing older ones out of sight or dropping them altogether. For @theaidsmemorial’s followers, its images feature prominently in our feeds, in accordance with viewing patterns and the account’s popularity. Historical AIDS images are remixed with content from other accounts followed in a provocative affective temporal disruption. Each Instagram post, comment, or like is visible only for a short period without effort to refind it. Use practices and the interface reinforce a ‘nowness’ that dictates recalibration of our lived times and attendant social relations (Lindley, 2015).

The ubiquitous presentism and futurism of Silicon Valley ideologies (Agger, 2013; Opitz and Tellmann, 2015: 110; Tierney, 2018) pervade Instagram time. Even when users interact with images of the past, it is about present and future. @theaidsmemorial is no exception. @theaidsmemorial’s practice of posting actual historical images is more unusual, but not unprecedented. It and other archivally oriented accounts are understudied. Researchers and journalists’ examinations of Instagram’s engagement with pastness are confined to how the app cultivates nostalgia for earlier photographic practices by simulating past technologies. Instagram mimics, for example, Polaroid photography (Alper, 2014: 1244). Its digital filters often invoke the names and effects of traditional filters and imperfections of analogue film processing – light leaks, vignetting, sepia tones. Embrace of past technological aesthetics might be misread as about present longings for an analog past; however, these tools actually represent the look of photographs that have aged as they appear to viewers now (Bartholeyns, 2014: 60). Therefore, they are in keeping with a relentless presentism (Zappavigna, 2016: 16). Whether perceived or actual – as in @theaidsmemorial’s images, pastness is powerful as it renders the banality of the current moment more poignant ‘through the added emotional value provided by a temporal distance’ a ‘dated aesthetic’ makes visible (Bartholeyns, 2014: 60). Although their subjects are likely strangers, @theaidsmemorial images are also rendered familiar to us through such recognizable aesthetics. Geotagging too reflects a relentless emphasis on the present. Users are encouraged to post images and share their geographic locations synchronously in real-time during activities or to depict moments that took place in the very recent past (Drakopoulou, 2017). @theaidsmemorial’s linkage to physical AIDS memorials powerfully mobilizes geotagging to reinsert AIDS into the urban material present. Instagram mobilizes an affective sense of immediacy and nowness to keep users engaged in generating data that they collect, process, and monetize. As Instagram time and AIDS time converge, @theaidsmemorial could utilize Instagram’s lively technological affordances to remake AIDS time’s deadly orders.

The immediacy and (lost) urgency of AIDS time

Comprehending endemic AIDS time’s harmful operations is crucial to understanding why intervention is needed and how the @theaidsmemorial is poised to enact transformation. @theaidsmemorial’s potential for disruptive animacy that Instagram affords is urgently required to remake AIDS time. AIDS time is shaped by a distinct parameter of immediacy. In endemic time, we in positions of temporal privilege encounter relics of an AIDS-time past in a commemorative register, through records created in and about ‘epidemic time’, including @theaidsmemorial posts. Such a narrow temporal focus in how AIDS is represented and thus experienced can support White supremacist patriarchy by acknowledging and celebrating only gay, White, middle-class men’s efforts, marking AIDS activism as past, and ignoring the failures and limitations of early responses, and thereby, the existence and needs of marginalized communities where HIV/AIDS continues. Even as there is a dominant temporal register, individual and communal temporalities are still disjointed and manifold as they depend upon one’s relation to power (Sharma, 2014: 149). For PLHA marginalized in AIDS' time politics, HIV/AIDS has a distinctive persistence; it is a present, unfolding emergency, one marked by unremitting immediacy. HIV/AIDS’ immediacy, and its lack, in endemic AIDS time is divided by access to power. During epidemic time, HIV/AIDS held an acknowledged immediacy that the efforts of PLHA and their allies managed to surface in the popular imaginary. It was as though time itself had accelerated in ways that demanded an immediate on the ground response (Sturken, 2012). The shift to endemic time, toward a conditional HIV-chronicity post-1996, depleted AIDS’ perceived public immediacy and transformed the lived experience of AIDS’ temporal rhythms for those with privilege. Under neoliberal logics, individuals are understood to be responsible for managing ourselves, for making calculative choices about health and risk (Montoya, 2012: 562). New HIV infections or treatment failures now are frequently blamed on individual recklessness rather than structural oppressions. HIV-survivability is often taken for granted; however, without treatment-based suppression, AIDS remains life-threatening. Access to treatment and the stability required to maintain healthfulness remains out of reach for many, especially cis and trans women, Black, Brown, Indigenous, undocumented, or, poor people, and those facing addiction and incarceration. Minoritized persons continue to be made structurally vulnerable and to disproportionately live with HIV and die of AIDS-related complications. Gay and bisexual men in their 20s, for example, made up 81% of new infections in 2016 and nearly 80% of those diagnoses occurred among Black and Latinx men who are less likely to have access to treatment and care (CDC, 2018). Even when HIV becomes a chronic illness, it requires arduous efforts to sustain healthfulness. Dominant endemic AIDS time that marks the epidemic as complete pervades the ways we think about, feel, and address HIV/AIDS now.

My research is not the first to highlight temporality’s significance, HIV/AIDS scholars emphasize widely the import of temporality shifts to HIV/AIDS’ meaning and experience (Gill-Peterson, 2013; Hilderbrand, 2006; Huebenthal, 2019; Juhasz and Kerr, 2014; Román, 2006; Sturken, 2012). Research has focused on the temporal implications of activist and mainstream media representations of PLHA. Yet, with notable exception (Juhasz, 2015), there is little scholarship on digital technologies’ productions of AIDS time, a gap this article begins to fill. AIDS continues, as Douglas Crimp (2002) wrote in 1988, ‘not [to] exist separately from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it and respond to it. We know AIDS only in and through these practices’. Reflecting endemic time’s norms, most AIDS representations, from scholarly accounts to popular films to memorials, operate in a resoundingly retrospective register. @theaidsmemorial again centers the anguish of those first 15 years (Solomon, 2017). Despite knowledge that HIV was circulating in the United States by the late 1960s (Kerr, 2016; Worobey et al., 2016), most commemoration begins with 1981 when medical professionals and the press first noted in ‘homosexual’ men clusters of rare opportunistic infections. That men with expectations of good health and access to healthcare were affected meant that this epidemiological trend was recognized (Solomon, 2017). The privileges these men held meant that they expected that political and medical establishments would respond; when they failed to do so it ignited outrage that fueled fierce AIDS activism (McNay, 1999: 186) and involvement in the arts, publishing, and media aided in securing attention within visible venues (Juhasz, 2012). Contemporary representations often focus on White, gay men’s passionate treatment activism. They end with the 1996 advent of antiretroviral combination therapy, a celebration of activists’ success. Activism, reduced to the necessity of getting drugs into bodies, is marked as over. Framing commemoration around these years constricts its subjects to mostly White, middle-class, gay American men as this time is identified with them already (Solomon, 2017).

The face of AIDS on @theaidsmemorial is almost invariably White, male, gay, middle-class, American, and dead – a generation of men cut down in their prime between 1981 and 1996. The privileges of the men featured did not and could not save them from AIDS; however, they did and do protect them from disappearing from the historical record (Huebenthal, 2019). By reproducing a ‘sea of whiteness’ (Alvarenga, 2018), @theaidsmemorial amplifies the elision of men of color, women, intravenous drug users, poor people, incarcerated people, and immigrants. The account does sometimes post images and words that tell the story of AIDS beyond 1996 or that depict a broader range of experiences; however, without sustained attention, these read as dutiful add-ons. In normative registers, AIDS’ immediacy is evacuated, it is static, and its persistence is only as a memory of past contagion. @theaidsmemorial routinely extends normative endemic AIDS time, its images reading as elegiac reminders of a bygone era. Yet, the account holds in its convergence with and mobilization of the affective force of Instagram time a disruptively animate potential for redesigning AIDS time in ways that could expose its uneven valences, ongoing liveness, and reset its harmful social rhythms. In the following sections, I offer examples of @theaidsmemorial posts that encapsulate the ways that this account could use Instagram’s affordances to rupture normative AIDS time in ways that showcase its contemporary liveliness as a means to redesign the social in more just and livable ways. I turn, first, to how @theaidsmemorial generates and circulates affective immediacy to engender palpable lively, present connections to HIV/AIDS. Second, I examine posts that exemplify the account’s practice of geotagging physical AIDS memorial sites to showcase how @theaidsmemorial might provocatively use spatiotemporal linkages to reinsert AIDS into the quotidian in ways that expose HIV/AIDS’ affective immediacy and structural persistence.

The clock: Immediacy through affective intimacy

The image shows Steve Small holding a portable clock (Figure 1). It’s warm palette and playful intimacy between subject and photographer render an affective immediacy. @theaidsmemorial is a production of Instagram time with its affective present-driven urgency and AIDS time that plays within and against its dominant registers. The affective immediacy @theaidsmemorial engenders is vital to its potential for disruptive animacy. The ways the account facilitates lively connections that render AIDS’ immediacy visible is requisite to remaking the meaning and experience of endemic AIDS time. John D’Amico, Mayor of West Hollywood, contributed Small’s memorial. Stuart first posted it on September 20, 2018, geotagging ‘Las Vegas, Nevada’ and collating it to @theaidsmemorial’s archives with the hashtags: ‘#whatisrememberedlives’, ‘#aidsmemorial’, ‘theaidsmemorial’, ‘#neverforget’, and ‘#endaids’. In users’ feeds, the posting account and geotag display above the image(s). Under the image(s), the caption, hashtags, and timestamp appear. Small was a ‘regular nice guy’, D’Amico writes, an all-American boy with ‘dreamy hair and those eyes and that Adam’s apple’, ‘soft skin’, ‘and such a sweet grin’. He was a White, gay, well-educated, artistically inclined American man who died from AIDS-related complications during the ‘crisis period’. In these respects, Small is a subject who resembles those @theaidsmemorial routinely memorializes. Its posts are devoted to lives deemed valuable, and that are therefore grievable (Butler, 2004, 2016). Often when AIDS has been archived, it is through activists’ records, documentation of people engaged in extraordinary acts. @theaidsmemorial centers ordinary voices of loved ones left behind, the survivors. D’Amico’s post sketches Small’s biographical details: ‘he worked at a local hospital’ and in a ‘sweet voice’ he ‘would tell me stories of poets and poems’. It is likely that Small’s face had never before graced the Internet and that he and many of the other men that constitute the losses to which @theaidsmemorial is devoted would not be otherwise publicly mourned or memorialized. Small’s memorial illustrates the limitations of @theaidsmemorial’s representational practices. Yet, it also demonstrates @theaidsmemorial’s potential for redesigning AIDS time in ways that ensure across generation and privilege breaks that we recognize, live, and feel HIV/AIDS as immediate and persistent. The account thereby disrupts dominant endemic AIDS time that suggests given life-prolonging medications that the AIDS crisis is dead.

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Figure 1.

Memorial Post for Steve Small (1962-May 6, 1994) published by @theaidsmemorial. https://www.instagram.com/p/B_3Vb9TJPWY/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

The snapshot was taken in night’s low light. It is typical of @theaidsmemorial images, photographs captured on film and later digitized – a transformation that advances mobility, circulation, and reach (Montoya, 2015: 11). Small gazes directly into the camera, at the photographer, at us. This horizontal front-on perspective engenders intimacy (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006) and direct connection. A portrait of an individual, their face legible, is characteristic of @theaidsmemorial’s visual repertoire. It is fitting for the medium, Instagram images containing faces generate the most ‘likes’ and comments (Bakhshi et al., 2014). Faces are powerful communication channels and, trained from infancy, we turn toward and read them for context, emotion, identity, and relation. Showing faces is important for HIV/AIDS. It is a condition that has always been othered, whether in the stigma associated with being HIV-positive and/or being LGBTQ, or, through engagement in socially stigmatized practices, intravenous drug use, or unprotected sex. Many individuals and their loved ones did not disclose their HIV-serostatuses publicly. @theaidsmemorial’s publicness produces binding collectivities and narrates HIV/AIDS’ everydayness.

D’Amico recalls he and Small ‘went on some dates’. On @theaidsmemorial lovers, families, acquaintances, and strangers share, interact with, and connect over privately held precious records. Animating @theaidsmemorial is an anxiety about HIV/AIDS knowledge and memory transmission across generational breaks between the different lived valences of epidemic and endemic times.

The secrecy, guilt, shame, tragedy, and bravery that surrounds the AIDS epidemic, all this recent history with so many gone and forgotten – not by their relatives or friends, of course, but AIDS is not a subject that we want to be reminded of…,

Stuart notes (Holgate, 2018). He emphasizes that early epidemic survivors who routinely contribute ‘don’t want to relive it’ and fear ‘that they will be judged all over again just because they were in close quarters with someone who has died of AIDS’ (Holgate, 2018). A public account, @theaidsmemorial posts are accessible for general consumption. However, @theaidsmemorial hails younger LGBTQ+ generations, who, like Stuart and me, came of age in endemic time, and who sensing the losses AIDS wrought are searching for ways to fill absences in queer cultural and political genealogy, even as we still navigate possibilities of HIV infection amidst ongoing structural oppressions (Solomon, 2017). ‘The AIDS epidemic’, Stuart argues, ‘is ancient history to millennials’. There is an urgent need to engender recognition of the persistence of HIV/AIDS’ immediacy. ‘It’s vital’, Stuart concludes that younger people

recognize the struggles they face today are linked to AIDS, and the panic endured by our elders and that what we have gained so far is built upon those, as they were dying of AIDS, who acted up to demand fair treatment from a hostile society. (Holgate, 2018)

The ways that the past is conceived is essential to communities as it provides the continuity required for self-definition and relation. LGBTQ+ cultures face particular challenges in asserting a heritage not passed down through biological familial channels and in the face of constrained access to power and resources. Queers must seek out or be actively confronted by our lineages.

After another @theaidsmemorial custom, the caption begins ‘Steve Small (1962–1994)’. Small was born the same year as my parents, and I calculate, he lived 32 years, to be about my age. D’Amico’s poetic rhythm and careful prose are gorgeous. Yet, the caption’s content and tone are also characteristic. Many narrativize the posted image. D’Amico notes both the intimacy of the moment captured and with wistfulness its irretrievable pastness. ‘I remember the first time we kissed. It was seconds before I snapped this picture’, he writes. In the square Instagram image, the top of Small’s head and area below his breastplate extend beyond the frame. D’Amico sets the scene: ‘We were sitting on the hood of my ‘79 Fiat convertible. We had just met, we were outside Gelo’s bar on Paradise Road, the sparkling city beyond’. Lowlight blurs Small’s dark eyes and his white skin is warmed in hues of brown and yellow. His floppy medium-brown hair too blurs into the sepia warmth. Small wears a dress shirt and dark tie, opened to expose his neck. Continuing, D’Amico notes, ‘I opened my trunk. “Here, hold this clock,” I said, “I want a picture of you with this clock.” I leaned in and kissed him, stepped back and snapped this picture’. Small’s mouth is slightly agape. Yet, his face is not distorted. This movement lends animacy. On @theaidsmemorial, subjects in snapshots, headshots, and videos, are shown vibrantly alive, healthy, youthful, and social. That @theaidsmemorial depicts people living with AIDS, highlighting capacities, ambitionss, and relationships, provides a powerful counterpoint to earlier representations. Between 1981 and 1996, graphic mainstream HIV/AIDS’ representations were harrowing images of ‘victims’, gay, White, middle-class men visibly brutally ill and on the verge of death (Montoya, 2012: 583). They were marked as outside the social. An ambient viewer, I do not disturb the intensity of Small and D’Amico’s intimacy, but am invited into it. With both hands Small holds the vintage clock. The clock’s presence symbolizes the intensities of constrained time; the fleeting, ephemerality of connection, and of impending end. The clock is also a prime media technology that imposes orders of time on the social field and that dictates the calibration of life in modern society (Peters, 2013; Sharma, 2017). It is impossible to tell the time here, its hands indistinguishable in the dim-light. ‘It was Las Vegas, the late fall of 1985, and those lips, soft and willing and like mine wanting attention. For that moment, I think we could only see each other’, D’Amico recounts. Small punned, ‘“We’ll remember this time,”’ and ‘pointing to the clock face asked D’Amico, “Get it?”’ and indeed, he writes, ‘I got it’. The sole survivor D’Amico still remembers the time.

D’Amico’s narrative charts fleeting moments that generate persistent and animate affection disrupting boundaries between past, present, and future. In the same convertible on which Small sat that night, D’Amico shares how

in early 1986, all bundled up, we drove to LA with the top down to listen to Pierre Boulez’s ‘Repons’…I was transported by the music. And him. He pressed his knee against my leg. He always smelled like fresh laundry. We walked on Melrose. We ate hot dogs at the Tail of the Pup.

In these personalizing details, Small and their relationship come alive. The contributors and subjects’ connections extend with @theaidsmemorial to those who engage with it. Such moments pass, D’Amico writes, ‘And then we drifted apart. I can’t remember why. It happens. It happened’. This and many @theaidsmemorial posts document present impressions and implications of lost time. D’Amico never reconnected with Small. ‘I heard he died from a friend of a friend’. 1994, he notes, was ‘when so many others were dying. When I was caught up in the facts and fears of my own life’. Small’s loss, like most @theaidsmemorial documents, happened at crisis’ ‘height’. Queer temporality scholars highlight how perceptions of entitlement to a future life grounded in white middle-class privilege are embedded in normative memorialization practices (Halberstam, 2005: 16–17 and Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2004: 56–65 in Huebenthal, 2019). @theaidsmemorial routinely reflects and amplifies endemic AIDS time that in its dominant iteration elides a hazardous present and future for some, by canonizing the past of a few. Yet, @theaidsmemorial also holds the promise of disruptive animacy that is necessary to redesign AIDS time. It is by mobilizing Instagram’s affordances that @theaidsmemorial could engender a present intimacy, a lively direct connection with memorialized subjects. Activating Instagram’s insistent nowness opens space for disruptive animacy that could provoke a renewed urgency and immediacy for AIDS. In addition to its capacities for affective immediacy, the account’s temporally transformative potentiality also lies, as I demonstrate next, in materializing spatiotemporal immediacy.

The location: Immediacy through spatial intimacy

A July 11, 2018, @theaidsmemorial post memorializing Vito Russo (July 11, 1946 to November 7, 1990) is neither the first nor the last devoted to him (Figure 2). Russo, a film scholar, AIDS activist, and White, gay, middle-class man who died of AIDS-related causes during the ‘crisis period’, is recognized and recognizable. In a polo and khakis, lounging in an Adirondack Russo gazes into the camera, his mustachioed face warmed by a smile’s start. Contributor Danny Gruber captions it by describing a university weekend spent hosting Russo. Another @theaidsmemorial post, this one memorializing David Wojnarowicz (September 14, 1954 to July 22, 1992) is one of many on the account for the acclaimed artist, writer, AIDS activist, and White, gay man who died of complications from AIDS during epidemic time (Figure 3). Posted July 22, contributed by photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, it shows Wojnarowicz in sunglasses, a crimson top, silence=death pin, and string of pearls in a nod to what was the height of Republican women’s fashion. The caption enumerates biographical details. Both memorials are characteristic of @theaidsmemorial’s repertoire: the portrait style, subjects’ prominence and identities, period of their deaths, captioning with biography or personal memories, standard hashtags, and subjects’ ties to New York City, the place most recognized in representations of AIDS’ devastation and anti-AIDS activism. The posts featuring two acclaimed gay, White men who died during epidemic time are representative of the temporal, racial, and gendered constraints of @theaidsmemorial’s representations, ones that can abet dominant AIDS time’s normalizing force. Yet, in their geotagging, this pair of posts also demonstrates the disruptively animate potentiality embedded in Instagram time’s immediacy and nowness. The spatiotemporal immediacy @theaidsmemorial engenders through geotagging could facilitate endemic AIDS time’s redesign.

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Figure 2.

Memorial Post for Vito Russo (July 11, 1946-November 7, 1990) Published by @theaidsmemorial. https://www.instagram.com/p/BlGmxhKFYNw/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

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Figure 3.

Memorial Post for David Wojnarowicz (September 14, 1954-July 22, 1992) Published by @theaidsmemorial. https://www.instagram.com/p/B0OKeI0pI65/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

Geotagging results in direct, real-time connections in the liveness and affective flow of Instagram feeds. The spatiotemporal tag, reinforcing the temporal slippage provided by the images themselves, collapses established AIDS temporalities. By assigning an electronic tag marking the Russo and Wojnarowicz posts’ geographical location as the ‘NYC AIDS Memorial’, Stuart provocatively manipulates Instagram’s functionalities to reinsert AIDS into present space and time, exposing the materiality and blurring boundaries between digital and physical memorials. Geotagging draws together contemporary images taken at or near the physical NYC AIDS Memorial site in real time and remixes them with historical @theaidsmemorial images. Users can browse public Instagram accounts, including @theaidsmemorial, by hashtags, locations, or trending content. The cultural meaning of the location the geotag indicates is acquired from accumulation of digital information attached to it over time. Despite their real representational flaws, the Russo and Wojnarowicz posts create a temporal rupture that is the precondition for the disruptive animacy that opens the possibility of building an alternative AIDS temporality.

Further, @theaidsmemorial’s geotagging to the ‘NYC AIDS Memorial’ legitimizes the virtual memorial by linking it to the officially sanctioned physical monument. The online and offline memorials are not simply counterparts, they are corresponding modes of materializing memorialization. @theaidsmemorial’s location on a commercial surveillance platform and its constrained representational practices are rife with contradictions. Similarly, the physical memorial too holds dissonant implications. The NYC AIDS Memorial is one among few American AIDS memorials, it was unveiled December 1, 2016, World AIDS Day. It stands at Seventh Avenue in Manhattan’s West Village, the former site of St. Vincent’s Hospital, which in 1984 opened the country’s second AIDS ward (Schwartz, 2016). The NYC AIDS Memorial stands over now-filled underground tunnels used to transport supplies in and corpses out. Positioned within a historically gay and segregated neighborhood, St. Vincent’s served a population of gay, White cis-male PLHA. After its 2010 closure, Rudin Management demolished the building to make way for Greenwich Lane, a luxury condo and townhouse complex with rooftop gardens and an underground swimming pool. As Sarah Schulman (2013) observes, it is no coincidence that neighborhoods with the highest rates of infection, have also been the sites of the rapid gentrification as the dead left openings and their survivors, lacking rights, were ousted from rent-controlled dwellings and replaced with straight, White, wealthy occupants. Funded by Rudin, the NYC AIDS Memorial is the centerpiece of St. Vincent’s Triangle Park, a neatly landscaped 15,000 square-foot space with benches, walkways, lawns, and water-jets. It is abstract, a white steel canopy composed of inverted triangles. The triangle is an important AIDS symbol. Activists reclaimed the pink triangle Nazi’s used to brand gay men (Crimp, 2002). Inverting it, they deployed the defiant symbol across the City and on ACT UP ephemera including the button Wojnarowicz wears. A plaque near the Park’s entrance proclaims that it ‘honors more than 100,000 New Yorkers who died of AIDS…recognizes the contributions of caregivers and activists…aims to inspire and empower current and future activists, health professionals, and people living with HIV…in the continuing mission to eradicate the disease’ (Solomon, 2017). Under the canopy, Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ is inscribed on paving stones, a Jenny Holzer installation. Despite its politicized ambitions, as René Esparza (2018) identifies, in its careful curation the NYC AIDS Memorial ‘sells a non-threatening past to spectators’. As a site it exonerates the state and commemorates minoritized persons in ways that disavow the structures of inequality underlying racial segregation and disparate resource distribution responsible for HIV’s spread (Esparza, 2018). Memorialization marks a way to remember an atrocity and to forget the inequality and injustice that engendered it (Montoya, 2015: 11). The NYC AIDS Memorial certifies the past as completed, thereby masking HIV/AIDS’ material and affective persistence and immediacy in racially and economically marginalized communities (Esparza, 2018).

I see the Russo and Wojnarowicz posts first as remixed in my personalized feed, amidst an algorithmically generated cascade of images, persons, and landscapes from different decades in distinct formats and styles. With a 2016 algorithm update, Instagram user feeds shifted from reverse chronological order to feature images of ‘the moments we believe you care about the most’ with posts sorted according to the ‘likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting’ and ‘timeliness’ (Hamill, 2016). This design choice, initially unpopular with users, extensively remixes content, styles, times, places, and accounts in novel, nonlinear ways (Medel, 2018). Piquing my curiosity, I take a step further to view each in @theaidsmemorial’s chronologically organized feed. Finally, I select the ‘NYC AIDS Memorial’ geotag. Geotagging attaches exact spatial coordinates to posts, either by the platform automatically or the user manually. By tagging their locations users, scholars suggest, are creating new identity practices (Yılmaz and Kocabalkanlı, 2019) and social memory (Drakopoulou, 2017: 2), and engaging in performativity (Mendelson and Papacharissi, 2011: 256), sociality (Papacharissi, 2011), or narcissism (Lovink, 2007). @theaidsmemorial routinely geotags cities, states, and physical AIDS memorials. When a user searches Instagram by ‘place’, images collated by geotagged location display. The first thing I see in this feed for the NYC AIDS Memorial are algorithmically generated ‘Top Posts’, those tagged by users with influence based-in quantities of likes or followers. Below, in a time hierarchy, the ‘Most Recent’ images unfold. @theaidsmemorial posts, including these two, recur often in both spatiotemporal categories. On Instagram location sharing enabled by smartphones’ ubiquity is typically synchronous; added to a post at the app’s suggestion while the user is still at the physical location or shortly afterward (Drakopoulou, 2017: 3). A scroll through posts geotagged to the NYC AIDS Memorial could be misread as demonstrating that even with the physical immediacy of the monument’s presence it seems to disappear easily into Park’s landscape. Images are reduced to abstracted architectural elements, and many posts make no discernible connection to AIDS in topic or tenor. It is a bizarre experience to peruse the abundance of tourist shots, fashion bloggers posing to take advantage of the monument’s geometry, and innumerable incidental snapshots of dogs, kids, and lunchtimes spent lounging on the grass or splashing in the jets. Yet, I argue @theaidsmemorial’s geotagging to the NYC AIDS Memorial, a material spatiotemporal intervention, still makes the dead who continue to walk here newly visible and available. These ghosts become in their direct presence, their liveness, that which spoils the picnic and disrupts the mundanity of scrolling Instagram’s visual catalog of the here and now, recorded depictions of activities that took place very recently and were shared almost immediately. The dead through the material meeting of physical and digital memorialization become productive, awakened they become the lively foundation for novel networks, media practices, and affective connections (Papailias, 2016: 452).

The recurrent visual cues of @theaidsmemorial images disrupt Instagram’s spatially oriented feeds that favor the ‘most recent’ posts. Whether through outmoded aesthetics, now faded colors, or the frequent glitches of analogue film processing, the faces @theaidsmemorial depicts indicate visually, quickly, and explicitly, an awareness that they were snapped long ago. Actual images from the past, much like those digitally manipulated through filtering, cropping, and blurring on Instagram to mimic the look of analogue photographs as they appear to us in the present (Bartholeyns, 2014; Zappavigna, 2016), carry a heftier emotional value. Users’ awareness of temporal distance made visually legible through dated aesthetics enhances meaning through layers of cultural association. @theaidsmemorial images indicate that they were taken long before the NYC AIDS Memorial was erected in this physical space; in an epidemic time well before one could even imagine that AIDS could ever be memorialized in this sanctioned way. As @theaidsmemorial founder and moderator, Stuart, frames its project, ‘I want to see the face of AIDS, those who perished, disowned, forgotten to be remembered. History doesn’t record itself and I feel a sense of duty to make that happen in some way’ (Guobadia, 2017). For Stuart ‘Instagram was a perfect way to document the lives of people who have died of AIDS. I just want more people to hear the stories and remember’ (Hudson, 2017). Notably, few @theaidsmemorial images were actually taken at the physical site of what became the NYC AIDS Memorial. The affordance of geotagging is, for Instagram, about data collection and its monetization. Social networking’s business model is built on commercial surveillance. These ‘profiling machines’ (Elmer, 2003) collect and process user-generated data to effectively target services, advertisements, and content (Andrejevic, 2013; Cheney-Lippold, 2011). Instagram’s smooth, easy-to-use interface willfully obscures the ways that such personal data can uncover user habits, street traffic, and footfall statistics (Drakopoulou, 2017) that the company utilizes or sells to third parties at substantial profit. The remix provoked by @theaidsmemorial’s images disrupts such market structures that commodify location data by inserting content that does not reveal users’ current location, places visited, or activities, habits, and tastes. Stuart utilizes geotags prodigiously to indicate a subject’s lived material relationship to space, one often explicated in the caption. Russo and Wojnarowicz lived, worked, organized, and died in 1980s to 1990s New York. In this pair of images, he tags also a past-New York City, a grittier city where at least in the imaginings, particularly of others and I who were not there, we can fantasize about the kind of space of belonging it offered, as queer person and as an artist.

@theaidsmemorial is a production of the refusal to move past AIDS. The virtual and physical memorials together in their corresponding materializations aspire to counter forgetting’s violences, remember those who have perished, recognize those who resisted, and offer lessons that catalyze different futures (Solomon, 2017). Yet, these AIDS commemorations also occupy a fraught temporal and material position. American AIDS memorial projects, both physical and digital, occur in a society that fails to acknowledge and reckon with the historical trauma that occurred, and the role of the state, media, and different communities in exacerbating the suffering and accelerating the deaths of thousands (Solomon, 2017). @theaidsmemorial’s geotagging enacts a provocative remixing of time and space, in which those memorialized are animated; thereby, disrupting boundaries between past and present by occupying a recognizable shared physical and digital space. Next, I extend my analysis of Instagram’s affordances that provide @theaidsmemorial’s unique potential for enacting the disruptive animacy needed to redesign AIDS time.

The (unrealized) promise of disruptive animacy

31 years of this disease for me, and 22 years of countless medication cocktails and side effects that would drop an elephant. Health problems from the long term use of medications. Loss of so many friends, partners and acquaintances…we have been through hell but live to tell our story,

reads John Termine’s @theaidsmemorial post.

These words accompany side-by-side images. On the left, a 1980s black and white shot of Termine youthful, shirtless, and leaning into the camera, and right is his selfie, a smiling man with gray temples wearing an @theaidsmemorial T-shirt. In addition to the customary @theaidsmemorial hashtags it is classified, ‘#ItsStillNotOver’. Termine’s post was part of a June 5, 2018, series marking HIV Long-Term Survivors Day. Long-term survivors, who have and continue to contend with the arduous tasks of living with chronic illness, stigma, and discrimination, are one of the groups that require and deserve for @theaidsmemorial to live up to its disruptively animate temporal potentiality. In this section, I analyze the account’s real promise for enacting an overhaul of AIDS time enabled by Instagram’s socio-technical affordances before turning in conclusion to why that promise remains unrealized. @theaidsmemorial’s memorializations can expose diverse experiences of living as well as dying with HIV/AIDS. I have demonstrated @theaidsmemorial’s tremendously powerful potential as the convergence point between the affective force of Instagram time and the structures of AIDS time. Its unique position means that it could be made to render acute HIV/AIDS’ persistent immediacy, of affect, geography, and time.

When uploaded, visual records have the potential to affect those who curate, view, and interact with them. Affect accumulates as they circulate between networked users (Prybus, 2015: 240). @theaidsmemorial’s representations stand poised to make powerfully resonant now experiences of living and dying with HIV/AIDS. For public accounts, possible sharing extends to all within the app’s network. Users can be followed or follow others in (a)symmetrical relationships. The app’s open-ended relational affordances include heart and speech bubble icons under posts where users offer likes or comments. The interactivity Instagram affords is central to @theaidsmemorial’s promising affective potency. The account compels outrage, grief, tenderness, sympathy, thereby engendering immediacy and emphasizing animacy across bounds of time and space, of digital and analog. It is such affective engagement that could build community for often-isolated survivors of epidemic time and for other queer heirs in endemic time. For example, when first posted Small’s memorial received nearly 3500 likes. It generated 199 comments including rainbows of emoji hearts, expressions of gratitude to D’Amico, and identificatory recountings. Digital memorials can generate sociality, they tie us together and cohere our relationships through the data we circulate (Pybus, 2015: 242). Most commenters describe the post’s emotional resonance, and that of @theaidsmemorial: some were moved to ‘tears’ by this ‘lovely’, ‘beautiful’, ‘heartbreaking’, ‘sweet and sad’, ‘touching’, ‘gorgeous’, and ‘tender’ memorial. @theaidsmemorial’s popularity is due to its participatory affordances that engender real-time linkages and a public recognition of their lived experiences for those impacted by a stigmatized illness that propagates isolation and silence. Generational divides in AIDS time’s lived rhythms are explored throughout the thread trailing D’Amico’s post. D’Amico and Small’s contemporaries reflect on their evolving relationships to epidemic time, the immediacy of which persists for them. One writes, ‘You have struck something deep in me. That line, ‘When so many others were dying’ took me back to that dark time. I am so sorry for your loss, for what we all lost’. Another calls attention to how ‘We were all so young when this happened to us. I, for one, have lived the rest of my life with the shadows from that time’. ‘These stories remind me that those years really did happen’, a third highlights. ‘I spend a lot of my time pretending, but so many of my loves were lost in those days. I’m amazed that I’m still alive’. Many younger users assert that D’Amico’s post newly enlivens the experiences of epidemic AIDS time making it theirs to live and feel. ‘Damn’, one emphasizes, ‘Makes me so so humbled to be undeservedly lucky enough to live in this day and age and never have to live through those times. But it makes me so deeply proud of what my community has endured and achieved’. Users also repeatedly tagged others in their networks, calling them into the conversation. By sharing on @theaidsmemorial contributors extend records’ permanence and resonance creating an intersubjective space despite the time and space that separates the memorialized subjects, the hundreds of commenters, and their lines of address. As one user describes, using this post as example of a larger phenomenon, ‘little did Steve Small know, the very large effect he would have, on people he didn’t even know’. Creating shared experiences of AIDS time binds new collectivities. @theaidsmemorial is credited prodigiously by followers with ‘keeping them and us alive’. Electronic media, in hiding its multiplicity of temporal mediations, appears to users as communications that are unsullied and untouched, and therefore more ‘immediate’ (Tomlinson, 2007: 99). Instagram can thus disrupt the security of a comforting distance from HIV/AIDS – temporal, spatial, generational – to generate renewed immediacy, showcasing the liveness and changeability of AIDS time.

@theaidsmemorial’s power to evoke memories and bear witness to HIV/AIDS is immense. The persistent memory of epidemic AIDS time is what @theaidsmemorial often captures. However, it is the enduring emotional intensity of that past for contributors and followers alike that engenders affective immediacy, a disruption that provokes renewed attention to liveness. That they were ‘so happy’ is what makes D’Amico ‘love this photo’, leading him to keep it ‘all these years’. By sharing on @theaidsmemorial, contributors extend the affective intimacy beyond the physical photograph, confines of their memory, and bounds of their lifetimes. Acknowledging of the importance of the persistence promised through the public collectivity of new media archiving is how D’Amico concludes, ‘And now it’s kept here too and you have a copy…’ There is an accountability that can be developed through such archiving, as a user commented: ‘now we all have this picture. This perfect piece of time stopped. I hope you look at it each day and remember that one perfect moment when time stopped for youth, health and beauty’. On May 6, 2019, @theaidsmemorial shared D’Amico’s post again, accumulating 3323 more likes and 120 new comments. Its reuse emphasizes the account’s continuous capacity to provoke emotional response. ‘I wept the first time this poignant and moving remembrance was posted and I’ve just wept again reading it now…Thank you for sharing this post again. I will never forget it’, one posted. Stuart describing ‘#whatisrememberedlives’ highlights how this hashtag embodies @theaidsmemorial, it

evokes the comfort in knowing that once we are gone we will not be erased from the memories of others. Every time I post, the memories or legacy will be remembered far and wide and in turn hopefully influence the lives of others. (Guobadia, 2017)

Affective immediacy names the experience of direct, seemingly instantaneous connection that Instagram time facilitates. Many @theaidsmemorial posts reproduce problematic aspects of dominant representations of epidemic AIDS time. However, even as the account abets forms of domination, it offers new and open-ended ways to disturb and thus to begin to redesign contemporary AIDS time’s normative orders. The disruptive animacy that @theaidsmemorial could produce using images created during epidemic time and linking them to us in endemic AIDS time is in significant part accomplished through affect. Affective engagement shifts the ways we think about, feel, and address HIV/AIDS. There is a much-needed palpable immediacy and a visible, material liveness in the individually created and curated relatable snapshots of a life lived and remembered in moments, in breaths every day. That immediacy built into the Instagram platform, and made urgent through emotional content, is central to @theaidsmemorial’s promise for recalibrating AIDS time in ways that hold all of us accountable for its ongoing immediacy and enduring persistence. These memorials insist on the nowness of HIV/AIDS.

Central, too, to @theaidsmemorial’s disruptively animate potentiality is the temporal material remix geotagging enacts. Connections between living and dead, between then and now, are felt and lived as instantaneous and direct, crossing simultaneously normative time and space bounds. Such tagging, the geographical and temporal identification of a media artifact, Hochman and Manovich (2013) name as ‘the most prominent element that underlies Instagram’s structure’. Geotagging’s immediacy is radical for AIDS archiving as it ‘suppresses temporal, vertical structures in favor of spatial connectivities’ (Hochman and Manovich, 2013). Through this feature, contemporary quotidian images posted in real time are continuously remixed with posts dedicated to the meaning of AIDS and its significance in particular physical sites. In American culture, the dying and the dead are removed and absented from the rhythms of daily life into the constrained spaces of hospitals, hospices, funeral homes, and cemeteries (Gibbs et al., 2015: 256). Commemoration of the dead too is often restricted to demarcated places and times. @theaidsmemorial by geotagging its images into contemporary urban space intervenes, ‘repositioning the dead back within the flow of everyday life’ (Gibbs et al., 2015: 257). Geotagging underscores the centrality of both place and materiality in digitally mediated witnessing countering with liveness the idea that this AIDS history is dead, or, even really past. In the disruption of retrospective coherent linearity and in the production of linkages to contemporary spaces, places, people, and sensations, the deadly pastness of AIDS in our endemic time is troubled. Positioning people lost to AIDS back into urban life might be utilized to generate more direct, intense, and instantaneous animate involvement with HIV/AIDS, even for those persons who inadvertently encounter the materiality of an AIDS memorial, physical or digital, ‘through transformative, unpredictable and subjective encounters’ (Papailias, 2016: 442). The overlay between the geotag, caption, and image(s) provides new ways in which to narrate a sense of place with sociality in ways that make the past viscerally continuous with the present. As James E Young has written, memorials are ‘inert and amnesiac’ structures are ‘dependent on visitors for whatever memory they finally produce’ (1993: xii–xiii). By disruptively animate acts including affective engagement and geotagging, @theaidsmemorial pushes us toward a collapsing of endemic AIDS time’s norms, moving us toward a renewed popular recognition of HIV/AIDS’ continued immediacy and liveness in ways might bring about the redesign AIDS time and its meanings. However promising, @theaidsmemorial has yet to take the steps needed to overcome its own limitations so that it might actually realize its radical potential.

Conclusion

Amidst an ongoing AIDS pandemic, @theaidsmemorial has a responsibility to raise awareness not only that people who died from AIDS-related causes were once here, but also that PLHA continue to be here, and that those stories must be told and retold. The account should harness the promising seed of its disruptively animate socio-technical potential to build new and nimble networks for survivors and queer heirs, rather than simply histories of an epidemic past. My relationship as a follower and critical HIV scholar to @theaidsmemorial is complicated. I find it moving, powerful, and resonate, and I care deeply about the account’s present and future. The @theaidsmemorial is in a defining moment of development, one that I see as needing its larger community’s critical and ongoing engagement in order to actively shape its ability to do disruptive animacy. This conclusion reflects my own commitment to making myself available to do this work. I aim here to open some possibilities, while inviting and inciting other followers, contributors, and its moderator to come together to work through both the power and limitations what has already been done and to dream up new futures. Advancing disruptively animacy in @theaidsmemorial’s practices requires now two primary steps. First, @theaidsmemorial needs to acknowledge publicly its extant limitations and the unintended harms enacted by its reproduction of normative AIDS time that elides a perilous present and future for some by memorializing the past of a few. It’s beautiful memorials reflect whose lives are valued. The privileges, whiteness, maleness, citizenship, economic stability, did not save the memorialized subjects, but they have protected them from becoming faded memories (Huebenthal, 2019). The harm sustained by these subjects is rightly now accepted as unjust, aberrant, remarkable, and as such deserving of remembrance. Those who are visible largely through their absence on @theaidsmemorial are the same persons who are still structurally vulnerable by virtue of their mintoritized race or ethnicity, Indigeneity, lack of economic or educational resources, behavior deemed aberrant (sexual promiscuity, intravenous drug use, criminal conviction), non-citizenship, and/or marginalized gender identity and expression. These are ungrievable lives, othered such that they never ‘counted as a life at all’ (Butler, 2016: 15). The representational harms routinely reenacted by @theaidsmemorial’s status quo do not preclude transformation or undermine its potential.

Second, to generate the resistant temporalities that its designed environment affords @theaidsmemorial needs to strategically and explicitly redress the injustices that characterize the epidemic’s past and present. Recent moves such as collaborations with long-term survivors and the acceptance of stories without photographs through the accompaniment of Justin Redodor illustrations are promising indications of the account’s capacity to expand representational modes. The remixed ways that @theaidsmemorial displays AIDS records, and its production of novel linkages to contemporary spaces, people, and feelings powerfully trouble linear narrativizations of AIDS as past and elsewhere. We need to utilize these performances to provocatively expand grieveabilty’s bounds. With due credit for building this powerful archives, continuing an archiving project with a sole gatekeeper for its diverse ‘objects of remembrance’ (Price, 2009) inhibits political and communal possibilities. Instagram’s design could facilitate broader participation in crowdsourcing the archives direction as much as its contents (Beer and Burrows, 2013: 55–56). Growing the archives through additional moderators and community partners would enable @theaidsmemorial to readily highlight and support the efforts of organizations and individuals working from, within, and in coalition with queer and trans communities of color, anti-carceral, anti-poverty, Indigenous, and immigrant rights’ movements. Finding new ways to center the voices of those made most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS now would generate novel approaches, build richer networks, and promote resource sharing in ways reflective of their evolving needs, desires, and agency.

@theaidsmemorial holds in its disruptively animate mobilization of Instagram’s socio-technical affordances the political potential to reconstitute AIDS temporalities in ways that emphasize the urgent immediacy as well as the structurally informed persistence of the crisis. A technologically facilitated interruption of the linear chronological relationality of bodies, archival objects, and spaces rendered by memorialization and forgetting is a queering requisite to remaking sociopolitical realities. By mobilizing the liveness, immediacy, nowness, persistence, publicness, affective relationality, and self-archiving opportunities, in short the disruptive animacy that inheres in Instagram’s designed and performed values, features, options, and pacing, @theaidsmemorial can remake the temporality and face of AIDS in America. Mourning and memorialization can be bound up with outrage, and outrage in the face of injustice and unbearable loss wields enormous political potential. @theaidsmemorial promises a tangible production of the epidemic’s liveness in ways that call forth an immediate attention and persistent intervention. The account could thereby engender resistance and survival needed in the face of the AIDS epidemic, past, present, and future. However, whether @theaidsmemorial will be able to effectively engage its community in the challenging work required to fulfill its disruptively animate potential to move the past in service of a more just present and future remains an open question.