Affordances,remediation,and digital mourning: A comparative case study of two AIDS memorials

Introduction

Recent projects on social networking sites such as Instagram have begun to receive attention in the fields of media and memory studies. HIV/AIDS has long been a subject of scholarly work in the field of memory, and has gained traction in these new digital spaces. The Instagram account @theAIDSmemorial (TAM) is a public Instagram account that boasts over 100,000 followers, and since its inception in 2016, has published nearly 6000 commemorative posts culled from user submissions honoring loved ones, activists, and historical figures who have died from HIV and AIDS-related causes. By popularizing the hashtag #whatisrememberedlives, TAM has become a digital space where memories of the AIDS crisis can be archived, reassessed, and recapitulated in the present, following the logic of contemporary cultural memory. While other digital projects related to AIDS memory have been proposed and temporarily enacted on Web 2.0 platforms, TAM’s following, interaction with users through the app’s affordances of sharing, liking, and commenting, and its scope far outweigh any previous attempts at establishing a large-scale digital memory bank to remember the lives of those lost to AIDS. In the present, it reminds us of the ongoing-ness of AIDS as an epidemic. However, a critical examination of how collective memory work is performed on commercial platforms that follow an often-clandestine algorithmic logic has led many to wonder how collective and cultural memory on social networking apps has altered the relationship between the individual and collective in relation to public mourning and witnessing. Culling submissions from users, the account serves as a digital repository for collective memory and healing, much in the same vein as the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (AIDS Quilt).

Perhaps the most notable instance of large-scale public AIDS memory is the AIDS Quilt, a massive, collaborative folk art project that memorializes individuals who have died of AIDS-related causes. The Quilt was initially conceptualized by Cleve Jones, a San Francisco-based gay activist, in 1987, where its first iteration, comprises 40 interwoven panels, was displayed that same year at the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Freedom Parade (Hawkins, 1993). Since its inception, it has become the largest public folk art project in the world, and its growth to more than 48,000 individual panels has made it impossible to display in its entirety. Its last full exhibition was in 1996 at the National Mall in Washington, DC.

While both “sites” of collective memory are embedded within particular cultural ideologies and media historicity, many of their features (or affordances) have perceived commonalities. By utilizing a transmedial comparative case study methodology that foregrounds digital platform analysis and the sociocultural contexts from which these two projects have emerged, this research proposes an assessment of how public mourning and memorialization processes in relation to HIV/AIDS have been transformed through digital remediation, and how digital affordances of social networking apps have revolutionized the scope of memory in Web 2.0 virtual spaces. As such, this article seeks to bridge scholarship engaged in collective memory practices with new media theory to offer evidence of an altered digital landscape where connective measures of group formation have been digitally mediated in ways unseen in previous scholarship on HIV and AIDS collective and cultural memory.

Beyond collectivity: digital connective memory in the social network

Following the work of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992), collective memory can be understood as the representations of the past that are collectively shared. Jan Assmann and Czaplicka (1995) unpack the notion of collective memory by describing the two memory-making processes involved: communicative memory represents individual, everyday action with no fixed point to bind it to the passing of time, whereas cultural memory is defined by its purposeful distancing from the everyday, which places it in a fixed temporal horizon. This theory of cultural memory attempts to relate memory, culture, and society as co-actors in a relationship of meaning-making (Assmann and Czaplicka, 1995). By further complicating the temporal field in which memory-making processes occurs, Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering’s (2012) concept of the mnemonic imagination interrogates constructed dichotomies of memory and imagination, experience and expectation, and the private and the public, so that we may approach recollection as not just a process of mere recall, but also one of imaginative creation. Using the mnemonic imagination as a guiding principle to assess dynamics of memory in the present clears an “interstitial space” in which memory becomes less of a product of the past and is initiated in a memory-as-process, in which traditional temporal relations to the past and future are collapsed into a moment where these different modes may coalesce. This concept is an apt entry point into studies of memory in new media landscapes, where digital media technologies have further complicated notions of linear temporality in relation to memory. This conception of temporality is supported by the work of Frederic Jameson (2003), who contends that the postmodern condition ultimately signals an end to linear notions of temporality. In its place, digital technology and social media have attempted to create new temporal structures relative to user-generated production of content to contend with the perceived atemporality of the virtual space (Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2014). Furthermore, an investigation of vital memory in relation to affect has revealed a sense of “traumatic time”; this specific temporality is performed and worked through on an episodic or biographical level, which is ultimately at odds with previous modes of modernity, and privileges notions of forgetting and moving on from difficult past events and life histories (Brown and Reavey, 2015).

New media theory helps us understand how memory functions in increasingly networked online environments. Lee Wellman’s (2001) observation of a shift to networked individualism in large cities has extended the notion of kinship networks to include “weak ties” among relatively unaffiliated persons within a social network. As such, the networked individual can be representative as a contemporary formulation that gels with the notion of cultural memory as a space wherein individual, personal memories coalesce into a sphere of collectivity. Similarly, in his work on social movements in the networked environment, Manuel Castells (2007) identifies a defining feature of the contemporary media environment as mass self-communication, which exists in contradistinction to earlier periods in which commercial mass media companies were the purveyors of political information. This new communicative environment is one that is horizontally structured by digital technologies, and moves beyond the vertical bounds of industrial society’s centering of mass media to offer a web of information flow through the exchange of messages and information on both the local and global (“glocal”) levels. The digital media environment compounds the preexisting concept of media memory (Van Dijck, 2009), which posits that media memories are particular phenomena that go beyond the mere use of media to communicate memory, but rather are memories formed from remembering a mediated experience in the first place. As such, memories of media events have become a dominant mode of understanding past historical events (Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2014).

Within a networked media ecology, in which multiple horizontal and vertical webs of information flow and counter-flow collide in an unprecedentedly global scope of memory, Michael Rothberg’s (2009) notion of multidirectional memory, defined as an interactional, productive process in which memory is constantly being borrowed, renegotiated, and cross-referenced against seemingly unrelated past memories, pushes back against the notion that memory is a “zero-sum game”; it encourages us to move away from the dominant mode of thought of competitive memory. This has bearing on identity, in that, it obliterates the notion that an individual’s culture, history, and identity are intractably unique and unrelated to other types of oppression and suffering. This concept is helpful in excavating memories of HIV and AIDS in digital environments, as collective memory is often conceived of as an in-group exercise, while it has been proven without question that suffering caused by HIV and AIDS, while being more prominent among particular social groups, knows no bounds as it has proliferated globally.

More specifically, the algorithmic logic of social networks and digital technologies has reformulated the scalability and visibility of the memory collective; new memory can be thought of as a phenomenon that is always already mediated, manufactured, and manipulated:

Memory is always new if seen as an attitude towards or a representation of the past in the present, constantly remade. (Hoskins, 2017: 9)

This conception of a new memory builds upon mediated memory in a post-Benjamin digital landscape; in Benjamin’s seminal work, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), he posits that all imagistic reproductions are lacking of the aura of the original work’s existence in a particular time and space. Within the context of new memory with global reach, image reproduction is a process of transduplication; there is no longer a clear path to the originating image, and everything is a copy of a copy (Neiger et al., 2011). New memory, often conceptualized in terms of television memory, in which images serve as the primary building blocks of memory processes, and highlights instantaneous time as the prominent feature of electronic media. From the 24-hour news cycle to the mediated present of Instagram, the notion of the “labyrinth of the instant” is an apt metaphor for explaining current memory work taking place on live, instantaneous social media feeds.

This new memory is more accurately represented as a networked or connective memory, in which traditional binaries of private and public, individual and collective, and past and future are all made present in the instant news stream (Hoskins, 2017). Thus, it may be said that memory work takes place within a culture of connectivity in which social media serves as the dominant landscape; in essence, memory and technology have co-evolved and are inseparable from one another (Van Dijck, 2009). Thus, memory cannot be retracted to either the individual or collective as it is wholly bound up in technological structures and modes of dissemination. This technological unconscious may be understood as the underlying “power of the algorithm” (Beer, 2009) that is largely impervious to the demands of users. This technological infrastructure serves as a black-boxed code that steers and facilitates human interactivity in the digital sphere, and thus has bearing on how memory may proliferate. Beyond the techno-utopian argument of the Internet-as-archive, a seemingly endless space of data storage and retrieval, the logic of the algorithm may be just as confining as it is emancipatory.

AIDS Quilt

As one of the most highly visible analog forms of public HIV/AIDS memorialization, the AIDS Quilt has inspired a great deal of research into the memory-making processes of mourning. Researchers have examined the historical influences, affective and therapeutic responses (Kerewsky, 1997), and alternative process of mourning related to the AIDS Memorial Quilt. While Jones, the quilt’s creator, has not connected the project to previous acts of memorialization, researchers have noted that the act of “naming names”—an element which figures prominently in the construction of the AIDS Memorial Quilt—harkens back to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Blair and Michel, 2007; Hawkins, 1993). Designed by visual artist Maya Lin and constructed in 1980, this minimalist sculptural monument intends to both explicitly memorialize the dead in the precise order they died, thereby allowing living veterans to make sense of the atrocities (and overall objective failure) of the Vietnam War, and transform the national response to the Vietnam War by offering a multi-modal process of rehabilitation and bereavement (Blair and Michel, 2007). Other comparisons to collective memory banks, such as the public display of Holocaust-related ephemera in Jewish museums or the public viewing of skulls of victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (Gambardella, 2011), have been noted as earlier projects that perform the same collected ephemerality also witnessed in the construction of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Building on this conception, the AIDS Quilt offers a means of interweaving the political and the therapeutic, by combining mourning processes with activist intentions, two domains that were previously considered mutually exclusive (Blair and Michel, 2007). By naming individuals on panels and incorporating them into a much larger fabric, the quilt has been noted for its integration of the personal into a public collectivity (Blair and Michel, 2007; Capozzola, 2002; Gambardella, 2011).

Research on the AIDS Quilt builds on previous knowledge concerning public memory and its construction of the “nation” through a rhetorical process (Rand, 2007); this is also evident in the scholarly propensity to frame the AIDS Quilt Project in line with other national monuments. While portions of the quilt have been exhibited internationally, the mission of the quilt is positioned in a wholly American context: “Jones had been at great pains to demonstrate that AIDS was an American problem, not something invading from abroad, not something from the other” (Gambardella, 2011: 219). Thus, the quilt was positioned in specifically American terms to stake an argument for the inclusion of AIDS into the national imagination, an idea that was radical due to the “un-American” nature of the disease in the eyes of the general public (Capozzola, 2002). While HIV and AIDS have proven to evade supposed boundaries of identity and geography, the origins of the AIDS crisis in America positioned the quilt firmly within a gay context. Its decisively gay origins are supported by the fact that the quilt was conceptualized during a candlelight vigil in honor of Harvey Milk, also organized by Cleve Jones (Stull, 2001). By reimagining a national identity inclusive of gay individuals, some of the quilt’s power lies in its attempts to recontextualize American identity by placing marginalized identities firmly within the American imagination (Hawkins, 1993).

The AIDS Quilt and its metaphors

In assessing the remediation of the AIDS Quilt in digital memorial projects, an attention to the quilt’s originating metaphors for other media forms is essential. The selection of a quilt, and several of the memory-making practices incorporated in this specific materiality, reflect, and signify American symbolism by drawing upon traditions of American folk art. Sturken (1997) recognizes the tropes of Americana that are evoked in quilting, as well as the symbolic reintegration of those excluded by national imaginary. The quilt serves as a metaphor for the affective American pastime, and its materiality lends itself to unique aspects of public commemoration. As noted by Rand (2007),

By utilizing a symbol of American folk art and mythology—the patchworked quilt—the [AIDS] Quilt was able to encourage nationwide mourning, even if those being mourned continued to be reviled. (p. 664)

The use of a patchwork quilt also amplified the highly ephemeral nature of the memorial, allowing creators/mourners to include or construct their individual panels out of personal clothing of the deceased (Howe, 1997). This traditional American symbolism of quilting seemed historically apt considering feminists’ recovering of women’s quilting work in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the Reagan-era cultural nostalgia that promoted a return to the perceived domesticity of the 1950s (Capozzola, 2002). Other scholars have gone further in their research to align the AIDS Quilt with American national heritage: “Like the flag of the United States, the quilt is incorporative, pieced together from efforts from every state like a cultural map of the AIDS crisis” (Gambardella, 2011: 219). While this comparison with the creation of the American flag contextualizes AIDS memory within the mainstream national imaginary, one can also look to an alternative historical narrative that, much like the AIDS crisis, has been largely underwritten in history. Following Marita Sturken (1997), the quilt “evokes a sense of Americana, yet it also represents those who have been symbolically excluded from America—drug users, blacks, Latinos, gay men.” The recapitulation of marginalized identities into the American imaginary should also point to quilting practices that are historically underrepresented. By assessing the practice of quilting by African women who were brought to the United States as slaves, the traditional notion of American quilting and flag-making is complicated by a more anti-hegemonic narrative. The history of African-American women’s quilt-making practices during the period of slavery in the United States seems particularly resonant to the AIDS Quilt’s materiality. As noted by Florence Barnett Cash (1995), “African-American women recycled cloth as a means of survival. They designed their quilts to accommodate scraps and rags which were available to them.” This particular approach to quilt-making offers a historical precursor to the materiality of the AIDS Quilt, which is patch worked by traditional textiles as well as clothes and other material of the deceased. By drawing connections to the artistic practice of material repurposing within quilt-making, we can position the AIDS Quilt within an alternative narratology that does not evoke the preeminent symbol of American nationalism, the American flag. Of course, aside from the American context of quilt-making, we can instead view the quilt for its material form. A quilt is patched together to keep a person covered and safe from the elements; part of the selection of the quilt as the material form of the memorial was guided by a metaphor that was “cozy, humane, and warm” (Hawkins, 1993).

Other metaphors beyond the quilt have been offered in scholarly writing: the photo album (McLaughlin, 2004), the collage (Hawkins, 1993), and cartography (Howe, 1997) have all been evoked as objects of comparison. However, none of these metaphors seem as prescient as the image of the quilt itself: “The Quilt is a text that, like all texts, reflects the emotional and ideological contents of the culture from which it was produced” (Howe, 1997).

Digital mourning and memorialization

Research in digital mourning has defined how the digital affordances of persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability (boyd, 2010) have created apt spaces for remembering and memorializing the dead online (Giaxoglou, 2015). Prior research has praised digital mourning practices for their ability to allow increased levels of participation, interaction, and engagement with online communities. This complex process has been investigated in instances of digitized memorials and memorial pages for singular individuals on Facebook (Church, 2013; Giaxoglou, 2015), digital memory banks for natural disasters and national tragedies (Recuber, 2012), and digital witnessing of conflict in real time (Chouliaraki, 2015). The earliest studies of digital mourning, before the advent of social media, detail the creation and affordances of independent memorial sites; many early instances of digital mourning research highlight the therapeutic and supportive nature of such activities, and how digital practices were used to bolster aspects of physical space-time funerals (Roberts, 2004).

Other research has attempted to bridge the gap between traditional mourning practices and digital formulations. Church (2013) draws on a history of traditional gravesites and mourning practices to assess how processes of bereavement are altered or extended in the digital realm; Chouliaraki (2015) used traditional narratives of journalistic representations of mourning to contextualize digital witnessing of death; and Ferrándiz and Baer (2008) investigated how photography and video of mass grave exhumations allows digital memory to excavate the past and offer a symbolic recovering of historical memory. Perhaps most relevant to this study is the work done to assess Instagram’s platform vernacular in relation to mourning and the use of hashtags (Gibbs et al., 2015).

Through assessing the existing research on digital mourning, assumptions can be drawn about the nature of the process, and how it may/may not improve on analog conceptions of death and mourning. The idea of personhood sustaining life posthumously through continued participation among users repositions the dead back into the domain of everyday life (Veale, 2004; Gibbs et al., 2015). This type of research has pointed to the idea that joining social media sites encourages a perpetual online presence that does not end with one’s death (Church, 2013). The practice of digital mourning has thus become so commonplace, that designers and researchers have pointed out best practices in honoring the dead through digitized environments (Moncur and Kirk, 2014). However, this continued engagement with the dead is not a completely digital phenomenon; research on pre-digital memorialization has noted that creation of memorials strengthens the bonds between the dead and their loved ones, as well as between those who contribute to the commemoration process (Rosenblatt and Elde, 1990). Particular affordances of digital technology, such as its ability to store, organize, and curate endless amounts of data, have been noted in their contributions to establishing archives of collective memory. Recuber (2012) notes that digital memorials evade the problems of representation in physical archives because they do not have to choose what documents and commemorations are worth storing over others, offering a non-hierarchical distribution of digital ephemera. Similarly, other research has noted the power of digital technology to destroy hierarchical notions of collective memory, by de-emphasizing the role of the author through the co-creation of materials by several thousand authors, who are often unnamed (Gambardella, 2011). In addition, the adaptability of digital memorials has been noted for its ability to change over time in response to the constantly evolving social circumstances of those who engage with them (Moncur and Kirk, 2014).

As a digital mode of cultural mourning and recollection, @theAIDSmemorial on Instagram is the largest, most widely accessed corollary to the AIDS Quilt. Attempts to digitize the quilt have been documented at the 20th anniversary of the quilt in the summer of 2012 (Literat and Balsamo, 2014), creating a tabletop browser with horizontal views and zoom capability, an interactive timeline of HIV/AIDS biomedical innovations and activist interventions, as well as a mobile app, AIDS Quilt Touch, which allowed users and spectators of QUILT2012 to have a more holistic engagement with the quilt (which was too large to be shown in its entirety at the National Mall at the time). However, it appears this remediation has not been successful in sustaining itself on digital platforms; as of this writing, the digital app is no longer accessible. As such, @theAIDSmemorial has filled a space for large-scale digital mourning and remembering in the context of the fight against HIV and AIDS.

Affordances, remediation, and networked concepts

An investigation of affordances, digital remediation, and networked concepts are essential in bridging the gap between the analog nature of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the digital context of its counterpart Instagram account, @theAIDSmemorial. By assessing these concepts, one can bear witness to the relationship between digital memorialization and earlier, physically oriented forms.

Originally developed in the field of ecological psychology (Gibson, 2015), theory of affordances is often used to describe what actions and artifacts media technologies allow users to do and manipulate. Of the many digital affordances, interactivity has been positioned in much research as a defining characteristic in the shifting media landscape, and is distinguished by the amount of control an audience has over tools, pace, content, the amount of choice that control offers, and the ability to use the tool to create (Shedroff, 1999). Important to the concept of remediation is the theory of affordances, as well as convergence of media within digital forms.

Following Marshall McLuhan’s famous assertion that the content of any medium is always another medium, remediation has been identified as a defining characteristic of new digital media (Bolter, 2000). By adopting the qualities, forms, and structures of preexisting media, digital forms are capable of a mimetic form of simulation that in many cases erases the medial difference of the origin and the digital (Rajewsky, 2005). This “representation-through-recontextualization” (Adami, 2014) of previous media allows a networked distribution of texts on digital platforms to refashion older media; it is also posited that older forms of media must adjust in order to better compete with new media (Schrey, 2014). Thus, we can view remediation as a transfer, in which, “the transference is always a translation in the sense that the authentic or the real is redefined in terms appropriate to the remediating media form” (Bolter, 2005). Also important to theoretical discussions of digital affordances is the concept of convergence. The main feature of converged digital media environments is that narratives of any form (and any configurations of networked narratives) may be widely circulated through a single digital platform (Couldry, 2008). In the case of Instagram, convergence through the compression of text, photo, video, and the practices, this combination allows stands out as a definitive affordance of the digital platform.

Furthermore, by assessing the remediation of mediated memory (Erll and Rigney, 2009), we can witness how mediation and remediation dovetail into the realm of cultural memory. They draw clear connections between memorial media and cultural memory, noting:

Memorial media borrow from, incorporate, absorb, critique, and refashion earlier memorial media. Virtually every site of memory can boast its genealogy of remediation, which is usually tied to the history of media evolution. (Erll and Rigney, 2009: 5)

As such, we can posit that mediation is an essential component to the production of cultural memory, and assess mourning practices of HIV and AIDS against an evolving media sphere contingent upon the available media technologies at a given time, and how they build on one another.

Remediating the Quilt: @theAIDSmemorial and affordances of digital mourning

While the AIDS Quilt has been digitized for online viewing, the scope of this research chooses a different digital AIDS memorial to assess affordances and remediation. This is because the digitized quilt functions primarily as a search engine to locate specific blocks and panels; there is no easy way to browse through all of the selections, and the quilt’s website refers users back to the display schedule unless they know specific block numbers or the names of persons for whom individual panels have been created for. In addition, the cultural ubiquity of Instagram, the second most frequently used smartphone app in 2018 across all demographics (Bell, 2018), positions its prominence and visibility squarely within the popularity of the social network which hosts it. TAM, itself an independent project with no formal ties to the NAMES AIDS Memorial Quilt, gained notoriety within LGBT and mainstream news publications. While the account culls submissions from other Instagram users who are identified by their handles within the posts, the account’s sole proprietor is “Stuart,” a Scottish activist who aggregates content and posts on behalf of TAM’s Instagram followers. While Stuart has given many interviews to online publications, he intentionally obscures his identity, noting, “I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to know who I am. The account is not about me” (HisKind, 2017). While Stuart’s role as originator and proprietor of TAM bears resemblance to the role of Cleve Jones in the conception of the AIDS Quilt, his reluctance to claim ownership over the account’s content as evidenced by the mystification of his identity points to a seemingly non-hierarchical standpoint. Submissions are written in the voice of other users, following guidelines of what is supported by Instagram’s platform. Stuart has defended this choice, noting, “I have been told that not showing my face causes some to be skeptical, cautious or even reluctant to submit a post. Why? I’m not trying to sell you 100% Natural Activated Charcoal Face Masks or Teeth Whitening Kits” (HisKind, 2017). This reference to Instagram influencer culture, where notable figures are paid to sell cosmetic commodities, distances the account from entrepreneurial enterprise, a dominant aspect of Instagram culture. By evading the designation of a personal brand, Stuart and TAM projects are afforded distance from the neoliberal connotations of posting content on a for-profit digital platform like Instagram. Yet, while TAM’s sole proprietor strives to be as invisible as possible, both the platform’s technological affordances and algorithmic ordering provide a de facto curatorial function in-and-of-itself; this is not a fault of TAM or of its proprietor, but rather the reality of hosting memory repositories on proprietary commercial platforms such as Instagram.

TAM’s photo stream offers a variegated survey of personal commemorations, solidaric posts from fans of TAM wearing the account’s graphic T-shirt, and digital scans of collected ephemera. These scans are similar to what you may sift through in a physical archive; early news reports on the AIDS epidemic, obituaries, and professional portraiture from art galleries. Furthermore, the display of various media clips from films and music videos commemorating celebrities who died of AIDS-related causes shows the ease with which Instagram’s affordances allow moving images to be displayed alongside traditional photography and text. One recent post demonstrates the connective memory of TAM in its linking of AIDS activist organizations that were active during both the “AIDS crisis” period as well as in the present. The post shows a photo of a man and his partner taken in 1992 for a photo book of portraits AIDS activists, with visible scarring on the man’s chest from a removal of a mediport. The post details how he died in 1992, a few months after the photo was taken. The post, however, does not offer the portrait as a static artifact; the accompanying text updates users that the man’s partner, after recently retiring from his job, received help from his community to take a vacation using popular crowdfunding site GoFundMe. The post concludes,

It’s so beautiful to see this kind of love and community come out to support an individual member. It’s a reminder to me that, yes, there is hope. If people could talk, care and help each other, as people have done for [him], what a wonderful world it could be. (TAM, 2019)

The post demonstrates the temporal changes that occur within digital memorials; rather than offer a snapshot of a past time, it points us to the present, wherein survivors may be just as important as those who have left us. The post is a powerful reminder of community engagement, and the accompanying comments on the post show continued engagement; with over 4000 likes, user comments include simple statements of heart and rainbow emojis and kind remarks that show the affective power of the post (“Beautiful. Thank you.”; “I’m crying”; “I love this story. One of loss, perseverance, and love”). While TAM may primarily serve as a digital memorial for the lives lost to HIV and AIDS, it holds value for honoring those who are left behind to bear these painful memories. Evidence from TAM’s post lends credence to recent discussions of queer memory. As Holman Jones and Harris (2019) note, “We not only make memorials to what is lost and past, but also become memorial in how we reanimate ways of relating and sharing affection” (p. 17). While TAM does not obey the physical logic of the queer memorial, in which the migration of bodies make the memorial through spectatorship, this virtual mode of AIDS memorialization still demonstrates high levels of engagement and interactivity along a connective network of mourners, remembers, and spectators through comments, likes, and, most importantly, submissions to the memorial.

The Instagram platform affords the user the ability to share stories instantly, thus living up to its name, which is itself a portmanteau of “instant camera” and “telegram,” both which signal the immediacy and continuous present of the photo streaming app. While the AIDS Quilt’s structure is based on the metaphor of a standard grave, of which the size of each panel mimics, the Instagram interface is made to display images as though they are Polaroid camera photographs; in essence, Instagram portends to remediate the instant photograph. One need look no further than the app’s thumbnail to ascertain the metaphor to the prior analog technology it serves to remediate.

TAM does not require participants/users to wait for a public exhibition as is the case with the AIDS Quilt. The selection of Instagram seems apt considering it is perhaps the dominant image-based mobile app, and has ability to extend its reach further than the contained visibility of cultural memory projects like the AIDS Quilt, which require vast physical space; as noted by Stuart, “Instagram seems to me to be the perfect medium in which to achieve this mainly due to its accessibility and reach” (Karimzadeh, 2017).

However, the type of interactions taking place on the Instagram platform should not be assessed uncritically; Facebook and Instagram, as well as other similar social network platforms, have been criticized of late for their latent support of “slacktivism” (Larsson, 2017; Morozov, 2011) or “clicktivism” (Karpf, 2010). These critiques highlight that the affordances of these platforms for expressing solidarity, such as liking, commenting, and sharing posts, are a far less demanding mode of interaction in relation to grass-roots, street-based protest and activism. Furthermore, the algorithm used on Instagram and similar platforms obeys a programmatic approach of personalization; thus, the more a user interacts with a particular account, the more posts from said account will appear in their newsfeed. This algorithmic logic lends credence to the connective memory of the social network, in that collectivity is ultimately sidestepped in favor of user connections that demand constant interaction. The less one interacts with an account like TAM, the less likely they are to have the memorial’s posts appear in their newsfeeds. This positions affordances that ostensibly maximize user agency, such as the free will to post, like, comment, and share memories submitted to TAM, under the guidance of Instagram’s black-boxed technological infrastructure. In order for a user to maintain a connection with TAM so that the memorial’s posts remain visible and prominent in their personalized feed, they must constantly engage with the account using one or more of these affordances. While Instagram still prioritizes immediacy by showing new, timely content with each refresh of the newsfeed, the algorithm is not strictly chronological, which demonstrates the impact on both temporality and witnessing. Within this new form of social media time, one can see the technological affordances of the medium as a new means of organizing and containing space and time within a virtual environment whose borders are invisible, and whose content seems limitless. By abstracting users from the algorithmic processes that guide their interactions and what is made visible to them, this new semblance of temporality appears to be intentionally obfuscated, and transformative of the human perception; this synchronicity of development between sociality and technicity further demonstrates Instagram as a primary site of our present culture of connectivity.

The proprietor of TAM has noted the skepticism of the currency of likes on the Instagram platform:

I often receive messages from followers saying they feel uncomfortable hitting the “LIKE” button when they read a story on TAM. However, I highlight to them the positive impact of doing so. I consider a “LIKE” on a particular post as an acknowledgment, a way of saying, “WE REMEMBERED YOU, YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN.” (Karimzadeh, 2017)

The reluctance of users to “like” posts coupled with Stuart’s positive reframing of this type of interactivity may point to the act of liking as more complex than previous research equating it to “slacktivism” suggests. While some researchers contend that engaging in cultural, community-based practices on social media should increase visibility and audience (Russo and Watkins, 2007), it is still unclear how a person unfamiliar with TAM might happen upon the account without either actively seeking it out or having it suggested to them via sponsorship or algorithmic personalization. Of course, digital cultural communication has the potential to empower audiences by allowing them to participate instantaneously in co-creating content with curators. Much of the submissions posted to TAM are highly personal commemorations by family members, friends, and lovers of those who have passed from AIDS-related complications. While co-creation figures into the AIDS Quilt prominently, the ease and speed of contribution to cultural memory banks like TAM seems to be an affordance that is unique to digital platforms.

From analog to digital

Perhaps, the principal loss from analog to digital memorialization is the absence of space and place. The AIDS Quilt offers an “intensified horizontality” in comparison with traditional memorials (Blair and Michel, 2007), and thus, the quilt’s power is often viewed through the juxtaposition of its place of exhibition and the ephemera woven into it; for this reason, some of the most powerful displays have been noted at the National Mall in Washington, DC. The juxtaposition of the quilted ephemera with the place of exhibition, typically in public spaces in major cities throughout the world, is a powerful paradox that does not extend to TAM. While the mosaic compression of the Instagram platform allows a type of “patchwork” motif to exist, the sterile white borders of the interface do not offer any interplay between the content and the site of exhibition.

The spatiality of the AIDS Quilt also does not seem to figure into the appeal of TAM; as of 1997, the AIDS Quilt had already grown larger than 15 city blocks, and because of this, can rarely be shown in its entirety, instead traveling in “blocks” of panels, allowing simultaneous exhibition of different parts of the quilt (Howe, 1997). This could perhaps be considered a positive aspect of digital memorialization, where data compression allows a seemingly limitless amount of content to be held on a single platform. However, the sheer magnitude of the quilt, even when exhibited in sections, has been noted as one of the most powerful attributes of the memorial: “One of the most disturbing features about the AIDS Quilt’s rhetoric always has been its massive growth, an urgent reminder that AIDS continued to claim more lives, despite medical breakthroughs with drug therapy” (Blair and Michel, 2007: 605). As such, the growth of the Quilt across space served as a constant reminder of the importance of AIDS memory in present; AIDS is ongoing, rendered in the Quilt’s continual extension across space. The massive size of the Quilt also has political power in that it overcame the improbability of “a giant memorial to those stricken down by an epidemic, especially one that manifested first in the gay male community” (Blair and Michel, 2007: 601).

Aside from the obvious loss of quilt-as-metaphor, materiality and the textures of memory that figure so prominently in the Quilt are not a component of TAM or other digital memorials. The power of the quilt’s materiality has been recorded by many scholars:

Panels quite often present the literal material of personal clothing, flatly depicting the human forms that once inhabited a surgeon’s and nurse’s surgical scrubs, a police officer’s uniform, a sequined gown, a motorcycle jacket, and a favorite pair of blue jeans and a t-shirt. (Howe, 1997: 116)

By rendering panels in clothing worn by those who passed, the quilt is imbued with the “human forms” that this material once covered, offering a highly affective, personal commemoration that photo, video, and text alone on digital platforms cannot emulate or remediate.”

On Instagram, TAM has published over 5880 posts as of October 2019, yet the magnitude of this memorial is diminished by the limited size of the interface. The quantification of size follows the neoliberal economization of social practices, whereby the number of followers and posts is meant to signify the popularity of the account. While the collective processes of sharing and mourning are evident in both of the cases analyzed in this research, it would be shortsighted to insist that AIDS memory archives are exempted from neoliberal logic. In research of neoliberalism within archival studies, Cifor and Lee (2017) remind us that archives, including those that are not profit-driven, are not beyond the scope of neoliberal control, and are often reinterpreted through techniques and practices drawn directly from the market, and thus assessed through market metrics. On social media platforms, “Participants manage their individual personal identities much like ‘brands’ in order to acquire the most likes and audience attention” (Cifor and Lee, 2017: 3). In this way, TAM follows neoliberal ideology in several ways. Most prominently, it is hosted on Instagram, a private, for-profit platform. Moreover, the size, and thus importance, of TAM is delineated by the economizing logic of neoliberalism. With over 66,000 followers, the account’s importance is quantified by digital currencies of follows, likes, and comments, all of which are imbued with notions of sharing and promotion for both the individual project and the for-profit platform of Instagram. One can also see how the logic of neoliberalism has “branded” TAM; its own logo, featured prominently as the account’s avatar, also brandishes official merchandise of the account in the form of T-shirts, in which a portion of sales benefit Housing Works (n.d.), a non-profit organization that promotes advocacy and legislation for HIV-positive persons and provides access to medical intervention for homeless people living with HIV and/or AIDS, among other services remembrance as well as self-advertising as a cultural commodity.

Many of the most popular posts on TAM, as noted by its proprietor, are those that commemorate persons with a level of celebrity or fame, (Dresden, 2017) which mirrors the presence of celebrity in the AIDS Quilt, where both increased audience interaction with celebrity panels, as well as the presence of multiple panels for individual celebrities, have been noted for figures like Freddie Mercury, Rock Hudson, Arthur Ashe, Michel Foucault, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Liberace (Blair and Michel, 2007). Since both memorials engage in a seemingly “democratic” approach of open submission, barring none, they become imbued with larger social and cultural values that deify, and draw attention to, celebrity. In relation to dominant media discourses surround HIV/AIDS, celebrity has been positioned as a normalizing frame in which deaths and diagnoses of specific celebrities (Rock Hudson, Magic Johnson, Arthur Ashe) catapulted AIDS into an unprecedented period of media coverage (Bardhan, 2001; Brodie et al., 2003; Nelkin, 1991; Pickle et al., 2002). Thus, the through-line of this privileging of famous persons by audiences of both the AIDS Quilt and TAM can be viewed as a testament to the continued strength of celebrity discourse within social and cultural contexts surrounding HIV/AIDS media. This is one way that user interactivity is mobilized by Instagram’s affordances; posts that were previously well-liked by others are made more visible, which offers insight into why posts that include the familiar faces of celebrities are among the most popular, in terms of likes and comments.

Finally, while the far-reaching platform of Instagram was selected by Stuart of TAM to excavate narratives of AIDS memory that audiences may otherwise not hear, it seems to be the case that TAM is similarly positioned in an American context that is also an integral part of the metaphoric construction of the AIDS Quilt. When asked why there is such a strong focus on American subjects of commemoration, Stuart has noted, “TAM has evolved organically and is solely driven by those who submit stories. Of course, AIDS didn’t just affect white gay men who lived in America. However, I can’t force anyone to submit a story to TAM” (Holgate, 2018). While the dominance within AIDS memory by white, Western, male-bodied subjects on TAM and the AIDS Quilt appear to stem from the memorials’ attempts at egalitarian submission guidelines, the whitewashing of AIDS memory and cultural production has been noted by scholars and activists alike. Alexandra Juhasz (2012) has critiqued the cultural remembering of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a direct action activist group begun in New York in 1987, over other forms of AIDS activism, noting that the young, upper-middle class, predominantly white gay men who constituted the group were more appealing and ripe for remembrance in the eyes of dominant culture, over Haitians, immigrants, homeless people, poor people, and IV drug users also contemporaneously engaged in AIDS activism. Similar to the logic of neoliberalism and celebritization, both the AIDS Quilt and TAM do not seem to fully evade the whitewashing of cultural memory and historicity of HIV/AIDS activism.

Finally, as is of great importance in research on memory processes, TAM and other memorials hosted on Instagram do not seem to obey the logic of the archive. While a relatively new affordance on Instagram, the “Saved Posts” function, was introduced in 2016 and allows users to save posts from their photo stream into a folder that can be accessed in their account information may be a means of archiving particular posts, the platform’s affordances largely lack the features to systematically archive all posts. Other affordances, such as tagging individuals in photos, also deliver said post into an archive of sorts, yet the privileging of the constant present, as with other social media, encourages constant creation and interaction with new content rather than consciously sifting through older posts. Furthermore, to utilize De Kosnik’s (2016) frameworks of definition for digital rogue archives, an archive must have constant availability, be populated by content that can be fully downloaded by private users for no payment, and contain content that would never appear in a formalized memory institution such as a museum. While TAM may ostensibly meet the definition of rogue archive (despite the tenuous circumstances of copyright and censorship of content), it is more accurately positioned as a constantly changing database (Van Dijck, 2009). Furthermore, its lack of preservation (1000s of posts on TAM have been reportedly deleted by Instagram in the past) and messiness of direct recall of past posts orients it toward the present; the deletion of these posts may signal a lack of permanence of archiving personal artifacts on social media platforms like Instagram, whereas traditional notions of archiving would entail easily retrievable records of the past. Stuart noted in a discussion of the deletions, “I got angry posts from followers who had submitted posts asking why I had deleted them. They were so upset. It’s like vandalism in a graveyard” (Beresford, 2017). The evocation of the graveyard offers commonality with the AIDS Quilt’s metaphorical–structural origins, and also demonstrates that users who upload personal commemorations may choose to “follow” these posts well beyond their introduction to the TAM feed to witness and revisit user interactions. As such, Instagram memorials obey earlier photo stream services on the Internet such as Flickr, which are highly transitory and oriented toward recent activity and constant production in the present. It would be remiss to view Instagram’s photo stream as an archival device when it so obviously privileges the present over the past, both in posting and interacting.

Conclusion and future research

While digital platforms offer affordances of increased interactivity, wide reach, information and spatial compression for maximal storage, and near-instant sharing of cultural memory, the shift from non-digital publicly exhibited memory repositories like the AIDS Quilt to digital corollaries like TAM also demonstrates a loss of materiality and the powerful scope of its size and growth, two aspects of this particular memorial that have been noted as highly affective and engaging for audiences. While TAM does represent a remediation of older digital forms like photo, video, and written testimony, it can also be positioned as a remediation of the AIDS Quilt itself; they share structural similarities, and TAM seems to be incorporated into some of the specific cultural contexts (gay, American, celebrity-oriented) from which the quilt emerged.

Further research on TAM and its potential as a digital repository of AIDS cultural memory should be attentive to audience reception, and take up questions of access and representation. Assessing the ways in which digital memorials have/have not reproduced the privileging of white, male subjects in AIDS memory could further illuminate how history and memory interface with identity. While this study focuses primarily on structural, social, and cultural contexts associated with the two memorials, further engagement with audiences on how these memorials are accessed, viewed, and processed by individuals and communities appear to be fruitful lines of inquiry into research on AIDS cultural memory and production.

While this research engages in a comparative analysis of the ways in which memory (both personal and cultural) are collected, exhibited, and made sense of within two distinct sites of mediated recollection, it is vital to stress that one form is not essentially better than the other. While digitization and remediation may present a perceived net loss in certain aspects (materiality, space and place), both of these memorials have value in their own right. Rather than assessing analog and digital practices in a linear fashion, and instead viewing these spaces without relative value judgment, we can better understand their individual importance to processes of collective and cultural mourning.