Join the Department of Performing and Media Arts for PMAPS Colloquium with AE Stevenson: “‘Oh My Fucking God, She Fucking Dead’: Time in a Vine,” on Friday, March 20, from 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm, in the Film Forum, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. AE Stevenson is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago. This event is free and open to the public.
“‘Oh My Fucking God, She Fucking Dead’: Time in a Vine,” is about the now-defunct social media app Vine and its patented looping feature that renegotiated online time, not to be mistaken with what Shane Denson calls “Screen Time.” The chapter centers around the case study of Kayla Newman who created the phrase “on fleek” on the app, which quickly became a major socio-cultural indicator for others to generate cultural capital from because it was not attributed back to its Black girl creator. However, while Newman did later get acknowledgement for the creation, it took time. The looping feature of Vine, meaning that the video begins replaying immediately after it finishes, quickly became implemented on all social media sites by 2014 changed the understanding of how long the experience of a video could be. Dr. Stevenson connects the way that time is elapsed on Vine to the way that Black women and girls on this app often could not find a way to own their creations. It has been only after Vine, and its loop, “closed” that these Black women and girls get to reap the nostalgic capital of their creations.
AE Stevenson is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is currently a Residential Fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, where she is working to complete her first monograph, Sites of Chaos: Scenes of a Black Social Life. Sites of Chaos analyzes Vine, TikTok, Instagram’s The Shade Room, and “blackfishing” to argue that Black women and girls have fundamentally changed the visual language of the Internet. She has published in Catalyst, Feminist Media Histories, and liquid blackness.
This event is sponsored by the Performance and Media Arts Presentation (PMAPS) colloquium series. Inaugurated in Fall 2021, PMAPS is the latest iteration of a colloquium series within the Department of Performing and Media Arts. Its greatest vision lies in offering graduate students a space to present their work to students, faculty, and professionals of similar fields and interests. The content of its presentation’s ranges from media studies to dance, and such diverse nature has earned the attention of related communities both within and outside Ithaca, NY.
