“Digital Visual Studies translates to New Media Studies in my mind. It might be more relatable since it is transforming Visual Studies aka physical arts into digital space. One might be intimidated by "New Media," intimidated assumptions such as coding being a requirement. Our digital space is just as malleable as clay, paint, graphite, and metal. New Media and Digital Visual Studies have the unique ability to harbor liberation and conscious questioning of the norms in our physical world. What is learned in the Digital Space does not stay there, but is embodied in the real. It's a way to practice the future without the limits of gravity..”
— Nina Marie Barbuto
“For me, digital is everywhere, it is not only in digital tools we use or digital files (images, video streams, ebooks etc.) we consume, but it is woven and intertwined with many common and novel processes. Digital entangles with culture, ideologies, economies in complex, often abstract and hard to comprehend ways. Moreover, digital code and data, not to mention machine learning or other advanced algorithms, present s fascinating and challenging layers to the intra-action between the actors.
Visual, another monster concept, is one of the primary ways we situate, think and act in this world. For me, visual means much more than images, but rather the vast scope of actions, actors and possibilities that we employ and that employ us to act, think and do.
Digital Visual studies, therefore, implies the large field of fascinating, intertwined, mangled, complex processes that are folded with digital and visual. Digital Visual Studies is the unfolding of the multiple meanings of our current overtly digital and visual worlds. Moreover, these unfoldings, for me at least, are closely tied with the topics of empowerment, equality, critical thinking and democracy. My inspiration for Digital Visual Studies comes, for instance, from critical pedagogy, new materialist feminist studies and alternative future studies, along with critical code studies and digital humanities”
— Tomi Slotte Dufva
