Introduction

This website has been made to host visual and textual contributions by students in the Digital Literacy & Interpretation class at the Graphic Design Department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp.

We understand digital literacy as a knowledge of practices that develop digital technologies. How they are built, what their purpose is, and in what context they come to be. We borrow this understanding from two Ursulas: Franklin and Le Guin.

During a series of public lectures in 1989, the metallurgist and educator Ursula Franklin used the metaphor of a house to describe technology in terms of a speculative shape.¹ How its walls are put up and taken down, the flow of people through its hallways, and who can enter where. This co-lived flow makes technology a common practice.²

In an online post on her personal blog in 2005, sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin describes technology as an active human interface with the material world, and its purpose as society coping with physical reality. She also tells us that they can be learned to do.³

These two definitions — technology as a common practice and something to be learned to do — inspired a collection of texts read in the context of the class. To collectively interpret them, discussions on digital technologies were encouraged. These stemmed from the perspectives of design practices, lived experiences, and social observations.

Following shared readings and discussions, the students prepared a set of visual and textual contributions published on this website. They vary in tone, topic, and approach, showcasing the extent of possible digital literacies and its interpretations.

Texts read in 2025/26 were the following, in alphabetical order:

• Against Imperial Knowledge,
  by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Lisa Lowe,Maya Caspari and Ruth Daly, 2023.
• Angels in Latent Spaces,
  by Bogna Konior, 2024.
• In Free Fall,
  by Hito Steyerl, 2011.
• Pussy Capital,
  by Liara Roux, 2024.
• Small and Close or Big and Far Away,
  by Gary Zhexi Zhang, 2024.
• Social Reproduction, But Not As We Know It,
  by Leopoldina Fortunati, 2015.
• The Author of the Acacia Seeds,
  by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974.
• The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,
  by Bogna Konior, 2020.
• The Girl Who Was Plugged in,
  by James Tiptree, Jr., 1974.
• The Internet Enters Its Age of Aquarius,
  by Günseli Yalcinkaya, 2025.
• The Real World of Technology,
  by Ursula Franklin, 1989.
• The Umbra of an Imago,
  by Allison Parrish, 2020.
• User Error: Shrinkbots, Part 1,
  by Adina Glickstein, 2025
• Why We Should Remember the Soviet Information Age,
  by Ksenia Tatarchenko, 2022.