Before this course, « Digital Humanities » was just a sandwich of two separate words slapped together. Now I think of it as a magnifying glass to rewire how we see the past and the potentials of learning and growing the future. Digital Humanities is a labyrinth and has so many interpretations and applications. In my mind, it is the space where analogue and digital meet. As an artist, I love the idea of this grey zone that’s not fully one thing nor the other. In this age of rapid information and digital transformation, digital humanities is like a jazz improvisation, a creative exploration of the intersections between technology and the human spirit. It’s a place where we search for meaning amidst the vast sea of data.
I came to Besançon from Johannesburg in August of 2022. I had just earned my undergraduate in Fine Arts and had spent the first couple of month out of my degree working in various printmaking studios as an assistant. My skillset was definitely of a different kind. Mechanical in terms of my hands, technical in terms of tactility rather than technology. In the digital humanities the written word seemed to become transformed into bits and bytes, navigating through a complex web of data. It’s as if the everyday mundanity of language takes on a new, ethereal form. This appeals to the notion that we can peer into the collective memory of humanity, excavating forgotten stories, voices, and histories that were buried beneath the sands of time. In this pursuit, we embrace the chaos of the digital age.
We can lose ourselves in the relentless flow of data, and for me it definitely was a challenge to confront the inexplicable and the absurd in the form of coding and web orientated work. It demands a special kind of introspection and discernment and discipline. I had never pictured myself doing something like this, and it certainly was a surprise to many of my former colleagues and friends from South Africa. This was surely just a new medium to experiment with, a new way of wiring my brain.
Yet, somehow it’s become a place where the familiar and the strange coexist; something that is constantly shapeshifting into endless possibilities unbounded by space and time. I think that it’s something that is shaped according to the user, much like an art form.
