What Do (Digital) Images Want?

Taking W.J.T. Mitchell's What do Pictures Want? and David Freedberg’s The Power of Images into the digital realm, this category interrogates the complex agency of digital images today and the power dynamics at play in their creation. We aim to investigate not only how images and data (and images as data) shape cultural narratives and power systems, but what these digital entities seem to demand from us as scholars, archivists, cultural producers, and spectators. At the same time, we seek to understand how a visual studies approach to digital images might generate alternative (digital) art histories and new ways of seeing beyond the constraints of conventional methodologies.