Digital Culture Meets Collage in Visual Studies Workshop
DVS instructor Marianne Botros invites students to explore memes, emojis, and online imagery through art
The Department of Visual Studies recently hosted a Digital Culture Collage-Making Workshop led by instructor Marianne Botros. The event invited students to explore how online imagery can function as a form of artistic and cultural expression. The workshop, centred on collage-making, asked participants to work with materials inspired by digital life, including emojis, memes, GIFs, hashtags, and social media aesthetics.
Botros explained that the idea for the workshop came from her teaching in VCC390: Community and Media. “The goal of this course is to create a community inside a classroom,” she said. In the course, students are divided into groups based on shared interests, with each group forming its own small community through names, images, and collaborative work throughout the semester. That structure, she said, helped shape the thinking behind the workshop.
For Botros, the event was not only about collage as an art activity. It was also about getting students to think more carefully about what culture means in a digital age. “Culture is a set of beliefs. Culture is a set of practices,” she said, adding that culture changes “from one era to another,” because people now communicate, represent themselves, and share meaning online. Botros sees digital platforms as part of contemporary culture itself. “When someone is signing in [on] Facebook, they are practising the new culture of this age,” she said.
That idea became the basis for the workshop. “After teaching this course, I have found that students were so much [more] engaged when they were using digital culture,” Botros said. “So, when I thought about a workshop, how about we do a collage making [event]?”
According to Botros, participants were asked to create “a unique step-by-step collage art piece” inspired by elements of digital and visual culture. Some students used tablets while others worked with paper and other physical materials on a flat surface. Before starting, participants were asked to identify parts of their background, including “their age, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, gender.” and consider how those factors might shape their collage.
Botros also introduced students to examples such as “pixel art, emoji collages, meme-based artwork, social media layouts,” then walked them through the basics of visual composition. “I quickly went through what the elements of art are. Lines, shapes, textures, colours, forms, space,” she said.
Although the workshop drew a small group, Botros still found the responses revealing. “Only 4 students attended,” she said. She partly attributed the turnout to the time of year, saying the workshop took place during “the busy time of the year,” and also suggested that the concept may not have been immediately clear to students.
Even with limited attendance, Botros noticed that students approached the activity differently depending on their academic backgrounds and personal perspectives. “The engineering student used geometric shapes. Versus anthropology [student], which loved using organic shapes,” she said. At the same time, she noticed a shared approach in the tools students used, whether through “cutting with scissors” or “using Canva to put their collage together.”
That variety was part of the point. She emphasised throughout the interview that digital symbols do not carry one fixed meaning. Instead, they shift depending on who is interpreting them. “They are all exposed to the same thumbs up, but each one would have a different expression towards it,” she said. In that sense, digital culture can act as a common visual language while still being shaped by age, identity, background, and lived experience.
She also argued that forms like memes, hashtags, and emojis are worth taking seriously as artistic material because they can carry cultural meaning. “Each one of them has a meaning. It’s meaningful, and it represents their own cultural narrative,” she said.
At the same time, Botros drew a clear distinction between digitally influenced work and AI-generated art. “Traditional art is more serious than using AI art,” she said. Explaining why, she pointed to the physical and emotional process involved in making art by hand. “When we create art, we feel,” she said, “When we move physically, it helps in expressing better.” By contrast, she described AI as “highly related to articulating prompts” and said that the process does not engage the body in the same way.
Still, Botros believes the boundary between internet culture and traditional art is changing. When asked whether that line is becoming less rigid, her answer was immediate: “Yes.”
More than anything, Botros hopes students leave the workshop looking at digital imagery more critically. “Number one is to question everything they see,” she said. In a world saturated with visual information, she wants students to become more attentive to the meanings built into the images that surround them and more confident in expressing their own stories through visual culture.
