Digitaalteadust

Digitaalteadust is a fictional concept that appears in certain strands of digital art criticism and speculative fiction. It is not a scientifically recognized material, but a term used to discuss the materiality of data and information storage in ways that are tangible, visual, or tactile.

The name fuses digital imagery with the idea of dust, sometimes rendered as "digital tea dust" in essays or captions that juxtapose modern data infrastructures with everyday material residues.

In its imagined literature, digitaalteadust consists of ultrafine particles that interact with light or magnetic fields to encode information.

Though not real, it serves as a metaphor for data trace, enabling artists and theorists to explore how memory, recall, and decay intersect with the physical world.

In critical discussions, it is used to question digital materiality, memory lifecycles, and the environmental footprint of data infrastructures, while offering a tangible lens on otherwise abstract processes.