This paper aims to explore how visual literacy emerges when visual analytics and students enact in social science secondary classrooms. Interacting with visual technology likely demands new forms of literacy as various dimensions of complexity emerge in such learning activities, where reading become a way to impose order and relevance on what is displayed. However, there is a lack of research how these visual processes emerge. By applying a socio-material semiotic approach, the interactions between teachers, students and a visual analytics application are followed. The paper clarifies what might strengthen or weaken the socio-material relations at work in emerging visual literacy. This design-based study was conducted in five classes in three secondary schools in Sweden, with 97 students. The visual analytics application introduced was Statistics eXplorer. Each class were followed two to three lessons by a video recording program that captured both the students and the actions at the computer screen. The socio-material analyses show that the enactments between the visual analytics and the students were both strengthened and weakened by different social as well as material forces. The actions were directed by visual properties as movement, highlighting and color. Connecting to the students these often produced a quick vision or a "locked" vision. The paper argues for close didactic alignment and deeper knowledge of how the visual interface attracts human (students’) attention and how students’ visual literacy ablilites may emerge in that relation.