Enclosures
CURSOR08
We can connect our collective sense of digital entrapment to physical enclosures. In medieval era England, land that had for long been communally tended was bought up by wealthy landowners, fenced off and privatized, marking the beginning of private property ownership and early-stage capitalism in Europe. Today, every digital interaction has a location—whether tracked, inferred, or erased. Once promised as a space beyond borders, the internet is now a terrain of checkpoints, paywalls, geofences, algorithmic exclusions, and enclosures.
This issue of CURSOR seeks to examine who draws the lines, who crosses them, and who is erased by them. By tracing the shifting boundaries between physical and virtual worlds, the central question of CURSOR 08: Enclosures is: How are digital borders produced, managed, and contested in an increasingly networked world? As always, the submissions we received answered and went beyond expectations. I continue to be surprised by the number of playful, creative, and at the same time critical, submissions we receive in response to a theme that is, fundamentally, quite grim. This is what CURSOR is all about: critical perspectives and utopic visions.
In CURSOR 08: Enclosures, you’ll find both critiques and dreams. Last Seen in the Lobby and The Last Time explore the consequences of the digital enclosure and online relationships: what is left when a person disappears or is disappeared? Plaything of an Impossible Dream: Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon 30 Years Into the Future asks: just as the internet can be an apparatus for violence, can it be used to memorialize the transcendent digital body, where the act of glitching itself becomes a movement that allows for the defiance of enclosures? In Temporal Enclosures in the Age of Cruel Optimization, Sandy Di Yu analyzes digital enclosures through the lens of cultural theorist Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism, or when you form a deep attachment to something that actually harms your well-being and hinders your growth. There may be no simple solution to getting our way out of the enclosure, but we can look to Les be in pleasure and livelovecalculate, which both imagine alternative visions for what digital connection could look like if we refuse the algorithms of search engines and are forced to slow down.
Inside, you’ll also find CURSOR Coding Camp Dispatch_02: Mapping Enclosures on a Former Military Fortress, which chronicles the experiences of twelve creative coders who joined us for an extended weekend on Ungdomsøen to explore the theme of Enclosures. Campers were divided into three teams—Time, Space, and Bodies—to investigate enclosures through these different lenses. Time: How does time become a tool of enclosure? Space: How is physical/digital space constricted? Bodies: How is the body a site of enclosure? Each group came up with their own unique interpretation of the theme, and a creative coding project in response, which you can read inside.
Thank you as always to the editors, designers, contributors, and readers of CURSOR! We wouldn’t be here without you. Happy reading.
Maya Ellen Hertz
Editor-in-Chief
Editor-in-Chief
- An Atlas of Maps
- ████████
- les be in pleasure
- Am I a Woman, or Am I Dead?: Notes from the Trans (After)Life of Digital Enclosure
- The Folded World
- The Last Time
- CURSOR Coding Camp Dispatch 02: Mapping enclosures on a former military fortress
- Temporal Enclosures in the Age of Cruel Optimization
- becoming crossings
- Plaything of an Impossible Dream: Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon 30 Years Into the Future
- livelovecalculate
- Last Seen in the Lobby
Marina Cardoso