Enclosures

CURSOR08

Issue 08, Autumn 2026

LETTER FROM THE EDITORExisting online in 2026 is for many an ambivalent experience. You watch your friend who lives on the other side of the planet’s Instagram story and feel closer to them, maybe even energized; the next minute you’re fed ad-after-ad for new sneakers, a thinly veiled Airbnb alternative for ‘creatives’, and an AI therapy bot that apparently can solve all of your problems. Even your mundane interactions are extracted for profit: How many times did you click? How long did you pause on a reel? Which version of an advertisement caught your attention first?—these are all data points to be turned into shareholder value. At this point, most of us know from first-hand experience that the internet, once promised as a space for free expression and connection, hasn’t lived up to its potential. And yet it feels impossible to leave.

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

In this issue

Maya Ellen Hertz, Editor-in-Chief

Editorial team
Jill Blackmore Evans
Livia Godaert
Maïwenn Blunat
Micah Lockman-Fine

Print layout and design
Marina Cardoso (lead)
Andrea Nordbaeck
Anna Zhijun Xu
Naomi Stinus