In the Archives

CURSOR07

Issue 07, Summer 2025

LETTER FROM THE EDITORI became interested in investigating the archive as a tool of classification while working with a large, digitized dataset of legal case summaries for my PhD project. As archives increasingly become digitized, we must understand the data infrastructures that shape digital archives, but also how the structure of an archive—digital or not—can be understood as a technology in itself. In the Archives centers around this question of classification, and on the potential of counter-archiving to challenge dominant narratives and power structures.

So what is an archive? Is it a catalogue of TikTok reels repurposed as flipbooks? A digitized collection of family stamps tracing personal and post-colonial histories? Or perhaps it is a database of unsuccessful requests, data not found, from official websites around the world? In this issue of CURSOR, you’ll find all of these archives and more. Underlying each submission is a lesson about what the archive can teach us.

Cybertrophy Mag and Testament of the Flickering Scrolls repurpose digital platforms into new mediums, inviting fresh engagement with interfaces that many of us use every day, revealing their absurdity. Through an interactive web game or a speculative future tale, these authors provoke us to face our assumptions about how we archive our experiences online, and how it might feel to be archived.

Venom Zine Library speaks directly with their archive of anti-racist DIY publications from the 1970s-90s Britain. Conceptualizing the archive as a boundless spiral, they speak directly with the past, challenging the sense that repetition disintegrates. Instead of repeated touch eroding the preserved material, touch is an act of intimacy, and of imbuing the material with new meaning. These lessons are echoed in Vidya Giri’s piece on digitizing her mother and uncle’s stamp collection, and in the Cybernetics Image Library. The archive is not static—it calls for upkeep, care, and attention to continue living. As put forth by Saskia Knowles, it shapes and is shaped by traces of use and stewardship.

In The Interface vs. the Archive, Will Allstetter imagines the archive as the antidote to big tech’s profit-driven digital interfaces, where the archive ‘creates against the interface’ by cataloging meaningful artifacts, undermining profit and reaffirming “illogical humanity.” And in Impulse Playground, Claire Zhang provides the living-breathing example of ‘creating against the interface’: where an archive of rocks is imagined as an intimate grammar, as a devotion to being present, to the seriousness of play.

By collecting a series of artifacts and arranging them in connection to one another, archives have the power to reorganize, repurpose, and make visible things that otherwise go unnoticed. Thank you for your beautiful contributions, for the lessons learned, and thank you for reading.

Maya Ellen Hertz
Editor-in-Chief

In this issue: The Loona Database and Trashgram: Archives at the End of History by Caroline Cai

Cybernetics Image Library by Chaski (Saskia Knowles)

The Interface vs. The Archive by Will Allstetter

Digitizing a Stamp Album: The Shape of Archiving Memories by Vidya Giri

This Spiral is a Promise by Venom Zine Library

Cybertrophy Mag by Taylor Paydos

On Are.na and Archival Anxieties by Firuza Huseynova

Saving Her Sorrows in the Cloud by Caitlin van Bommel

Data Not Found by Jonathan Gray

Punk Archiving: Queering Norfolk and Fighting Power by Adam Baker

Friends Only by Roopa Vasudevan

Testatement of the Flickering Scrolls by Maja Mikulska, Meabh O’Halloran and August Kaasa Sundgaard

How Do You Tell Time? by Kalyani Tupkary

A Conversation With Rica Takashima by Nathalia Dutra

Impulse Playground by Claire Zhang

The Last Party by Freja Smith

Doing Archives: Progress Report by Anna Shams Ili and Clara Eddy

Maya Ellen Hertz, Editor-in-Chief

Editorial team
Alexandra Melekka
Amber Hanson
Charlotte Strange
Gemma Ciabattoni
Isabella Haid
Livia Godaert
MaÏwenn Blunat
Nathalia Dutra
Renia Morfakidon
Sonja Belkin

Print layout and design
Marina Cardoso (lead)
Bea Woolner
Jael Arau
Fiorella Mennesson
Ondine Vermenot

This issue of CURSOR was sponsored by UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). C2i2 is a critical internet studies community committed to reimagining technology, championing social justice, and strengthening human rights through research, culture, and public policy.