It’s time to curse the internet with care

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Where it all began…
In 2020 I began noticing how I was always in various degrees of pain, fatigue, and nausea. At the end of 2023 I visited the emergency room many times (with little success) due to nerve pain and returned to my childhood home for several months. This was a challenging time, however not unique. Many people face various chronic health conditions. It got me thinking about what care is. How both complicated and simple it can be.

We have these formal systems that are meant to care for us, hospitals, pharmacies, even the internet, but often don’t, or worst…they harm us. From this curiosity emerged the project Walked Traces: Living With (___) which I was lucky enough to work on during a residency at Ada X (2025).

During this residency I began reflecting on how objects care for us. And how these objects can be both universal, like 🍫, but also very personal like 🧣.

“There is nothing more vulnerable than caring for someone [or something]; it means not only giving your energy to that which is not you but also caring for that which is beyond or outside your control. Caring is anxious—to be full of care, to be careful, is to take care of things by becoming anxious about their future, where the future is embodied in the fragility of an object whose persistence matters.” – Sarah Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness

From this emerged the VR participatory work Objects of Care. This project has been a really wonderful experience that bridges personal stories shared by participants, their personal objects, and the use of technology to co-create a digital space of care as defined by each contribution.

It is this continued curiosity around what constitutes an object-of-care and the importance of them in our lives which gave birth to Cursors of Care…todays workshop!

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CURSORS OF CARE

WHY?! its a small, simple yet powerful opportunity to infuse what serves YOU into the internet. You are not only changing your cursor by what others see too. Perhaps making navigation slower, more inefficient (its hard to click on links when your cursor is a dinosaur) and hopefully a little more playful. Together we are cursing the internet with care.

Next 30-40 min: reflect on what objects care for us >> create pixel art of one of those objects >> turn that pixel art into a cursor on your computer (Windows) or website (CSS/JAVASCRIPT)

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NOTE: this presentation is simply a page on my website, which you can return to later if you wish!

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PIXEL ART VERSION OF YOUR “OBJECT”

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⋆.˚⟡ ࣪ ˖

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okay…

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You have your object of care in pixel form

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now lets turn it into a cursor!