It’s time to curse the internet with care

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Where it all began…
In 2020 I began noticing that I was always in various degrees of pain, fatigue, and nausea. At the end of 2023 I developed severe nerve pain, sending me to the emergency room many times (with little success). Eventually I returned to my childhood home for several months. This was challenging, physically + mentally time, however not unique. Many people face various chronic health conditions often with little awareness from the people around them. It got me thinking about my relationship to care. What it is. How both complicated and simple it can be.

We have formal systems that are meant to care for us, hospitals, pharmacies, even the internet, but often they 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 continued to be drawn to the roll of objects within this care ecosystem. 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 wonderful opportunity to bridge personal stories shared by participants, their personal objects, and the use of technology to co-create a digital space of care as defined by eachothers contributions.

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?! it is a small, simple yet powerful opportunity to infuse what serves YOU into the internet. You are not only changing your cursor but what others see too. Your custom cursor may make navigation slower, more inefficient (it’s hard to click on links when your cursor is an ice cream cone or 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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[15min] PIXEL ART VERSION OF YOUR “OBJECT”

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feel free to download the pixel art objects-of-care above (ice cream, fries, and dino dude) if you want to follow along but are not done making your own object 😉

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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!

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Changing your cursor is a small gesture, yet what it points to is larger. It offers an opportunity to critique all the different systems and interfaces we just accept without stopping to think…could this be different? Could it be funnier? More playful? More caring?

Cursors of care is a playful way of reflecting yourself into the screens you stare at all day long. And I hope that ,perhaps, it will provide yourself and others with a few reminders of objects that care.

One curser at a time, we will saturate the internet with inefficient, pixelated, and slightly lumpy care! ⋆.˚⟡ ࣪ ˖