Cursor was collaborative project developed by myself, Jake Watts and Dave Young.

Cursor is a publishing platform and corresponding Android and iOS fitness-tracking app that critically explores the political and economic relationships between physical exercise tracking, data-production, and labour.

In 2014 we were awarded funding through New Media Scotland’s Alt-W award to produce the project, which included newly commissioned works in the form of texts, videos, and sound works by ourselves and invited contributors Karen Gregory, Rumi Josephs, Simone C Niquille, and Anna Zett.

Alongside the publication itself we have also staged public events and exhibitions in relation to the project including featuring in The Edinburgh Arts Festival. We have also been commissioned and approached to produce texts and articles in relation to the project for Real Life and Arachne.

Resistance Training was an evening of screenings, readings, and discussion that opened out the key ideas informing our research and our approach to developing the Cursor app.

The event explored how shifts in digital technology are shaping the social mechanisms that produce our conceptions of ‘wellness and ‘health’, focusing on the persistence with which social norms structure technological practices. 

Resistance Training brought together works by artist Rumi Josephs and designer Simone C Niquille (Technoflesh) alongside a new talk by Dr. Karen Gregory, lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh.