First draft: The cursor is the switchover entity between the real and the virtual: Two works about the cursor by exonemo

This article examines the representation of the cursor in the Graphical User Interface. We often look the cursor as an expanding of our hand or the double of the pointing device like the mouse. Although the cursor on the display has been familier with us since the desktop metaphor, ‘↑’ has no correspondance with the real thing, such as the file or folder. Moreover, the cursor does not obey the physical law because it is in the cyber space. Therefore, we are familier with the cursor, but we don’t know anything about ‘↑’.

exonemo receives the unidentifiable of the cursor and considers the cursor as a halfway being: This means that the cursor is A, also it is B. This idea leads us to new understand of the cursor, therefore I focus on their two works, DanmatsuMouse (2007) and ↑ (2010) in order to explain what an essence of the cursor is. These two works make clear that the cursor is the switchover entity which makes the ‘between’ the real world and the virtual world, then switches from the real to the virtual, or vice versa.