あいだを移行する「↑」――エキソニモ《断末魔ウス》，《↑》におけるカーソルの諸相――

抄録

This article considers the role of the cursor in the Graphical User Interface. We often look to the cursor as an expansion of our hand or the compliment of a pointing device like a mouse. However, although the cursor, and its place in a display, has been familiar with us since the origin of the “desktop” metaphor in computing itself, the form itself, ‘↑,’ has no correspondence with the “real” thing to which it points or merges, such as a file or folder. Moreover, the cursor does not obey physical laws because it is in cyber space. We are familiar with the cursor, but we don’t know anything about ‘↑’.

The art collective, exonemo explores this question, playing with the unidentifiability of the cursor and considering the cursor as a halfway being-the cursor is A, and also it is B―leading us to a new understand for the cursor. In this paper, I focus on their two works, DanmatsuMouse (2007) and ↑(2010) in order to explain what, in essence, the cursor is. These two works make clear that the cursor is a switchover entity, which creates the ‘between’ of the real world and the virtual world, switching from the real to the virtual, or vice versa.