CyPurr Session: Communities Need Backup

Don't let your community 404! Building a personal archive of your life online doesn't just help you regain control, it preserves an important snapshot for the history of everyday working people. We'll discuss the importance of digital archival practices (with some guest speakers) before walking through how to download your social media history and view it offline (and optionally, delete it!). Let's not surrender our timeline to Mark and Elon!

Check out the bios below for our main speakers for this event:

Olivia M. Ross is a Caribbean American information worker, documentarian, and secretkeeper from Queens. Her work practice in audiovisual and software preservation informs embodied research into the cybernetics of secrecy, power, and place. She is a 2025-2026 Archival Resident at Performance Space and a maintainer of the Cyberfeminism Index. Current and previous collaborators include Wikipedia, The Center for Afrofuturist Studies, NEW INC, Rhizome, The Kitchen, The School for Poetic Computation, Pioneer Works, BelleMoon Productions, and NEON. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, Documentary Magazine, Letterboxd Journal, MUBI Notebook, Them, Refinery29, Bitch Media, and the YouTube video essays of young Black femmes. Ask her about Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (1987). She is a death doula-in-training.

Ven Qiu is an archivist and creative technologist based in New York, co-parented by Chinese immigrants and the internet. As a memory worker committed to data sovereignty, Qiu conceptualizes deletion as a mechanism through which sociopolitical and infrastructural conditions of memory become legible (e.g. digital colonialism, platform capitalism, neo-liberalism). These focuses materialize in their archival project, Dump Site, a digital repository of deleted media. Qiu draws from their work as a tattooer, archivist, and perfumer to explore the textures of memory and multimodal archives. Their practice incorporates oral history, field recording, body modification, scent, and new media.

The CyPurr Collective is a group of some tech-minded folks who are very jazzed about cybersecurity, cats, and helping folks out with their digital dilemmas. We offer workshops for activists, journalists, educators, and everyday folks who want to up their encryption game!