Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies

We invite you for the book launch of Maisa in Webland with the author Maisa Imamović. The event will take place in English.

ABOUT THE BOOK

What does ‘user-friendly’ website mean if, on it, online behaviors like stalking, teasing, and ghosting — once considered peripheral — are now central to survival, care, and belonging? How to thrive without becoming an “Interdisciplinary Unicorn”: the state’s most beloved user-citizen fluent in multiple registers of production, optimization, and self-branding? How in this beautiful world is one supposed to log off, when surveillance and privacy erosion have been normalized? And how, oh how, could users possibly think of building the alternatives, when cool and cringe online acts, all activate the platform’s reward system: the unleashing of emoji-filled praise? How to resist the platform’s toxic seduction?

Haunted by screenshots of early cyberfeminist websites and in dialogue with digital sages, web scripts, and business interests, media artist, web developer, and author Maisa Imamović embarks on a philosophical and practice-based crusade through the internet’s surface and its shadows. To expose the various ways of thriving online without surrendering to optimization, the book explores imperfect uses of perfect software, preservation of precarious web infrastructures, tactical content strategies, and experiments with autonomous financial systems — all wrapped in educational efforts to sustain criticality amid automation. Through these traversals beneath the scroll, Maisa finds her Webland: speculative, broken, and oftentimes, poetic infrastructure where logic destabilizes, binaries dissolve, and meaning evades monetization. But can a non-extractive internet exist beyond metaphor? Can poetry rewire protocol? Or will her sanctuary be absorbed into the very architectures it resists.

PROGRAM

**19:00 **– Doors open

**19:30 **– Maisa’s presentation about the book, followed by a Q&A

20:30 – Book Signing & Reception

**ABOUT MAISA **

Maisa Imamović (BiH/NL, 1994) is a writer, web designer/developer, and experimental educator based in Los Angeles and, oftentimes, in Amsterdam. She critically studies the role of the single user and user behaviors generated by code. She codes to challenge the ideology of user-friendliness, support cultural platforms, respond to political gems, and socialize. Text + Code are her main mediums. In 2022, her first book *The Psychology of the Web Developer, Reality of a Female Freelancer *was published by the Institute of Network Cultures. In the academic year of 2024-2025, she taught creative coding and the history of cyberfeminism as an adjunct professor at USC Media Arts + Practice, UCLA Design Media Arts, ArtCenter Interaction Design, CalArts Critical Studies and Integrated Media. She holds an MA degree in Aesthetics & Politics from the California Institute of the Arts. In 2025, her second book entitled Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies was published by Set Margins. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern California.