[Launch] Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies, with Maisa Imamović

Join us for the launch of Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies by author Maisa Imamović, published by Set Margins (2025). We will be joined by Maisa for a presentation and conversation about the book.

Schedule

16:00 presentation

About

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. Beneath the scroll, she finds her Webland: speculative, broken, and oftentimes, poetic infrastructure where logic destabilizes, binaries dissolve, and meaning evades monetization. But can non-extractive internet exist beyond metaphor? Can poetry rewire protocol? Or will her sanctuary be absorbed into the very architectures it resists?

Maisa Imamović (BiH/NL, 1994) is a writer, web designer/developer, media artist, and educator based in Los Angeles and, oftentimes, in Amsterdam. Text, Code + Talking are her main mediums. In 2022, she published her first book entitled The Psychology of the Web Developer, Reality of a Female Freelancer. 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. She just started her Ph.D. in Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern California, where she plans to do some radical stuff. In 2025, he second book entitled Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies was published by Set Margins.