Maisa Imamović

𝘱𝘳𝘦-𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳: A genre-defying inquiry into cyberfeminism, web design, and…digital life. 💥 25 euro at setmargins.press @setmargins (link bio) How is one supposed to log off in a world where surveillance and privacy erosion are normalized? And how could anyone build alternatives, when both the cringiest and the coolest online acts end up feeding the platform’s reward systems: the unleashing of emoji-filled praise? In short: How to resist the platform’s toxic seduction? 𝐌𝐚𝐢𝐬𝐚 𝐢𝐧 𝐖𝐞𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐝: 𝐃𝐞𝐭𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐔𝐗 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐞𝐬 by Maisa Imamović explores what 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘭𝘺 really means when online behaviors like stalking, teasing, and ghosting – once considered peripheral – have become central to 𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘷𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘭, 𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨. It asks how one can possibly thrive without becoming the 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘜𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘯: the ideal user-citizen fluent in production, optimization, and self-branding. Haunted by early cyberfeminist websites and in dialogue with digital sages, web scripts, and business interests, media artist and developer Maisa Imamović embarks on a philosophical, poetic, and practice-based journey through the surface and shadows of the internet, in search of new ways to thrive online. Featured are conversations and encounters with Alex Quicho(@amfq ), Amad Ansari(@badgalansari ), Anja Groten(@grooooten ), Bogna Konior(@bognamk ), Chia Amisola(@hotemogf ), Daniel Shiffman(@daniel.shiffman ), Kameelah Janan Rasheed(@kameelahr ), Kristoffer Tjalve(@kristoffer.tjalve ), Lilian Stolk(@lilianstolk ), Marie Williams Chant, Maya Man(@mayaontheinternet ), Nadia Piet(@nadiapiet ), Olia Lialina, Rachel Rose O’Leary, Sarah Friend(@isthisanart ), Tara McPherson, Theo Ellin Ballew(theo_on_silver), Tiffany Shlain(@tiffanyshlain ), Valerie Fuchs(@madame_robot ), Warren Sack. Published with Set Margins Written by Maisa Imamović (@iammans ) Design by Clara Pasteau (@clara_pasteau ) Text Editor: Tripta Chandola Thanks @ PrinsBernhard Cultuurfonds and MondriaanFonds #Webland #MaisaImamović #Cyberfeminism #InternetCritique #DigitalPoetics #NewBook #PlatformCulture #ResistTheScroll #SpeculativeInfrastructure

Rip Space 2.0 is continuing to evolve as a nomadic and adaptive form. While we are working toward a future physical space, this year focuses on exhibitions, and shaping new possibilities across collaborations with community partners and other spaces. With 2.0, our team structure has also evolved: Founded and led by curator Vera Petukhova @_vera_petukhova_ 
 Naomi Sam || technical producer, technologist, artist @oida_kalashnikov 
 Maisa Imamović || research, discourse, and design @iammans Rip Space operates as a platform for exhibitions, programs, and collaborations centered on future-oriented artistic practices and emergent cultural paradigms. New website and design identity coming soon and the next series of exhibitions unfolding shortly. Stay tuned ! 📸Thank you Zara Pfeifer @zarapfeifer ☁️☁️one of our favorite photographers ☁️☁️ for the photo

the boldest chapter in my book: Confessions of an Adjunct Professor in the Age of Automated Knowledge was initially written for this beauty catalogue: Data Fluencies — put together by Roopa Vasudevan !! full of gems by @aarati.online , @lani.asuncion , @liviatronic , @jazsalyn , @laiyi____ , @kristofferorum , @rothbergrothberg , @cyberneticforests , @sam.ee.in , @carolinesinders +++ it was an honor

PUBLIC_BETA was/is a research/website/program I developed for STRP festival Spring edition @strpeindhoven . For the research phase, I had amazing convos with STRP artists: @carriechen01 , @tegabrain + @samlavigne , @zenovdb + robin, @tom_kkemp , @wilsonamylouise @lodeffilms , hanna haashalti, @sara_culmann , @ling.tan.ql , @despodovv , n @saraballlout …about the blessings and crises of contemporary hybrid art, and hybridity in general. Now archived on a website which is designed to also engage users in this research by asking questions about life + tech. Fun web facts: 1) there’s a likeroom where you can like user answers and put them on a “pedestal.” 2) the background gradient rises and sets like a sun in CEST timezone. my UX tour guide @ksenia.perek did an amazing job at helping people understand how to navigate the website with a giant mouse that genius @jasperbloem.world built for me :’). a culture of mouse riders was born. (keyboards were everywhere on the floor too, allowing users to write one answer together.) i also invited XP @extrapractice to give workshops on mesh as a portal to exploring and talking about alternative communication systems (alternative to social media). we formed two underground communities called R.A.S (Rage Against Silence) and PERMANENT TURBULENCE 🫠 life is for living. tnx @bnjmnearl + @super.gijs for the program/web launch on march 27th, i was honored to be in a floor-seated conversation with geert lovink (transcribed Hair Clothing), @despodovv + @saraballlout - and discuss what hybridity means in the contexts of institutional setting and personal art practice. sp thanks to @tess_eliane and @nroestenburg for trusting and collaborating <3 THE WEBSITE IS LIVE: public-beta.strp.nl !! (help it get out of instagram, and mobile version) pics by Angelina Nikolayeva @nikolaevalina , @super.gijs , and my phone.

“What’s more important than two women talking about teaching creative coding in the age of AI?” I recently performed this dialogue with Maisa @iammans . Starting from how quickly AI is changing the act of writing code, we moved between classroom tensions, personal practice, and cyberfeminist frameworks, asking what it means to teach coding now. As coding tools keep shifting, how do we still make room for friction, mess, and thinking? How would creative coding help us figure out what to ask for, what to reject, what to refine, and what we’re actually trying to build? Part of Synthesis II: Earthbound, co-presented by Rip Space (@rip__space ) and Spectra Studio (@spectra__studio ), curated by @vera_petukhova . Interactive visuals of the talk coded with @p5xjs

absolutely destroyed from touring with the book; 120% will do it again without any oopsies next time around. wait this was magical, so much love and emptiness and gucci tears 🔫. im so blessed 1) to have worked with people who made the book tour possible: sven, pieter, christina, suzy, nahui, lauren, wade, barry, aryn, james, stepan, ben, anna-lena, ana, freek <3 2) to have received life-giving hugs from fam + friends, esp my sis anesa <3 3) with memories of convos with those who listened to my rants, i will never forget u <3 4) to have looped (about 10k times) soul-soothing music in my ears while running breathless (mostly moin theband, marina herlop, and corbin) 5) for digital love from unexpected corners of the web…….aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. pics themed admin reveal, proof of life, proof of joy, proof of pro (by Monica Nouwens and Selen Dogan), and questionable selfcare. This summer, find me resting and reading david graebers history of debt by the local pool, staring at spiral jetty and green bank observatory, teaching radical web dev at @artcenteredu (the kinda publishing i cant practice here), developing sick digital n cultural stuff at @rip__space , and stopping by +2 exciting cities for two final final final rants, or so i promise….got time to hang, txt, on my cellphone please #jobyourlove

the last batch of documented cutie readers of _____ caught on camera across the globe in and out of book launch events. here we see them at various locations like @wendemuseum , @uscedu , parks, bars, @grayareaorg , backyards, @highdeserttestsites , @laichter.house , streets and more!!! thank youuuu keep reading books please

What happens to the web when the internet disappears? Join us for an in-person creative coding workshop (LINK IN BIO) with writer and web developer Maisa Imamović. Working between Los Angeles and Amsterdam, Maisa researches how code shapes user behavior and how digital spaces can resist control. She has taught creative coding and cyberfeminist media history at the University of Southern California, UCLA, CalArts, and ArtCenter, and is the author of The Psychology of the Web Developer and Maisa in Webland. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Media Arts + Practice at USC. In this hands-on workshop, participants will explore how to build resilient offline-first websites designed to function even when the internet connection fails, is throttled, or is deliberately cut off. Together we will imagine the web without the cloud and experiment with websites as tools for survival, memory, rage, and community. Participants will design small web worlds that live offline and then create a public-facing online version that reveals some things while hiding others. Through this process, the workshop explores how web design itself can become a strategy for resistance. Open to all levels of technical experience. Participants should bring their own computer. Program 15:00 Workshop introduction 15:30 Introduction to coding 16:30 Independent coding time 17:30 Web publishing and short presentations.

We invite you for the book launch of Maisa in Webland with the author Maisa Imamović. 17. 3. 19:00 @laichter.house 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. (LINK IN BIO)

ｔｒａｎｓｍｅｄｉａｌｅ ａｌｅｒｔransmediale alert 📘MARCH 19 | 18:30: Book launch – Maisa in Webland Join us for a book presentation followed by a conversation with Maisa Imamović about her latest book, Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies, published by Set Margins (2025). Maisa will also lead a workshop on March 20, examining government-issued self-deportation applications as objects of design critique. 👩‍💻MARCH 20 | 14:00: Workshop – Tap to Go: Redesigning the Self-Deportation Apps As states increasingly turn to mobile technology to incentivize and administer voluntary migration return programs, a new kind of UX has emerged – one that must simultaneously function as a bureaucratic instrument, a marketing campaign, and a persuasion machine. These apps promise dignity and choice while encoding urgency, surveillance, and consequence into every interaction. Facilitated by Maisa Imamović, this workshop examines government-issued self-deportation applications as objects of design critique and sociotechnical conditions that emerge from their advertising rigor. Drawing on methods from speculative design and, as Maisa calls it, conceptual web development, participants will conduct a close reading of the aesthetic and rhetorical strategies embedded in voluntary return interfaces: their color palettes, onboarding flows, copywriting, iconography, and the emotional labor they perform on users navigating fear, uncertainty, and loss. How do these apps construct the “user”? What fantasies of safety and belonging do they sell? And what remains invisible in the interface – the legal fine print, the data trails, the years of exclusion that follow a single tap? In response to the intellectual stimulation, participants will develop counter-proposals: alternative UX flows, speculative ad campaigns, or critical mockups that expose, subvert, or reimagine what a “voluntary” return might look and feel like if designed with radical transparency, care, or dissent. No design or technical experience is required. The workshop is open to artists, researchers, designers, activists, and anyone who feels like urgency and paralysis feel like the same thing right now. RSVP LINKS IN BIO

𝐐𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐪𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐘𝐞 + 𝐌𝐚𝐢𝐬𝐚 𝐈𝐦𝐚𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐢ć 𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕’𝒔 𝑴𝒐𝒓𝒆 𝑰𝒎𝒑𝒐𝒓𝒕𝒂𝒏𝒕 𝑻𝒉𝒂𝒏 𝑻𝒘𝒐 𝑾𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒏 𝑻𝒂𝒍𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑨𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒕 𝑻𝒆𝒂𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑪𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝑪𝒐𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑨𝒈𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝑨𝑰? Earthbound Speaker Spotlight: A dialogue performed in the style of a web-series blurring irreverence, internet culture and critical insight, this conversation explores how AI reshapes creative coding practices, classroom dynamics, and access to technological literacy; foregrounding feminist and community-centered approaches to teaching emergent tools. @iammans @44ian Part of 𝐄𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 co-presented by Rip Space @rip__space and Spectra Studio @spectra__studio this Saturday 2/28 at Spectra Studio (Lincoln Heights) Daytime programming begins at 3:00pm – come for the full arc. << Tickets + schedule at link in bio >>

‘PUBLIC_BETA’ by researcher and web developer Maisa Imamović (@iammans ) investigates how humans and digital systems shape each other’s behaviours, questioning user-friendliness while exploring alternative technological and social relations. Through a website and on-site interventions, the project experiments with hybrid interactions, where text, code, and infrastructure converge to create unexpected forms of engagement. The website also presents research developed in dialogue with STRP’s former and current commissioned artists, exploring the contemporary meaning of hybridity through their works. Through an on-site installation, visitors are invited to explore how agency, usability, and digital labour can be reimagined in playful and critical ways. Project duration: ongoing, with on-site interventions by Ksenia Perek (@ksenia.perek ), Extra Practice(@extrapractice ), and Maisa. Thursday 26–Saturday 28 March. Access is included with a STRP ticket. ‘PUBLIC_BETA’ is part of STRP’s ‘Soft, Slow and Powerful’ from 26–28 March 2026. The programme and tickets are now available through our website.