Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies, with Maisa Imamović in conversation with Lauren Lee McCarthy

January 16, 7-9pm

Join us for the launch of Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies by author Maisa Imamović, published by Set Margins (2025). The evening will feature a presentation by the author, followed by a conversation moderated by Lauren Lee McCarthy.

7pm Author presentation & conversation with Lauren Lee McCarthy

8pm Book signing & reception

Find the book here: https://www.setmargins.press/books/maisa_in_webland/

For more information on the related Workshop on January 15, see here.

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 does one 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: a speculative, broken, and often 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?

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Maisa Imamović (BiH/NL, 1994) is a writer, web designer/developer, and experimental educator. She critically studies the role of the single user and user behaviors generated by code. Text + Code are her main mediums. Her first book entitled The Psychology of the Web Developer, Reality of a Female Freelancer was published by the Institute of Network Cultures in 2022. In 2024, she obtained her MA degree at the California Institute of the Arts and was kindly supported by Prins Bernhard CultuurFonds. In the academic year 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, and CalArts Integrated Media. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern California.

Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist exploring social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She creates performances inviting viewers to engage. To remote control her dates. To be followed. To welcome her in as their human smart home. To attend a party hosted by artificial intelligence. Lauren is the creator of p5.js, an open-source creative coding platform that prioritizes inclusion and access with over 5 million users worldwide, a professor at UCLA Design Media Arts, and co-director of the UCLA Social Software Lab. Lauren’s work has been recognized by Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA Art+Tech Lab, Sundance, Eyebeam, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, and Ars Electronica, among others.