CalArts alum Maisa Imamović’s (Critical Studies MFA 24) second book, Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies, examines how contemporary internet systems shape behavior, care, and belonging.
The book asks what “user-friendly” design means in an online environment where stalking, teasing, and ghosting have become central rather than peripheral. It considers how users are encouraged to optimize and brand themselves while navigating surveillance, privacy erosion, and platform reward systems. Throughout the book, Imamović questions how people might live online without fully surrendering to these pressures.
Drawing on early cyberfeminist websites and in dialogue with digital thinkers, web scripts, and business interests, Maisa in Webland explores imperfect uses of software, preservation of fragile web infrastructures, tactical content strategies, and experiments with autonomous financial systems. The book presents the internet as a speculative and often unstable space in which binaries dissolve and meaning resists easy monetization.
Writer Nada Alic describes the book as tracing the erosion of the web’s early utopian ideals to its “cold and extractive present,” while designer and writer Silvio Lorusso calls it “the interface confessional,” a form that treats digital experience as fully human rather than flattened.
The project began as Imamović’s Aesthetics and Politics program graduate thesis and was developed into a book following her graduation.
Imamović presents the book at a Los Angeles launch event this Friday, Jan. 16 at JOAN gallery. Doors open at 6:30 pm, followed by remarks at 7 pm and a moderated conversation with artist and coder Lauren Lee McCarthy. A reception and book signing closes the evening.
