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“What’s more important than two women talking about web development?”, made by Maisa Imamović in collaboration with graphic designer and web developer Clara Pasteau, screenshot

‘My research comes from having to do the things that my bureaucratic situation conditions me to do.’ Delany Boutkan asks artist, writer and web-developer Maisa Imamović about her research practice and the book The Psychology of the Web Developer, Reality of a Female Freelancer she recently published with the Institute of Network Cultures.

‘[…]it’s not easy to stay in the US. The bureaucracy and the system are so different than in the Netherlands – in the US it almost feels like they are escorting you out slowly.’ Maisa and I are meeting via my forty-minute ‘non-professional’ (as I like to call it) Zoom account. In the late afternoon in Rotterdam, Maisa finds herself nine hours behind my time, we have casually entered a conversation about her recent experience of temporarily staying in California in the United States to study an MA in Aesthetics & Politics at the California Institute of the Arts supported by the Netherlands’ Prins Bernhard Cultuur Fonds. ‘I’m kind of not counting on staying here, but on the other hand I am also taking note of the options,’ Maisa tells me. 

A website Maisa Imamović made for Merel Smitt's project What are you waiting for?.: https://whilewaitingwaithere.com/

Maisa Imamović’s research and web-development practice investigates the ways in which traditional (read dominant) codes and user experiences ‘program’ lifestyles and modes of being. Her practice started rather naturally while navigating her bureaucratic life in the Netherlands – first on a student visa and then the following ‘orientation year’ visa. With an orientation year residence permit the Dutch government and the Immigration and Naturalisation Service give the person who immigrated time to look for work on the job market after a study, doctorate or research trajectory. ‘I studied architectural design in an art academy, which is generally not considered to be “real” architecture, so I knew one year would not be enough for me to find a job in that field,’ Maisa chuckles in a rather self-aware manner while reciting the key moments of her life in the Netherlands. ‘Next to that, I had to pay my basic bills, the rent and so on. So I ended up working in bars, doing some freelance work, and eventually attending a boot camp coding school at BSSA – where I received a Full-Stack Web Development certificate.’

Maisa Imamović’s research and web-development practice investigates the ways in which traditional (read dominant) codes and user experiences ‘program’ lifestyles and modes of being

Imamović flirted with writing code before art school but once the option arose for her to receive a permanent residence in the Netherlands, and one of the points on the checklist of requirements for a person to do so was to have a steady income for eighteen months, she decided to gear her career towards becoming a freelance web developer and writer. ‘My research comes from having to do the things that my bureaucratic situation conditions me to do,’ she says. ‘The reason why all these milestones in my life are important to mention in the lineage of my research is that they reflect on the main essays that I have written in the last five years of being in the Netherlands. My latest book, for example, is a reflection on the boot camp coding school and being a freelance web developer and writer at the same time.’

Delany Boutkan

When was the last time you Googled yourself, or your book, and what did you find?

Maisa Imamović

‘I found my book on Amazon two weeks ago-ish (click). I was expecting that the quality of the front and back cover images would be lower than it is. The book has no ratings. Now I found it on bookdepository.com too; It all started from Lulu. My favorite self-stalking on Google was when I discovered Maisa the Chamoru Girl who Saves Guåhan — a Youtube movie of a girl who… the title is self-explanatory. I love the intro scene of the story told by a retired narrator to her granddaughter who also happens to be called Maisa. In it, the real Maisa is sitting bored on a canoe, humming. At some point, she asks her father to tell her a story, and he goes: “I’ve told you all my stories, Maisa. You’re old enough to make your own”. She defensively explains to him that nothing ever happens to her, to which he replies that stories don’t happen to girls who sit on canoes. She has to get up and make them happen. Maisa sighs out of shock, as if offended. Fast forward: a giant fish creature threatening to eat all the island people enters the story, making Maisa get up from the canoe and confront the creature in order to save her culture from getting eaten. She organizes everyone to defeat the creature together and they succeed. They don’t kill the creature but surely teach it a damn lesson. It’s not a story of my life, no, but discovering what other Maisa is up to does put a smile on my face.’ 

A website Maisa Imamović made for Marlies van Hak: https://www.marliesvanhak.online/

A website Maisa Imamović made for Merel Smitt's project What are you waiting for?.: https://whatareyouwaitingfor.eu/

From joining the Institute of Network Cultures as a Senior Researcher, where Maisa wrote three longform essays reflecting on her situation as a worker (such as Diary of a Stylist, in which she describes her time working as a stylist at a company that was producing images for e-commerce) to her first book; The Psychology of the Web Developer, Reality of a Female Freelancer, Imamović sees every part of her research trajectory as a chapter to a larger construction. In her practice she investigates her shifting roles and their conditions; in her work, her everyday life, in bureaucratic situations and while experiencing the limitations of having a Bosnian passport in a European country.

‘In a way, all of these long-form, research-based essays and texts were a way for me to write myself “out” of these roles, if that makes sense,’ Maisa reflects. ‘For example, I didn’t want to be a bartender anymore. While I couldn’t afford to just stop being one, I wanted to make the experience easier for myself. So I found joy in writing and theoretically trying to make the situation more understandable for myself.’ She continues; ‘As soon as I wrote myself out of these roles, the universe made it possible for me to not have to continue pursuing them. Whether this occurred consciously or because of pure luck, it felt magical and logical.’

While writing The Psychology of the Web Developer, Imamović took on the many different roles of the book’s different protagonists: that of the bossy Senior Web Developer, that of his loyal assistant and one less ‘common’ role – that of her younger self, a user of online interfaces such as Tumblr who has anorexia nervosa. ‘While writing the book I tried to be this “default” web developer that the work field expected me to be, and I tried to be the “default user” that web interfaces designed me to be,’ she explains. ‘Default’ user and ‘default’ web developer are terms referring to the ‘standard’ roles taught in web development courses such as the one Imamović followed. The ‘default’ web developer is the, often, overly ambitious developer who rarely sleeps in order to have their deadlines met; with severe burnout as a consequence.

‘I take my time with building interfaces and I also try to, when I collaborate with someone who cannot read code, guide them through mine. Because I want them, my collaborators, to understand what I’m writing’

‘My attempt to switch in the book from one role to another, either a web developer or a user, shows how unable I actually am to do so – to actualize myself fully in any of these two roles or to dwell in one.’ If anything, Imamović’s work actually lays bare the complexities of how personal situations (such as moving away from Bosnia, her bureaucratic status, living with anorexia, receiving a visa and so on) in many ways intertwine with professional roles and the ability to exist within those. ‘I think of all of these roles and experiences as deeply constructed,’ Maisa says. ‘If I consider myself a political body or theoretical body who thinks and feels at the same time, then all of these roles intertwine.’ 

Important, however, is to mention that those life events don’t become part of Maisa’s professional role or research in order to compare the severity of them to others’ struggles or to just showcase some isolated artists’ almost purely aesthetic, kind of suffering. But instead to acknowledge them as active sets of baggage. ‘We all carry these miscellaneous “burdens”, or items of baggage, in a way and it’s essential to address those – as they inform our roles and decision-making in our professional life and ways of working.’

Delany Boutkan

How did writing and publishing your latest book change the way you see yourself?

Maisa Imamović

‘I always thought of myself as shy and insecure in different directions (which may sound shocking to my friends), especially when it came to using the “I” in my writing. Everything else, such as the topic, the plot, the characters, were more important in my previous texts. It was easier to write knowing that everything and everyone else can have an opinion: the sock, a credit card, the club’s bathroom, coat hangers. But that also implies that the opinion could be anything. It may have gotten to the point where my actual opinions seemed half-mine. I could be of any opinion. I wanted to settle my thoughts for once, even if for a short time. So when I started writing this book, my main desire was not only to say what I have to say, but to make sure that the only consequence behind stating my opinions will be my ability to stand behind them. One may think duuuh, but it’s not that simple. Unless one strongly agrees that for opinions to develop further one needs to consciously play a role…as a vehicle for thoughts. And where I have no passion for what I’m doing is where I found the source of my occasional shyness. In which case I’d rather embrace the silence. It’s going to sound cheesy but I’m gonna say it anyway: Writing this book gave me wings I never knew I needed.’

Cover of 'The Psychology of the Web Developer, Reality of a Female Freelancer', courtesy Maisa Imamović

Table of contents of 'The Psychology of the Web Developer, Reality of a Female Freelancer', courtesy Maisa Imamović

Screenshot of the website of Maisa Imamović

As much as the narrative within The Psychology of the Web Developer, Reality of a Female Freelancer unfolds around the political, social and bureaucratic codes that surround Maisa’s work and life as a web developer, so does her practical work as a web developer and the code-based research she does within. ‘For me, (web)interfaces are political tools,’ she states. ‘In my practice, I often dive into the format and explain the life that happens behind, underneath and around websites.’ Imamović’s research comes about by studying websites’ front and back ends and their user experience, often from a very personal narration of them. ‘I need to understand theoretically what’s going on behind the emotions I have [as a user and developer a.o] with certain interfaces,’ she mentions. While reading the code of the website, she also tends to imagine the intention of the web developer who created the interface. ‘I try to imagine the user that they think of when they make interfaces,’ she says. ‘Because, that’s where writing code has so much impact, there’s so much culture to be studied from these social and political relations and constructions behind the website and the production of the website itself.’

Delany Boutkan

How did you do research for your book?

Maisa Imamović

‘Apart from in-situ research, my thoughts were shaped, if not accelerated, by plenty of books I read years ago and the books that entered my life while writing the book. Sadie Plant’s Zeros + Ones was the book my research started with. I loved it so much that when I finished reading it, not only did I almost cry, but I knew that I had to write a tribute to Sadie’s (90s)thoughts and almost with a sentiment: “fuck, not much has changed (for women)”. Other books followed as I was developing my thoughts in conversations with my mentor/friend Geert Lovink. He gave me homework to read Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits: Cultural significance of Free Software and Douglas Rushkoff’s books (Present Shock and Program or be Programmed). Those four really set the theoretical ground for my book.

During the first three months of seriously writing the book, chapter by chapter, I was living in Brussels. I was exploring the bookstores there and came across Maggie Nelson, Ariana Reines, Legacy Russell, and other good recent stuff. I wanted the experience of living + reading in Brussels to become part of the book. I had a few web gigs next to writing it, so I shared some steps of my writing process with my clients who ended up contributing to the research. Other snippets from other books and writers came from my peers; James was reading bell hooks, Stefan was reading Ocean Vuong, and so on..It was hard to stop more references from entering the book. I read McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker’s Manifesto about one month before the first publication deadline and that’s when I was like ‘ok, seriously now, enough. I’m young, wild, and have the time and capacity to write another fifty books if I wanted.’

A website Maisa Imamović made for the project 'Time is Capital': https://www.timeis.capital/spaces-map.html

“What's more important than two women talking about web development?”, made by Maisa Imamović in collaboration with graphic designer and web developer Clara Pasteau, screenshot

When discussing ways to (at times) be able to counter the roles of the ‘default user’ and the ‘default developer’ in her more practice and code-based research, Maisa gives the example of deadlines and stretching those. ‘As a freelance web developer I created completely different schedules around building interfaces than I am conditioned to have as a developer,’ she says. ‘I take my time with building interfaces and I also try to, when I collaborate with someone who cannot read code, guide them through mine. Because I want them, my collaborators, to understand what I’m writing — and for them to see how it’s not easy to change things around at a rapid pace.’ Websites are often built at an incredible speed, and in her research practice, Imamović attempts to prolong the time with a collaborator in order to, not only, move away from deadline culture but also to share knowledge about the reading and writing of code. In her book, she does this by publishing parts of her codes and their practical workings as an interface, next to a more ‘user autobiographical’, almost diary-like text.

Since our forty-minute Zoom time is coming to an end, Maisa and I feel rushed to end our conversation somewhere mid-reflecting on her feeling that the mention of female web developer in the title of her current book means she has written herself into a certain ‘default’ role instead of out of it. ‘I’ve spent so much of my research practice attempting to write myself out of default roles and bureaucratic constructions that currently I’m trying to focus more on constructing and becoming part of the digital worlds I do want to dwell and exist in — places where those default roles don’t have to exist.’ Referring to a collective buildup of the internet and writing code together, she says: ‘I now feel ready to initiate building digital spaces where others technically join the process as well…’

‘In three episodes Clara Pasteau and me question the hierarchies of how the internet is being built now. But also try to, on a positive note, show the type of internet that we believe in’

One way in which Maisa is already exploring collective and alternative digital worlds, is through an audio-visual web-series (launched in summer 2022) called ‘What’s more important than two women talking about web development?’, made in collaboration with graphic designer and web developer Clara Pasteau. ‘Clara is my coding soulmate and even though we never code together — we go through a lot together,’ Maisa says while diving into the web series. ‘In three episodes we question, through conversation, the hierarchies of how the internet is being built now. But also try to, on a positive note, show the type of internet that we believe in and discuss what it is that makes us continue being web developers.’ A new episode of ‘What’s more important than two women talking about web development?’ is coming out in the summer and is made in conversation with an LA-based artist Maya Man.

Meanwhile, our Zoom time has ended and we both realise the platforms’ latest update changed the number of times their users can re-use the same initial Zoom URL consecutively, from back-to-back as much as preferred to having to wait three minutes to restart every time. Essentially cancelling the free, effortless and rather bootleg way to extend the meeting time of my basic, default Zoom account. 

Click here for more information on the work of Maisa Imamović

Delany Boutkan

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