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While you’re being watched, watch out for Mika Ben Amar
On living online and the art that derives from that
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Mika Ben Amar grew up with the speed of the internet. Not as one of many curious, casual visitors.. No, she’s been a resident of the web as long as she can remember: someone whose default sight is a screen, whose memories are filled with conversations on forums, and whose dreams roam through many different chat windows, have autoplay videos, and constantly see the tiny ‘x’s’ in the corner of advertisements – or so I imagine.
But in any case, she is ‘a child’ of the browser. In one of her works she actually shows this by having put the following quote directly onto the glass of a MacBook Air screen: “ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to be on the computer a lot”. The sentence reads both like a confession and a biography. In the image of the work, the laptop lies half-open on the floor – as if dropped there after a long night online. The text isn’t displayed but laser-engraved into the display, burning through what the device was meant to do. At that point the MacBook was no longer a consumer product but transformed into a sculpture made out of an interface – a fossil of someone’s time spent looking into it.
I was that typical iPad kid, crying if it was taken away from me for dinner
This is Mika Ben Amar’s territory: the emotional life of computers, phones, browsers, ads, feeds, and files. She doesn’t treat the internet as an abstract ‘space’ but as something almost bodily, something that presses against your eyes and fingers every day. Her work comes out of that contact. She is not illustrating the internet from afar; she is working from inside it.
Privacy
Mika’s practice is shaped differently than traditional ‘artist studio’ routines; hers progressed by the repetition of ordinary habits online. Opening a laptop. Typing a URL. Waiting for a page to load. Interacting with the design. Leaving a comment, or not. Being tracked (without really consenting?). She is interested in the small frictions there, in what it means that your bank, the shoes you might want to buy, your crush, the over-expensive cream that gets thrown into your face, and your medical records all live behind the same rectangle of glass.
Where earlier generations of net artists would often attack the interface with glitches or tried to break it open entirely, Mika tends to accept its language and then tilt it. She keeps the browser window, the product page, the pop-up ad – but uses them as sculptural material. She looks at how smoothly we hand over our data, how quickly we forget that the same layouts are watching us back, and then asks: what if we slow this down and make the interface strangely literal?
Her pieces don’t scream about privacy, but let’s you think about the important questions: How much of you sits in your laptop right now? What does an ad space feel like when it is emptied out and framed as an artwork? How do you store something valuable in a world where everything is copied a thousand times a second? Or can be just as well be deleted without you realizing until months later.
Internet.flowers
Here’s a work by Mika that’s very exemplary for her style and concept. Open _internet.flowers_ and you’re greeted by a grid of low-resolution blossoms: roses, daisies, orchids, sunflowers; all in the over-compressed colors of early search-engine image results. The site looks like someone spilled Google Images across the screen. No captions, no credits, no explanatory text – just square after square of flowers scraped from who-knows-where. Except, they’re not scraped from ‘the internet at large’ but from Mika’s own browsing history. A Chrome extension she built scans every page she visits, lets an AI model she trained detect flowers inside the images on those pages, crops them out, and saves them. Some come from forums she has scrolled past, others from social media posts, others still from entirely unrelated photographs where a flower happened to be present in the background. They are not circulated images so much as fragments, cut loose from bigger contexts because the model noticed them. In that sense, they’re closer to traces than pictures.
At first, it can maybe read as something ‘uninteresting’; the most generic thing the internet can show you. But the more you sit with it, the stranger it becomes. These flowers are nobody’s and everybody’s. They were not uploaded as standalone photographs – they have been detected, singled out, cropped, and archived by a system that quietly accompanies her online. They are pieces of her data, glimpses of everything she has looked at. On internet.flowers, individual intentions (adding, uploading or sending flowers to someone) dissolve into a mass of almost-identical jpegs whose only shared origin is that Mika once passed by them on the web.
Truth engraved
Where internet.flowers stays inside the browser, the engraved MacBooks drag online language back into the physical room. Mika works with the notorious laptops and turns their screens into surfaces for text; an act of archiving digital records and data onto something physical. The backlit pixels go dark; the interface is literally scratched away.
Like mentioned before, one of these engraved laptops carries her line about wanting to be on the computer as a little girl. Another became a monument to a viral post from the account terminal of truths, which she rendered in full across the screen.
Seeing these words engraved on a laptop is quite funny and interesting to me. A tweet about compressing the whole web into one file was and is, in some sense, already happening in front of you: the MacBook has always pretended to be that compressed universe, and your phone still is. Mika’s gesture makes the ‘fantasy’ (or should it be a nightmare?) literal and physical: the idea of total access becomes both a heavy and fragile object which cannot be used for entering the web anymore.
Our private lives are converted into data, bought and then sold for access to our own attention.
There is also another edge to it. Tweets are designed to be fast and disposable – or so people think; not realizing their texts actually stay out there ‘forever’ to be seen. Engraving a tweet into hardware is another form of permanence; one that maybe feels more ‘weighed’, but actually is less out there since there are way less people going to see this physical object than that the tweet itself is read (or ‘scanned’ for data).
Mika here froze a high, rambling late-night thought in aluminium and glass, asking what kind of “truth” we project onto these platforms, and how much we (not) think of what they - or others - are going to do with it. By carving text into laptops, the artist turns the device into a reliquary of its own interface. The work speaks to data as something both intangible and stubbornly material.
Ad Space
Where the engraved MacBooks are about intimacy with devices, Mika’s latest project called _Ad Space_ zooms out to the wider web economy that funds so much of what we see. For Ad Space, Mika built a chrome extension which removes all the content of a website leaving only the sold products and/or ads, with each composition revealing an infrastructure we normally don’t see. This is both funny and scary at the same time. The language of the banner ad HERWOWARS. PLAY WITH ME! BEST BROWSER RPG. TRY looks quite ridiculous once it’s the only thing you can focus on. By presenting the layout as a static, almost elegant design, Mika reveals its underlying absurdity. How much are you aware of the ‘cheap’ seductions our screens are crowded by?
To me, the collection of 111 found compositions becomes a kind of diagram of how our attention is chopped up and sold. Even when you are concentrating on a perfectly ordinary object, there are other boxes quietly bidding for your gaze, trying to lure you away, and measuring every scroll. Mika freezes that moment. Nothing moves, nothing reloads, and yet you feel the latent activity: the invisible traffic of your data.
And, if the blank rectangles or the highlighted ads are where value flows, what does that make us? Not customers, exactly, but more raw material I’d say. Users being used. We move through pages online and leave behind traces that can be sold. Ad Space turns the browser into an anatomy drawing of that relationship. “Our private lives are converted into data, bought and then sold for access to our own attention,” Mika says. In a way it’s very meta, but I wouldn’t say it’s the kind of ‘feedback-loop’ that we want to have as humans roaming on the internet.
Your data, their interface
Across these projects, Mika keeps returning to one theme: the way your data passes through systems you don’t really see. She makes us aware of our everyday dependence – the way we reach for our phones without thinking, the way our browser history quietly builds a portrait of us that other entities can access more easily than we ourselves can, and actually sell that without us knowing or noticing.
Her work invites me to stay with the discomfort of being both user and resource: internet.flowers turns the internet’s habit of de-contextualizing images into a field of anonymous beauty and Ad Space puts the scaffolding of surveillance capitalism into a tasteful layout.
After speaking to the artist about her practice, I strongly feel that Mika belongs to a generation for whom there is no pre-internet (‘before’) to compare things to, and that seems to matter. Her questions don’t come from nostalgia for a simpler time but from living inside this complexity since childhood. She isn’t asking how to ‘log off’ – she knows that is largely impossible – but how to pay attention to the structures that mediate almost every interaction we have online.
I feel like everything is super exposed online and we don't even realize it
In my opinion, the tone of her work mirrors that stance. It is playful and funny, very specific, and not doom-laden. There is a sense that she is trying to think with the interface rather than against it. And well, if you are going to spend half your life staring at a laptop, you might as well press on that surface and see what it gives back.
I think it’s interesting to see how she’s not chasing technological novelty for its own sake, but lingers on forms that have already become invisible through overuse. In doing so, she opens up a space where others can ask themselves what kind of relationships they want with their devices. Not in the abstract sense of screen time, but in terms of trust, dependency, permission and caring (about your data). Who gets to write the sentences that live on your laptop? Where does your browser end and your sense of self begin? What happens to all the notes, emails, flowers, tweets, files etc. you send out into the online world?
Mika provides us with objects and websites that ask these questions – works that look like something you’ve seen a thousand times before, until you realize they’re watching you back.
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