Mika Ben Amar
Ad Space
December, 2025
Mika Ben Amar works with the internet not as an abstract space, but as a concrete infrastructure - one that governs how information moves, how it is processed, and how value is extracted. Her practice begins from a personal unease: a persistent awareness that while the internet structures nearly every aspect of daily life, the mechanisms through which data circulates, accumulates, and is accessed remain deliberately opaque. Privacy policies, consent banners, and legal documents promise transparency while producing the opposite effect - layers of language that obscure rather than clarify. Ben Amar’s work responds to this frustration by translating these systems into forms that are legible, restrained, and materially present.
Her projects often employ system-generated or extracted content - advertisements, browsing byproducts, image files - not to aestheticize them, but to hold them in place. The works are minimal in structure yet dense in implication, guided by a refusal to introduce visual excess. Aesthetic decisions are treated as technical ones: how to preserve context, how to avoid distortion, how to let the material speak without interference. In internet.flowers, images are presented as they appear in the artist’s own files, arranged in an unembellished grid. In Ad Space, advertisements are shown exactly as they surface while browsing, stripped of surrounding content until only the ads remain. The simplicity is deliberate; nothing is added that might soften or distract from the systems already at work.
More recently, her practice has begun to move toward the physical. A new project, developed through a custom computer program, explores objects whose form is determined entirely by computational processes. While materially distinct from her earlier web-based works, the conceptual throughline remains clear: an interest in how invisible systems exert control over visible outcomes.
Within each project, she aims to present a breadth of outputs rather than a refined subset - different ad layouts, different visual categories, different permutations generated by the same infrastructure. This insistence on range reflects her interest in accumulation over narrative, and in the archive as a living form. The works can be read individually, but they also operate collectively, forming a record of how algorithmic systems behave over time. As she continues to collect, the archive becomes a way to track shifts in advertising logic, personalisation, and platform behavior - changes that are usually felt but rarely seen.
Ben Amar situates her practice in conversation with histories of net art and post-internet art, without attempting to fix it within a category. Influences such as Rafael Rozendaal’s Abstract Browsing opened up the possibility of browser extensions as both tools and artworks - interventions that work from within the web rather than representing it from the outside. For Ben Amar, extensions allow a focused engagement with the internet as it is, narrowing attention onto specific mechanisms while leaving the broader structure intact.
Bio
Mika Ben Amar is a Berlin-based artist whose work navigates the internet as both a medium and a landscape. Blending digital and physical forms, she explores the aesthetics, behaviors, and infrastructures of contemporary online culture.