Mika Ben Amar was born in 2004 and works in Berlin. What she makes are Chrome extensions. The first was internet.flowers. She is candid that the extension itself was vibe-coded; the part that took real work was the object-detection model running alongside it, which she trained herself on a mix of datasets with a single goal — that it recognize every kind of flower, "especially ones hiding in the back of random pictures you find online." Once it worked she pointed it at her own browser history in full, pulled out the hundreds of images with a flower somewhere in them, and arranged those into digital bouquets. Nothing was styled: "I just presented the images the same way they appeared in my files, as a grid." The second extension subtracts. Open any page and it deletes the content, leaving only the ads. She surfed with it for two months straight, chasing the widest possible range of sites and ad layouts, accepting cookies at every one. The result was 111 compositions, released on December 10, 2025 as Ad Space. Her entire account of the process, posted on X: I trained Google to only show me weird ads for this.

Asked how she makes aesthetic decisions, she answers that she doesn't: "It's usually never about aesthetic decisions. It's always just very technical decisions, then it all makes sense aesthetically as well." The one curatorial act is coverage — every ad layout represented, every kind of flower — and everything else stands as it arrived. That isn't modesty, it's a hard rule, and it is the whole of the matter. Both of her materials are waste. Browser history is the sediment left by use, the thing everyone is taught to clear. The ad slot is the one region of a page that isn't the page, the thing everyone is taught not to see. One you delete, one you filter; she files both as the text.

The detector is the sharper move. Object detection is built facing the subject — it exists to find the thing the photograph was taken of. She turned it around and trained it to find the flower nobody meant to photograph. That flower was inside the frame the whole time and was never counted, which is the remainder in its strictest form: not left outside, but present and untallied. To count it she could not use anything off the shelf, because nothing off the shelf is aimed that way. She had to build the instrument first.

Ad Space goes further. The industry calls the model a targeting system builds of a person a profile; the Chinese term, 用户画像, says it plainer — user portrait. It is a picture, drawn of you by a machine, and its accuracy is the measure of how far formalization can get with a person. Her method required her to walk into thousands of sites she would never otherwise open and consent at each door. Partway through, the portrait began to fail: "my ads stopped being targeted to me and just became random selection of slop ads." By the end the system had one thing left to offer her — ads for IQ tests. That is what the machine emits once it can no longer draw her. It is not her picture; it is the remainder of her picture. And she refuses to compose the remainder: 111 frames printed as they arrived, the obvious scams left in. Composing would be the first chisel. She does not make it.

Set her beside an already-construct and the difference is easy to see. She has said it was Rafaël Rozendaal's Abstract Browsing that showed her a browser extension could be an artwork. That piece has since been woven into tapestries, collected, taught — it is beautiful, but its beauty is sediment, what settled after a chisel-construct cycle closed. It is thoroughly named. Hers are not. From September 21 to 27, ARTXCODE and Rhizome open WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES! at 39 Great Jones Street in New York, marking Rhizome's thirtieth year: twenty artists, among them Vuk Ćosić, Petra Cortright, Rafaël Rozendaal, Auriea Harvey, Molly Soda, Kim Asendorf, LIA, EXONEMO — half the canon of net art. She is on the list. The exhibition gives each artist one line, and hers reads: "Mika Ben Amar is working in the gap between what digital infrastructures knows about us and what we know about ourselves." A gap is not a name. The Learn More link goes to her own site, which holds one sentence, saying the same thing.

Three reasons seeing this now matters more than seeing it later. First, the show opens in ten days, and once she is hanging in that room the naming starts — in a room that happens to contain Vuk Ćosić, who has spent most of thirty years correcting the story that his field got its name from a corrupted email he opened in 1995, the only legible string on a screen of garbage. The story came from a 1997 message by Alexei Shulgin, was later identified as a prank, and Ćosić himself credits the term to Pit Schultz. A field can absorb even its own accident into canon, then spend decades prying it back out. Second, her material expires. Ad slots and user portraits have a season; the IQ-test ads of late 2025 cannot be collected a second time. This kind of remainder does not wait to be gathered. Third, neither extension has been released publicly, and she has said she wants them out so that anyone can grow their own "data gardens." On the day that happens the work becomes a tool, and tools are named fastest of all. That day has not come.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics