In 1994, less than three years after the first website launched, the first online ad appeared on Wired Magazine’s website. That very same year, HTTP cookies were invented, and for the first time in history, website data could be reliably stored on a user’s computer, enabling the Internet to become a tool of mass and centralised surveillance.

Cookies are fundamental to how the advertising technology industry (Ad Tech)—the primary revenue stream for companies like Google and Facebook—collects data, tracks users, and optimises online advertising. As a result, nearly all online activities, performed by our bodies and mediated by interfaces, are effectively captured and capitalised by a parasitic network of organisations that thrive on user data.

This lecture performance by Joana Moll intends to zoom in on the effects of this increasingly asymmetric relationship of informational exchange between our bodies and their hosts. Enabled by sustained online interactions and the mechanisation of gestures, users’ bodies become subtly yet incisively compressed, while their presence in the virtual realm expands—and with it, the power and reach of companies that exploit and capitalise on this dynamic dramatically amplifies.

Commissioned by Disruption Network Lab.
Performed at Disruption Network Lab’s conference Investigating the Kill Cloud in Berlin on 29 November 2024.