Luna Maurer
Human
First presented at Forward Festival Berlin 2025, What Makes Us Human is a lecture-performance that traces Luna’s 25-year journey in digital culture. At its core lies a central question: how do we experience friction with the machine, and which qualities remain distinctly human? Standing within an illuminated ring that holds her cellphone camera, Luna turns the device into both tool and companion – an intimate co-performer through which she reclaims human agency in an increasingly automated age.
Her story begins in the early days of techno-enthusiasm and web culture, when the digital realm still held the promise of playful experimentation. Luna embraced the emerging language of the internet and wove it into our physical surroundings, crafting participatory environments that invited large audiences. These experiments often revealed the shared human impulses surfacing in the crowd. This approach later became a signature method of her studio, Moniker: creating tech-critical yet playful artworks that expose how our behaviors, desires, and vulnerabilities crystallize within digital systems.
The performance expands this trajectory into a new, alternative form of techno-optimism. Luna introduces her Designing Friction statement, a framework that argues for the intentional creation of meaningful obstacles within digital culture. Instead of seamless efficiency, she advocates for slowness, resistance, and embodied encounter. She offers concepts how friction can be applied
as a deliberate strategy within contemporary digital culture – one that foregrounds not only human connection, but the felt experience of being human: the capacity to sense, respond, and feel alive within increasingly automated environments.
In her lecture-performance, Luna speaks through her body as much as through words. Rather than demonstrating concepts, she performs with and through movement, allowing embodied action to become a form of thinking and communication. Alongside this physical dialogue, she shares selected examples from her latest research in dance, exploring how narrative can emerge through the interaction between a human dancer and an AI model. The performance opens a space where the body converses with computational systems, not as a replacement for human expression, but as a means to sharpen our sensitivity to presence, resistance, and what it means to feel human.
Recent performances
2025 Sept 26
Forward Festival Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, DE
2025 Nov 11
CrashCourse, V2 Lab for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, NL
2026 Jan 16
BOUNCE, design conference, Trinity College Dublin, IE