About the Session
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 a glowing 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. The lecture offers practical insights into how friction can be applied to contemporary design and artistic practice, proposing it as a strategy for preserving human nuance in increasingly automated environments.
As a research fellow, Luna is currently exploring how narrative can emerge through the interaction between a human dancer and an AI model. By investigating the dialogue between a moving body and a computational system, she continues her search for spaces where technology does not replace the human performer, but rather sharpens our understanding of what makes us human in the first place.
