Artist Maya Man’s website has sparkles:



It also has links, lots of links, starting with a directory of where to find Maya on the internet, platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Are.na. That’s followed by a list of ”links! click around” which points to her projects elsewhere online. Next a collection of websites, talks, writing, and press. Oh, also a bio, a cv, and a photo. All collected on one simple html webpage. I like it!

So let’s follow Maya's lead and “click around.” The first link I clicked on just now is a winner — ☆ tiktok.mov (I made this in 2010 lmao). It’s hilarious, yes, and definitely cute. But despite the video’s title, it was made seven years before TikTok. So watching now, the video reads a bit differently than it must have when it was posted. Absolutely nothing in the work has changed, except crucially its context, and so then also its meaning. Maya’s work lives online, and it must come to terms with this situation. The internet, and to a lesser extent the world wide web, lives in a state of constant change. It will be different right *now* than when what it will be by the end of this sentence. Making work designed to live in the quantum foam of the internet, where every possibility is possibly possible, can’t be easy.

A more recent project addresses its context concretely. A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City is a project commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of its On the Hour series. Maya’s project was hosted on whitney.org for one year where at the turn of every hour, the site dimmed and Maya’s project appeared on top. The project’s source material is scraped from TikTok, graphically repurposed and reformatted for the Whitney website, referencing a specific hour which matched the current one, and collecting accounts of daily life in the place where the museum and the artist live, New York City. So this is an artwork that’s place-specific, time-specific, (web)site-specific, and medium-specific. I am going to include the full project description here:

A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City builds on one of the most popular formats for short-form content on the Internet, the “day in my life” video, to explore online self-representation. The artist excerpted text mentioning specific hours of the day—for example 8 am, 11 pm—from thousands of publicly posted TikTok videos, stripping them of all visual elements to highlight the “day in my life” genre’s method of storytelling. At the top of every hour, a quote from a “day in my life in New York City” video referencing the specific hour appears in large font size on whitney.org, followed by a stream of animated responses from the source videos’ comment section. Producers of “day in my life” content commonly use the descriptor “realistic” in the title of their videos, striving to communicate an aura of authenticity and relatability on social media platforms cluttered with overt product placement and aspirational lifestyle content. Man’s piece highlights the blurring of lines between living and performance in a format that offers a template for turning every moment into cinema and every person into a star. The “day in my life” genre requires a dramatized performance of the respective creator’s day while capitalizing on every TikTok scroller’s voyeuristic desires. A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City invites its audience to consider both the sincerity and absurdity of this contemporary form of content production.

Maya Man will join us today and we can ask her for more information.



Continues in class ...