Maya Man: A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City
Oct 29, 2024–
Maya Man, screenshot of A Realistic Day in the Life in NYC at 7:00 am, 2024
Maya Man’s 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 (b. 1996) is an artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the Internet. Her websites, generative series, and installations examine dominant narratives around femininity, authenticity, and the online performance of the self. She is the creator of the browser extension Glance Back and the Art Blocks curated collection FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT. She has exhibited internationally at bitforms, NYC; SOOT, Tokyo; Verse, London; HEK, Basel; and the online platform Feral File. She has been invited to speak about her work at The New Museum, NYC; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and MOCA, Los Angeles. Her artwork has been featured in Art in America, Document, Vogue, Dazed, among other publications. She currently runs a DIY space out of her studio in Soho called HEART. She is online at mayaontheinter.net.
On the Hour is a series of Internet art projects that mark every full hour around the clock, unfolding over a time frame of thirty seconds. Replacing the Sunrise/Sunset series, which ran from 2009 to 2024 and marked sunset and sunrise in New York City, On the Hour projects are commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org.
Using whitney.org as their habitat, On the Hour projects disrupt, replace, or explore the museum website as an information environment. This form of engagement captures the core of artistic practice on the Internet, the intervention in existing online spaces. The series is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
To see the current project, be anywhere on this website on the hour.
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