Maya Man: A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City
Oct 29, 2024–Oct 28, 2025
Maya Man: A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City
Maya Man, screenshot of A Realistic Day in the Life in NYC at 7:00 am, 2024
Maya Man’s On the Hour project 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 or 11 pm—from thousands of publicly posted TikTok videos, stripping them of visual elements to highlight the 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 that specific hour appears in a large font on whitney.org, followed by a stream of animated responses from the source video’s comment section. Producers of such content commonly use the descriptor “realistic” in their video title, striving to communicate authenticity and relatability on social media platforms cluttered with overt product placement. Man’s piece highlights the blurred line 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 dramatizes the creator’s day while capitalizing on TikTok scrollers’ voyeuristic desires. A Realistic Day in My Life Living In New York City invites viewers to consider both the sincerity and absurdity of this contemporary form of content production.
Maya Man (b. 1996; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) focuses 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 (2022).
She has exhibited internationally at Bitforms Gallery, New York; SOOT Gallery, Tokyo; Verse, London; HEK (House of Electronic Arts), Basel, Switzerland; and the online platform Feral File. She has been asked to speak about her art at the New Museum, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Document, Vogue, and Dazed, among other publications.
On the Hour
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 2023 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.
To see the current project, be anywhere on this website on the hour.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to internet art and its online gallery space for commissions of net art.