FULL INTERVIEW:
Pearl Marden: Your work combines physical material with an online digital element. What about the contrast of materiality interests you?
Maya Man: I've been thinking about that a lot also in relation to running a space (HEART). But to me, being an artist is all about manipulating attention. And so it's kind of about pointing to something and asking someone to engage with it, which is an act of directing attention.
So when I’m translating work that I make, that already exists primarily as a website or an algorithm into physical space or making something that's kind of physical, first, I really think about how people are going to encounter it and pay attention to it. In my experience, I love being online. But my attention span is way shorter online and it’s really important to me to have the chance for people to look at something for longer and think about it for longer.
So that's something that I think about a lot when I'm doing work that maybe starts digital but becomes physical. In terms of form, I'm curious about commercial methods of making physical goods.
So I've done an installation that's based on the gift shops in New York City on Canal Street where you have slat wall from floor to ceiling, and there are many different objects with printed text on them; T-shirts, teddy bears, shot glasses, keychains, that type of thing.
I'm really drawn to that process of making. Kitschy pop culture forms.
Pearl Marden: A lot of the text you use for your projects is AI-generated, right?
Maya Man: It’s actually not done on AI-generated text, but it is computer-generated.
A lot of the text-based projects that I've done are JavaScript-based, so it's just kind of putting things together, almost like the game Mad Libs where you fill in the blank.
That's essentially what's happening algorithmically. And I like that, because it gives me a little bit more control over the text, but it also very much kind of veers into the absurd strain because algorithms decide what to write.
love/hate, 2022.
Pearl Marden: I love how you use websites as a medium. I'm looking at your piece: love/hate.
I'm literally so obsessed. Could you tell me a little bit more about this one? Are you in the videos?
Maya Man: Yeah, it's me in all the videos. Hard to tell, because I was in my blonde phase. But yeah, so that piece was really unique for me in terms of process because usually I start with a concept and then I decide what form it's going to take. But, I was actually on Craigslist looking for PBteen furniture because I was obsessed with it growing up.
Growing up, it was like, “Oh, my God! I want a Pottery Barn teen room looking through their catalog.” But my parents were always like, “It's so expensive like we're not buying this.”
So I was looking on Craigslist recently for an installation and I happened to find this image of this punching bag, which was PBteen.
I saw it and I was like, this is so fascinating because it's this very aggressive form, a punching bag kind of connotes violence in some way and aggression, but it's this light pink, very girlish color.
It had this pocket already on the front that was for someone to put a photo. So the young person who gets this punching bag gets to put a photo of someone they hate in it.
I had no idea what to do with it, but I drove an hour and a half outside of L.A. and picked it up in front of someone's random house in the suburbs.
It stayed in my studio for a long time, and I didn't know what to do with it. I just knew I was interested in it, and then it now feels obvious to me, but it took me a long time to realize that I could fit a phone in the pocket and play a video piece versus just using a photo.
I knew I wanted it to be some sort of imagery of myself, and the piece is called love/hate, because that's often how I describe my relationship to the Internet. I'm really interested in the position of ambiguity in relation to being online. I feel very indulgent in the way that I use the Internet, especially social media. I really like posting, and a lot of positive aspects of my life have derived from the process of posting online.
But at the same time, I feel highly critical of the platforms that I am engaging with, and the way that they engineer the people who are on them.
So that’s one layer of the piece and then the other layers are really about my sense of self and the self-hatred that I feel about posting because I have a lot. I used to have even more, but I still have guilt and shame when I think about putting myself online. So the piece is really about self-hatred in relation to an abstract platform.
Pearl Marden: So are the videos playing ones that you had already recorded and posted? Or are they made for the piece?
Maya Man: They were not made for the piece, so they were made totally independently. It's a compilation of TikToks, and they're all TikToks that I'd made during my time in Grad School.
I would make them not with the intention of thinking, “Oh, this is an artwork.” I'd make them while I was working on artwork, but taking a break because they were kind of fun.
But once I realized I could put a phone in the pocket, I realized that the TikToks represented the version of self that I wanted to have on there. It's a challenging piece for me to watch people watch. It’s very personal. People really do punch it.
Pearl Marden: Do you feel like everyone is performing online? Or do you think there's a place where people can have some authenticity?
Maya Man: I think everyone's performing online and I don't really believe in authenticity, which is always a bit of a controversial discussion I find, especially with the people I'm close to.
But, I think we over-romanticize the notion of authenticity in the sense that of course there's different degrees of performance. I think on social media, performance is really heightened because it's not happening in real-time so you have this ability to hyper-curate how you're appearing. But I believe even when you know, I'm at a party talking to a group of people, I'm performing to an extent.
Over time, I've really kind of worked to dispel this notion of a true self because it really used to haunt me, and I felt like I could never achieve being my true self because I always felt like I was performing a little bit. I've tried to locate why I feel this way and I think it's an awareness of mediating for an audience, whether that audience is people on the Internet, or it's kind of like people I'm interacting with in real-time in physical space. I think that awareness is that feeling of performance. But online when people say, “Oh, I'm just posting for myself,” I don't believe that because it’s posting for other people to see. I think that's an act that's often really villainized and I think wrongfully labeled as pure narcissism.
But I believe it's a process of self-discovery that I think can be valuable and informative for people. But I don't really believe in “Oh, you can just do it for yourself.”
Pearl Marden: Being online is also so personal. It’s interesting, the things that I'm hiding in my TikTok “likes” versus the things that I'm posting. That's also kind of performative, too, and I agree with you, I think everyone is performing online. Everyone is just constantly in an active performance state.
I'm really interested in how you use social media not only as commentary but also as a medium, using it as a layer in your projects. How has that influenced your work? Do you have any upcoming works that play with this idea?
Maya Man: Yeah, so I've realized that I often fixate on a subculture of some subgenre of something happening online. Then, when I make work on that thing, I often mine data from that subculture. So posts or media or text that to me illustrate something that's at the core of this subculture.
For example, my most recent piece was this commission for the Whitney Museum and it's part of their new Internet art program called, On the Hour.
But the piece runs exactly on the hour on their website. So exactly 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock, and knowing that for the commission I wanted to do something that was kind of about time and the Internet, but also very in line with my practice and my interest. So this is called, A realistic day in my life, living in New York City, and to make it I watched hundreds of TikToks of people making videos that are “Days in my Life living in New York City,” and I would wait and see if they happen to say a time of day.
So whenever you view the piece, you're actually seeing the piece animate something someone was doing at that specific time. It's kind of a call and response. So then you also see a stream of comments afterward of different comments from those videos.
Thinking about social media as a medium, my process for that was watching all these TikToks, and then hand transcribing when people would say something, or actually copying the curated selection of over a thousand TikTok comments.
So I really think of my process as using found objects. There's a long history and art of using found objects already made, and what I'm doing often is using found objects
Thinking about social media as a medium, that’s how I’m often engaging with it, and kind of repurposing it in my work.
Pearl Marden: In the Whitney, is it the same every day?
Maya Man: So it happens 24 times a day. But, for example, at 8 am, there are 12 different options that could happen, and it's random.
So each time you view it, it's going to be totally different. It does have this element of generativity and randomness that's usually present in a lot of my work, too.
That's so unique about working with code because if it was a video that ran, it would be the same every time.
The element of randomness allows for me as the artist to not even know exactly what's gonna happen each time, which I really like.
Pearl Marden: That also reminds me, I'm forgetting the name, but have you seen the piece that's in the MoMA? It’s 24 Hours; The Clock by Christian Marclay.
Maya Man: His practice is really interesting to me because that piece is a major reference. It's really cool to me that my piece and his, they're kind of running at the same time in New York.
Pearl Marden: Did this sense of improv and randomness come from your history with dance? Has this sort of influenced your actions when it comes to things like coding and the Internet?
Maya Man: I think it's hard to quantify. But I spent hours and hours at the dance studio growing up in front of a mirror and then also going to competitions, practicing, and performing on stage. I think that really affected my psyche in terms of how I think about performance in general, but especially performance online.
It also really affected the way that I think about artwork and liveness, something that I really like about code is when you program in a degree of randomness to a piece, it’s really performed each time, just like a dance piece. You can have choreography like you can have code, but it's almost impossible for it to be exactly the same each time.
So I really like that degree of liveness. I think that's something in dance that was always really challenging, but really beautiful about it, because it sort of has a layer of risk also in the performance.
So I think about them in a relationship, conceptually. I used to do a lot more work combining dance with code.
But I moved away from that when I started to feel much more protective of my relationship to dance because I felt that it was something I loved and an organic art form and something I loved so deeply that I didn't want to touch it with my interest in technology.
But conceptually they remained so tied.
Pearl Marden: You are choreographing your code to be the dance performer, giving it this assignment of randomness, and then you don't actually know how it's going to perform for you.
Maya Man: I did a show with a gallery in Nashville a couple of years ago. It was three of my web-based pieces. But it was called Recital.
I really like the idea of thinking of the code as choreography, and then it runs the performance.
Pearl Marden: I've been looking recently at like AI sort of a gaze. I've been trying to train an AI model which is actually so hard.
It's really interesting to look at a computer almost as a persona, even though it doesn't have personality, but just how you can sort of manipulate it to interact with you.
Maya Man: It's so interesting to me, the different analogies that we create to try and manipulate AI. It's hard to ever really get it right
Pearl Marden: It does sometimes feel like such a male-dominated state. So that's why I like how you're sort of re-reclaiming it.
Maya Man: There was a moment where I used to feel like I made work and tried to impress the developers I knew, like the guys. Eventually, I realized it was inhibiting my ability to make work that felt truly expressive of my interest.
Pearl Marden: Where is your art moving towards? Do you have anything exciting coming up?
Maya Man: What I'm really excited about right now is bringing artists that I love into the space. I'm excited to take some time to test out some new ideas in the New Year.
I’m excited about thinking a little bit more about how to translate my practice into physical form, and I've made a couple of quilts. Patchwork has been fascinating to me for a while because social media is sort of a form of patchwork and collage to me.
Check out more about Maya: https://mayaontheinter.net/
Also more about her artist space, HEART: https://442broadway.love/