NEW YORK, NY.- Today, the Whitney Museum of American Art launches A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City, a new digital art project by artist Maya Man commissioned for artport, the Museum’s online gallery space for net art and new media art commissions. This project is part of artport’s On the Hour series, featuring projects that mark every full hour around the clock, unfolding over a time frame of thirty seconds. Using whitney.org as their habitat, these net art 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 of net art in existing online spaces.

Presented hourly on whitney.org, Maya Man’s A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City explores online self-representation, building on the style of a “day in my life” video, one of the most popular formats for short-form content on the Internet. The artist uses text excerpts from thousands of publicly posted TikTok videos to highlight the storytelling components from this genre of online content. Man pulls away all visual elements and focuses on mentions of specific hours of the day, resulting in a series of texts appearing in large pink font layered over whitney.org. The selected quotes are presented on the Museum’s website at the top of every hour and correspond with the specific time they are displayed online, followed by animated responses sourced from the video’s comments section populating the screen.

“Maya Man’s work perfectly captures the tension underlying a specific genre produced for social media platforms and TikTok, in particular,” says Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s Curator of Digital Art. “It exposes the templates for performing authenticity in a desire to find spaces for genuine every-day living. Functioning as a digital clock, the hourly posts present a range of familiar choreographies for staging a day in NYC.”

Content creators strive to establish an authentic image that communicates relatability to their online community. In doing so, “day in my life” content producers often include “realistic” in their video titles to engage followers, especially when social media can be oversaturated with product placement and idealistic lifestyles. Man’s piece explores the ambiguity between living and performance portrayed in online personas on platforms holding the potential to make every moment and every person an internet star. The artist highlights the paradox of this trend: the creator promotes a genuine “day in the life” while curating their activities, all while benefiting from the content consumption of the TikTok scroller. A Typical Realistic Day in My Life Living in New York City encourages viewers to consider the contradictions within this content production, acknowledging both the sincerity and absurdity of the interactions.

Maya Man’s A Realistic Day in My Life Living in New York City is the first newly commissioned project for On the Hour, which presents Internet art projects commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org. To see the current project, be anywhere on whitney.org on the hour. The projects are organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum. More information about artport can be found at whitney.org/artport.

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.