{
  "schema": "ab5d-dossier/1",
  "slug": "maya-man",
  "name": "Maya Man",
  "subtitle": "Scripts for performing the self",
  "lede": "Maya Man treats the internet as both a stage and a system of instructions. Her software reveals how identity is rehearsed through familiar online forms.",
  "url": "https://ab5d.xyz/artists/maya-man/",
  "bibliography_url": "https://ab5d.xyz/artists/maya-man/links/",
  "content_url": "https://ab5d.xyz/api/artists/maya-man.json",
  "updated": "2026-07-11",
  "tier": "standard",
  "editions": 700,
  "collections": 1,
  "otdh": {
    "rank": 196,
    "score": 10971,
    "collector_identities": 282,
    "holder_addresses": 290,
    "projects": 1,
    "current_works": 699,
    "raw_collector_days": 728343,
    "median_project_hold_days": 1347,
    "snapshot_at": "2026-09-14T00:00:00.000Z",
    "methodology_url": "https://ab5d.xyz/artists/otdh/",
    "api_url": "https://ab5d.xyz/api/otdh/maya-man"
  },
  "identity": {
    "artist": "Maya Man",
    "website": "https://mayaontheinter.net/",
    "based": "Born 1996, Pennsylvania, USA. Lives and works in New York, NY",
    "practice": "Websites, generative software, installations, publications, and performances examining femininity, authenticity, and online self-presentation",
    "now": "*StarPower*, a solo exhibition at bitforms gallery, ran March 19 to May 2, 2026",
    "raster": "https://www.raster.art/artist/maya-man",
    "otdh": "[10,971 · rank 196 of 308](/artists/otdh/#artist-maya-man)",
    "holding signal": "282 collector identities · 290 holder addresses · 728,343 raw collector-days · 14 Sep 2026",
    "collector tdh": "[maymTDH](/artists/maya-man/maymtdh/) · dashboard"
  },
  "socials": {
    "website": "https://mayaontheinter.net/",
    "x": "@mayaonthenet",
    "instagram": "mayaontheinternet"
  },
  "profile_image_url": "https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1605058311086379009/Vp64a2Ay_400x400.jpg",
  "profile_image_source": "https://x.com/mayaonthenet",
  "works": [
    {
      "name": "FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT",
      "editions": 700,
      "supply": 700,
      "artblocks_slug": "fake-it-till-you-make-it-by-maya-man",
      "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/fake-it-till-you-make-it-by-maya-man"
    }
  ],
  "sections": [
    {
      "heading": null,
      "paragraphs": [
        "Maya Man approaches the screen not simply as a support for images but as an intimate theater. Born in Pennsylvania in 1996 and trained in computer science and media studies, she writes software that examines how people turn themselves into legible online characters. Her subjects include aspirational graphics, personal archives, lifestyle videos, reality television, and the tiny verbal formulas through which platforms invite users to narrate themselves. Across these projects, code is both material and argument: it produces variation while exposing the templates that already shape supposedly individual expression.",
        "This concern is especially clear in *FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT*, her 2022 Art Blocks Curated release. The collection comprises **700 editions**, each presenting a computer-generated affirmation in a visual idiom associated with Instagram wellness culture. Art Blocks records the release date as August 10, 2022 and describes the set as 700 unique artworks. The work borrows the polished friendliness of inspirational posts, then destabilizes it through phrases that are slightly anxious, aggressive, needy, or absurd. The result is not a parody delivered from outside the culture. It is an imitation constructed from inside its grammar.",
        "> Man’s software does not ask whether an online self is true or false. It asks what systems make that self recognizable."
      ]
    },
    {
      "heading": "The affirmation as social script",
      "paragraphs": [
        "The motivational graphic is an unusually compressed cultural object. Typography, color, ornament, and sentence structure converge to make a claim feel instantly shareable. In Man’s collection, those components become variables. Six additional layouts, Wavy Baby, Mood Swing, Glossy Block, Snack Tray, TMI Text, and Main Character Energy, supplement the core text layout and organize generated phrases in a palette of glossy, hyper-feminine styles. The algorithm does more than automate graphic design. By recombining a constrained vocabulary of postures and desires, it models how platform vernacular circulates through repetition.",
        "Man has explained that the project emerged from her fascination with self-help graphics as quasi-instructional media. Their messages do not merely describe confidence or wellness. They propose ways of acting, desiring, and being seen. The affirmations promise access to a coherent self, yet their circulation depends upon public performance. A user shares a statement about private belief so that belief can become part of an outward-facing identity. The distinction between “What do I believe?” and “What do I want to appear to believe?” consequently becomes central to the work’s tension.",
        "This is why randomness matters. It generates linguistic near misses that preserve the cadence of advice while interrupting its authority. A familiar graphic form appears to offer guidance, but the sentence may suddenly sound coercive, embarrassing, or unwell. Man has described this state of being “not quite right” as the point where imitation becomes artwork. The generated object resembles content closely enough to pass through the viewer’s habits, then forces a second look."
      ]
    },
    {
      "heading": "Intimacy, capture, and the distributed self",
      "paragraphs": [
        "*FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT* extends questions already present in *Glance Back*, Man’s browser extension. Once a day, when a participant opens a new tab, the extension unexpectedly takes a webcam photograph, asks what the participant is thinking, and stores the paired image and text locally. Unlike a conventional selfie, the photograph arrives before pose and expression can be optimized. Yet Man does not frame the result as an unmediated truth. It is another representation produced by a particular apparatus, another self formed in relation to an anticipated or remembered viewer.",
        "The privacy of the local archive complicates the dominant economy of social photography. One account of using the extension for a year emphasizes its accumulation of unflattering, distracted, and contextually obscure moments, images valuable precisely because they were not prepared for circulation. *Glance Back* therefore makes the computer visible as a participant in looking. The screen that normally absorbs attention briefly returns the gaze, recording the body positioned before it.",
        "Man’s work belongs to a history of artists who understand online identity as distributed across posts, interfaces, usernames, and audiences. Her contribution is to foreground the choreography built into ordinary digital habits. Posting is not merely expression after the fact. It feeds back into conduct, encouraging the person to live in forms that can later become content. In interviews, she has resisted the expectation that online performance must be judged as either authentic or deceptive. A mediated audience makes performance structural, even within spaces imagined as private.",
        "Her movement between software and physical presentation follows from this position. The publication of *FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT* translated all 700 generated works into a book containing essays, source code, feature analysis, poetry, and records of community discussion. A Los Angeles presentation at Heavy Manners Library took the form of a gift shop, extending the project into teddy bears, clothing, totes, and other merchandise. These objects do not abandon the internet. They reveal how readily its emotional language travels into commodities and environments."
      ]
    },
    {
      "heading": "Critique from within the feed",
      "paragraphs": [
        "The project’s closeness to commercial visual culture creates productive disagreement. A sharply critical Brooklyn Rail review argues that its cute styling and merchandise risk reproducing the very gendered conventions it claims to scrutinize. That objection identifies a real pressure in Man’s method: mimicry can never guarantee critical distance. The work may circulate as the thing it imitates, and pleasure in its surface may overwhelm its disturbance.",
        "Yet this ambiguity is also historically specific. Online formats rarely remain contained within a stable context. They are copied, cropped, reposted, bought, misunderstood, and converted into identity signals. Man builds that instability into the work instead of securing a single authoritative reading. An affirmation can be sincere and ridiculous, comforting and disciplinary, personal and algorithmic at once. The collection’s strength lies in making these categories difficult to separate.",
        "The wider practice confirms that this is not an isolated formal exercise. In the Whitney Museum commission *A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City*, Man excerpted time-specific text from thousands of TikTok “day in my life” videos. At the top of each hour, the museum website displayed a quotation followed by animated comments from the source material. The work stripped away the videos’ images while retaining their temporal script, showing how a claim to realism becomes a repeatable genre. The Whitney situates the project within *On the Hour*, a series of thirty-second interventions that use the museum website itself as their habitat.",
        "Man has also used exhibition-making as a social practice. An Are.na interview discusses HEART, the space she operated from her SoHo studio, and its effort to connect communities often separated across art and technology scenes. This activity complements the art’s focus on platforms: if commercial networks organize attention through metrics and feeds, a small physical venue can test other conditions for gathering."
      ]
    },
    {
      "heading": "From platform grammar to synthetic spectacle",
      "paragraphs": [
        "Recent work has moved from the aspirational feed toward the competitive stage. *StarQuest* draws upon Man’s childhood in competition dance and uses custom software with AI-generated video and audio. Feral File describes 111 one-of-one, eight-second scenes that can combine into generative episodes when multiple scenes occupy a single address. Here, the unstable self is not composed from wellness phrases but from routines, costumes, confessionals, judgment, and endless rehearsal.",
        "The 2026 bitforms exhibition *StarPower* developed that world through software, prints, quilts, and installations. Its account links the discipline demanded of young dancers with the optimization demanded by algorithmic systems. Both environments turn presentation into a measurable task. Bodies and models train, repeat, fail, and try again under conditions where visibility feels equivalent to existence.",
        "This trajectory clarifies the stakes of *FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT*. The earlier collection is not simply an archive of a dated “girlboss” aesthetic. It identifies a cultural mechanism that persists across changing interfaces: people learn to describe themselves through available templates, then experience those templates as personal desire. In Man’s work, generative software is uniquely suited to examining that loop because it can produce both sameness and difference at scale. Each output appears singular, while its relation to a shared system remains legible.",
        "That relation also explains why Man’s work has moved fluently among blockchain editions, browser extensions, museum websites, printed books, galleries, and performances. Raster’s cross-platform archive reinforces the breadth of that digital practice by bringing her works and exhibition history into a single artist record. The medium is not any single screen. It is the circulation of identity through technical and social formats. Her practice holds that circulation close enough to inhabit its seductions, but introduces errors, repetitions, and awkwardness that make its choreography perceptible. The viewer is left not with a pure self behind the interface, but with a more demanding question: which parts of the performance were chosen, and which were chosen in advance by the form?",
        "MOTZKO's digital art collection adds a collector-side record of that circulation through holdings spanning *FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT*, *StarQuest*, *I'm Feeling Lucky*, *Hard Copy*, and related works."
      ]
    }
  ],
  "body_markdown": "Maya Man approaches the screen not simply as a support for images but as an intimate theater. Born in Pennsylvania in 1996 and trained in computer science and media studies, she writes software that examines how people turn themselves into legible online characters. Her subjects include aspirational graphics, personal archives, lifestyle videos, reality television, and the tiny verbal formulas through which platforms invite users to narrate themselves. Across these projects, code is both material and argument: it produces variation while exposing the templates that already shape supposedly individual expression.\n\nThis concern is especially clear in *FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT*, her 2022 Art Blocks Curated release. The collection comprises **700 editions**, each presenting a computer-generated affirmation in a visual idiom associated with Instagram wellness culture. Art Blocks records the release date as August 10, 2022 and describes the set as 700 unique artworks. The work borrows the polished friendliness of inspirational posts, then destabilizes it through phrases that are slightly anxious, aggressive, needy, or absurd. The result is not a parody delivered from outside the culture. It is an imitation constructed from inside its grammar.\n\n> Man’s software does not ask whether an online self is true or false. It asks what systems make that self recognizable.\n\n## The affirmation as social script\n\nThe motivational graphic is an unusually compressed cultural object. Typography, color, ornament, and sentence structure converge to make a claim feel instantly shareable. In Man’s collection, those components become variables. Six additional layouts, Wavy Baby, Mood Swing, Glossy Block, Snack Tray, TMI Text, and Main Character Energy, supplement the core text layout and organize generated phrases in a palette of glossy, hyper-feminine styles. The algorithm does more than automate graphic design. By recombining a constrained vocabulary of postures and desires, it models how platform vernacular circulates through repetition.\n\nMan has explained that the project emerged from her fascination with self-help graphics as quasi-instructional media. Their messages do not merely describe confidence or wellness. They propose ways of acting, desiring, and being seen. The affirmations promise access to a coherent self, yet their circulation depends upon public performance. A user shares a statement about private belief so that belief can become part of an outward-facing identity. The distinction between “What do I believe?” and “What do I want to appear to believe?” consequently becomes central to the work’s tension.\n\nThis is why randomness matters. It generates linguistic near misses that preserve the cadence of advice while interrupting its authority. A familiar graphic form appears to offer guidance, but the sentence may suddenly sound coercive, embarrassing, or unwell. Man has described this state of being “not quite right” as the point where imitation becomes artwork. The generated object resembles content closely enough to pass through the viewer’s habits, then forces a second look.\n\n## Intimacy, capture, and the distributed self\n\n*FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT* extends questions already present in *Glance Back*, Man’s browser extension. Once a day, when a participant opens a new tab, the extension unexpectedly takes a webcam photograph, asks what the participant is thinking, and stores the paired image and text locally. Unlike a conventional selfie, the photograph arrives before pose and expression can be optimized. Yet Man does not frame the result as an unmediated truth. It is another representation produced by a particular apparatus, another self formed in relation to an anticipated or remembered viewer.\n\nThe privacy of the local archive complicates the dominant economy of social photography. One account of using the extension for a year emphasizes its accumulation of unflattering, distracted, and contextually obscure moments, images valuable precisely because they were not prepared for circulation. *Glance Back* therefore makes the computer visible as a participant in looking. The screen that normally absorbs attention briefly returns the gaze, recording the body positioned before it.\n\nMan’s work belongs to a history of artists who understand online identity as distributed across posts, interfaces, usernames, and audiences. Her contribution is to foreground the choreography built into ordinary digital habits. Posting is not merely expression after the fact. It feeds back into conduct, encouraging the person to live in forms that can later become content. In interviews, she has resisted the expectation that online performance must be judged as either authentic or deceptive. A mediated audience makes performance structural, even within spaces imagined as private.\n\nHer movement between software and physical presentation follows from this position. The publication of *FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT* translated all 700 generated works into a book containing essays, source code, feature analysis, poetry, and records of community discussion. A Los Angeles presentation at Heavy Manners Library took the form of a gift shop, extending the project into teddy bears, clothing, totes, and other merchandise. These objects do not abandon the internet. They reveal how readily its emotional language travels into commodities and environments.\n\n## Critique from within the feed\n\nThe project’s closeness to commercial visual culture creates productive disagreement. A sharply critical Brooklyn Rail review argues that its cute styling and merchandise risk reproducing the very gendered conventions it claims to scrutinize. That objection identifies a real pressure in Man’s method: mimicry can never guarantee critical distance. The work may circulate as the thing it imitates, and pleasure in its surface may overwhelm its disturbance.\n\nYet this ambiguity is also historically specific. Online formats rarely remain contained within a stable context. They are copied, cropped, reposted, bought, misunderstood, and converted into identity signals. Man builds that instability into the work instead of securing a single authoritative reading. An affirmation can be sincere and ridiculous, comforting and disciplinary, personal and algorithmic at once. The collection’s strength lies in making these categories difficult to separate.\n\nThe wider practice confirms that this is not an isolated formal exercise. In the Whitney Museum commission *A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City*, Man excerpted time-specific text from thousands of TikTok “day in my life” videos. At the top of each hour, the museum website displayed a quotation followed by animated comments from the source material. The work stripped away the videos’ images while retaining their temporal script, showing how a claim to realism becomes a repeatable genre. The Whitney situates the project within *On the Hour*, a series of thirty-second interventions that use the museum website itself as their habitat.\n\nMan has also used exhibition-making as a social practice. An Are.na interview discusses HEART, the space she operated from her SoHo studio, and its effort to connect communities often separated across art and technology scenes. This activity complements the art’s focus on platforms: if commercial networks organize attention through metrics and feeds, a small physical venue can test other conditions for gathering.\n\n## From platform grammar to synthetic spectacle\n\nRecent work has moved from the aspirational feed toward the competitive stage. *StarQuest* draws upon Man’s childhood in competition dance and uses custom software with AI-generated video and audio. Feral File describes 111 one-of-one, eight-second scenes that can combine into generative episodes when multiple scenes occupy a single address. Here, the unstable self is not composed from wellness phrases but from routines, costumes, confessionals, judgment, and endless rehearsal.\n\nThe 2026 bitforms exhibition *StarPower* developed that world through software, prints, quilts, and installations. Its account links the discipline demanded of young dancers with the optimization demanded by algorithmic systems. Both environments turn presentation into a measurable task. Bodies and models train, repeat, fail, and try again under conditions where visibility feels equivalent to existence.\n\nThis trajectory clarifies the stakes of *FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT*. The earlier collection is not simply an archive of a dated “girlboss” aesthetic. It identifies a cultural mechanism that persists across changing interfaces: people learn to describe themselves through available templates, then experience those templates as personal desire. In Man’s work, generative software is uniquely suited to examining that loop because it can produce both sameness and difference at scale. Each output appears singular, while its relation to a shared system remains legible.\n\nThat relation also explains why Man’s work has moved fluently among blockchain editions, browser extensions, museum websites, printed books, galleries, and performances. Raster’s cross-platform archive reinforces the breadth of that digital practice by bringing her works and exhibition history into a single artist record. The medium is not any single screen. It is the circulation of identity through technical and social formats. Her practice holds that circulation close enough to inhabit its seductions, but introduces errors, repetitions, and awkwardness that make its choreography perceptible. The viewer is left not with a pure self behind the interface, but with a more demanding question: which parts of the performance were chosen, and which were chosen in advance by the form?\n\nMOTZKO's digital art collection adds a collector-side record of that circulation through holdings spanning *FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT*, *StarQuest*, *I'm Feeling Lucky*, *Hard Copy*, and related works.",
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  ],
  "references": [
    {
      "n": 1,
      "note": "bitforms identifies Man as born in Pennsylvania in 1996, based in New York, and focused on internet identity culture.",
      "url": "https://www.bitforms.art/artist/maya-man/",
      "label": "bitforms-profile"
    },
    {
      "n": 2,
      "note": "Archetype’s interview covers Man’s computer science and media studies background and her interest in self-presentation.",
      "url": "https://www.archetype.fund/media/in-conversation-with-maya-man",
      "label": "archetype-interview"
    },
    {
      "n": 3,
      "note": "Art Blocks records 700 unique artworks and an August 10, 2022 release date for the collection.",
      "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/fake-it-till-you-make-it-by-maya-man",
      "label": "art-blocks-collection"
    },
    {
      "n": 4,
      "note": "Dazed details the collection’s layouts, generated aphorisms, publication, and Heavy Manners presentation.",
      "url": "https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/62017/1/maya-mans-self-help-mantras-are-designed-to-make-you-cringe",
      "label": "dazed-feature"
    },
    {
      "n": 5,
      "note": "Art Blocks interviews Man about inspirational graphics, software, intimacy, and public performance.",
      "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/articles/in-conversation-with-maya-man",
      "label": "art-blocks-interview"
    },
    {
      "n": 6,
      "note": "HEK describes the custom JavaScript algorithm, book contents, and tension between belief and performed belief.",
      "url": "https://shop.hek.ch/?id=600&op=product",
      "label": "hek-publication"
    },
    {
      "n": 7,
      "note": "Right Click Save interviews Man about randomness, imitation, authenticity, and generative practice.",
      "url": "https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/the-interview-maya-man-starquest-starpower-bitforms-gallery",
      "label": "rcs-interview"
    },
    {
      "n": 8,
      "note": "The official project page explains Glance Back’s unexpected daily capture and locally stored archive.",
      "url": "https://glanceback.info/",
      "label": "glance-back"
    },
    {
      "n": 9,
      "note": "The Los Angeles Review of Books chronicles a year of using Glance Back and considers its private archive.",
      "url": "https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/my-machine-and-me",
      "label": "larb-essay"
    },
    {
      "n": 10,
      "note": "Dirt interviews Man about browser art, online performance, girlhood, and the distributed internet self.",
      "url": "https://dirt.fyi/article/2023/06/browser-friendly-art",
      "label": "dirt-interview"
    },
    {
      "n": 11,
      "note": "Man’s official project archive confirms that the book reproduces all 700 editions alongside essays, source code, feature analysis, poetry, and community records.",
      "url": "https://fakeittillyoumakeit.lol/",
      "label": "official-project-archive"
    },
    {
      "n": 12,
      "note": "The Brooklyn Rail offers a critical assessment of the book’s gender politics, aesthetics, and merchandising.",
      "url": "https://brooklynrail.org/2024/06/art_books/Maya-Mans-FAKE-IT-TILL-YOU-MAKE-IT/",
      "label": "brooklyn-rail-review"
    },
    {
      "n": 13,
      "note": "The Whitney explains the sources, hourly structure, and critical frame of A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City.",
      "url": "https://whitney.org/exhibitions/maya-man",
      "label": "whitney-exhibition"
    },
    {
      "n": 14,
      "note": "The Whitney’s artist record documents Man’s museum commission and broader internet-based practice.",
      "url": "https://whitney.org/artists/21576",
      "label": "whitney-profile"
    },
    {
      "n": 15,
      "note": "Are.na interviews Man about HEART, Sacred Screenshots, and connections across New York’s art and technology communities.",
      "url": "https://www.are.na/editorial/an-interview-with-maya-man",
      "label": "arena-interview"
    },
    {
      "n": 16,
      "note": "Feral File documents StarQuest’s software medium, 111 scenes, and generative episode mechanics.",
      "url": "https://feralfile.com/exhibitions/series/starquest-en3",
      "label": "feral-file-starquest"
    },
    {
      "n": 17,
      "note": "bitforms’ StarPower release describes the project’s AI-generated performers and relationship between dance training and algorithmic optimization.",
      "url": "https://www.bitforms.art/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/starpower_pr-2.pdf",
      "label": "starpower-release"
    },
    {
      "n": 18,
      "note": "Raster archives Man’s biography, alternate names, addresses, and exhibition history.",
      "url": "https://www.raster.art/artist/maya-man",
      "label": "raster-profile"
    },
    {
      "n": 19,
      "note": "MOTZKO's Maya Man collection page documents holdings across FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, StarQuest, I'm Feeling Lucky, Hard Copy, and related works.",
      "url": "https://motzko.net/artist/maya-man",
      "label": "MOTZKO"
    }
  ],
  "bibliography": [
    {
      "category": "In the AB[500]: Art Blocks",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "Art Blocks records the 700-work Curated collection and its August 10, 2022 release.",
          "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/fake-it-till-you-make-it-by-maya-man",
          "label": "Art Blocks collection",
          "meta": "collection · 2022"
        },
        {
          "note": "Art Blocks speaks with Man about the project’s development and her approach to software.",
          "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/articles/in-conversation-with-maya-man",
          "label": "In Conversation with Maya Man",
          "meta": "interview · 2022"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "category": "Interviews",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "Archetype discusses Man’s training, practice, collaborations, and approach to internet identity.",
          "url": "https://www.archetype.fund/media/in-conversation-with-maya-man",
          "label": "Archetype",
          "meta": "interview · 2024"
        },
        {
          "note": "Dirt asks Man about browser-native art, NFTs, online performance, and girlhood.",
          "url": "https://dirt.fyi/article/2023/06/browser-friendly-art",
          "label": "Browser-friendly art",
          "meta": "interview · 2023"
        },
        {
          "note": "Are.na discusses HEART and the social infrastructure surrounding internet art in New York.",
          "url": "https://www.are.na/editorial/an-interview-with-maya-man",
          "label": "Are.na Editorial",
          "meta": "interview · 2025"
        },
        {
          "note": "Right Click Save examines randomness, mimicry, dance culture, and the StarQuest universe.",
          "url": "https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/the-interview-maya-man-starquest-starpower-bitforms-gallery",
          "label": "The Interview",
          "meta": "interview · 2026"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "category": "Press and criticism",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "Dazed profiles the book, the generative collection, and its gift-shop presentation.",
          "url": "https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/62017/1/maya-mans-self-help-mantras-are-designed-to-make-you-cringe",
          "label": "Self-help mantras",
          "meta": "criticism · 2024"
        },
        {
          "note": "The Brooklyn Rail challenges the project’s use of gendered aesthetics and commodities.",
          "url": "https://brooklynrail.org/2024/06/art_books/Maya-Mans-FAKE-IT-TILL-YOU-MAKE-IT/",
          "label": "FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT review",
          "meta": "criticism · 2024"
        },
        {
          "note": "The Los Angeles Review of Books reflects on a year spent using Glance Back.",
          "url": "https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/my-machine-and-me",
          "label": "My Machine and Me",
          "meta": "essay · 2025"
        },
        {
          "note": "Document considers Man and Sotce within a younger generation of internet artists.",
          "url": "https://www.documentjournal.com/2024/09/maya-x-sotce-internet-art-screenshots-performance-girlhood/",
          "label": "Maya Man and Sotce",
          "meta": "profile · 2024"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "category": "Museums and institutions",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "The Whitney presents the mechanics and themes of Man’s hourly website commission.",
          "url": "https://whitney.org/exhibitions/maya-man",
          "label": "A Realistic Day In My Life",
          "meta": "commission · 2024"
        },
        {
          "note": "The Whitney’s collection record situates Man’s internet practice and museum acquisition.",
          "url": "https://whitney.org/artists/21576",
          "label": "Maya Man",
          "meta": "archive · 2024"
        },
        {
          "note": "Feral File documents the 111 software scenes and collector-responsive structure of StarQuest.",
          "url": "https://feralfile.com/exhibitions/series/starquest-en3",
          "label": "StarQuest",
          "meta": "exhibition · 2025"
        },
        {
          "note": "Feral File records Man’s participation in Casey Reas’s inaugural Social Codes exhibition.",
          "url": "https://feralfile.com/exhibitions/shows/social-codes-pcl",
          "label": "Social Codes",
          "meta": "exhibition · 2021"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "category": "Galleries and exhibitions",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "bitforms provides Man’s biography, exhibition chronology, and gallery record.",
          "url": "https://www.bitforms.art/artist/maya-man/",
          "label": "Maya Man at bitforms",
          "meta": "profile · 2026"
        },
        {
          "note": "bitforms details StarPower and its convergence of competitive dance with generative AI.",
          "url": "https://www.bitforms.art/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/starpower_pr-2.pdf",
          "label": "StarPower release",
          "meta": "exhibition · 2026"
        },
        {
          "note": "HEK describes the FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT publication and its custom JavaScript source.",
          "url": "https://shop.hek.ch/?id=600&op=product",
          "label": "FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT",
          "meta": "publication · 2024"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "category": "Essays, talks and podcasts",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "MISA’s conversation addresses intimacy, multidimensional identity, and femininity on screen.",
          "url": "https://www.misa.art/articles/maya-man-in-conversation-with-margaret-murphy",
          "label": "The Art of Zooming In",
          "meta": "conversation · 2023"
        },
        {
          "note": "Apple Podcasts hosts Art Blocks’ After Dinner Mints interview with Man.",
          "url": "https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/maya-man/id1605922667?i=1000590802290",
          "label": "After Dinner Mints",
          "meta": "podcast · 2022"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "category": "Auctions and catalogues",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "Sotheby’s catalogue situates no one will realize as a continuation of FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT.",
          "url": "https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2024/lumen-prize-anniversary-auction-2024-an-auction-curated-by-auronda-scalera-alfredo-cramerotti-x-lumen-prize/no-one-will-realize",
          "label": "no one will realize",
          "meta": "auction · 2024"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "category": "Profiles and archives",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "Raster indexes Man’s biography, alternate identities, exhibition record, and blockchain addresses.",
          "url": "https://www.raster.art/artist/maya-man",
          "label": "Maya Man on Raster",
          "meta": "archive · 2026"
        },
        {
          "note": "Man’s official project archive documents the generative algorithm, layouts, complete book, and 2024 gift-shop installation.",
          "url": "https://fakeittillyoumakeit.lol/",
          "label": "FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT",
          "meta": "project archive · ongoing"
        },
        {
          "note": "The official Glance Back page explains the extension’s daily webcam capture and local archive.",
          "url": "https://glanceback.info/",
          "label": "Glance Back",
          "meta": "project archive · ongoing"
        },
        {
          "note": "MOTZKO documents collected works by Man spanning FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, StarQuest, I'm Feeling Lucky, Hard Copy, and related projects.",
          "url": "https://motzko.net/artist/maya-man",
          "label": "Maya Man at MOTZKO",
          "meta": "collection archive · ongoing"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "provenance": {
    "schema": "ab5d-provenance/1",
    "contributor": "ab500dao.eth",
    "agent": "gpt-5.6-sol",
    "model": "gpt-5.6-sol",
    "harness": "AB5D structured pipeline; fact-checked and revised with OpenAI Codex",
    "autonomy": "supervised",
    "tokens": {
      "input": 176659,
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    "cost_usd": null,
    "links_verified": 23,
    "date": "2026-07-11",
    "note": "Structured return rendered by scripts/render_dossier.py; token counts are measured API usage."
  },
  "license": "https://ab5d.xyz/license/",
  "license_note": "Dossier prose is CC0. Embedded Art Blocks renders are not: they remain the property of their respective artists and holders.",
  "attribution": {
    "name": "AB[500]",
    "url": "https://ab5d.xyz/artists/maya-man/",
    "cite": "AB5D, \"Maya Man\", AB[500] artist dossier, ab5d.xyz, 2026",
    "required": false,
    "requested": true,
    "note": "Prose is CC0; a credit and link back to ab5d.xyz is appreciated, not required."
  },
  "generated": "2026-09-14T12:58:26"
}
