FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT

The work and its context

FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT is a 700-edition generative art series by Maya Man, released on Art Blocks on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 337, through Art Blocks Factory, with heritage placement in the Curated Series 8 cohort.¹² Each output is a text graphic in the pastel visual language of Instagram wellness culture: an algorithmically remixed affirmation, sometimes familiar, sometimes absurd, set in bold lettering over gradients, checkerboards and decorative stars, hearts, flowers and sparkles.¹³

The registry description states the critical aim: the work "borrows from the bubbly language and pastel aesthetics of text driven instagram graphics to scrutinize the promotion of wellness, self-care, and confidence on social media". It concentrates on the rhetoric: "Persuasive, upbeat, and relentlessly inspirational, there's a sense of authority embedded in each one. By remixing words and phrases sourced from these types of existing instagram posts, the program generates combinations that mimic their cheerful tone, but range from feeling vaguely familiar to totally absurd." And it names the transactional core: "What do I believe? becomes What do I want to appear to believe?"¹

The series runs on p5.js 1.0.0 at a square aspect ratio with zero external assets, under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.¹ It is Maya Man's only work in the AB500 set, with a collector-metric rank of 196 of 308.² The project exists beyond the chain: the artist's dedicated site lists manifestations including a live-generated projection, a "gift shop" installation, a hardcover book, an Instagram account and public billboard displays.⁴

Conception and development

In the contemporaneous interview with Jeff Davis, published August 5, 2022, five days before the release, Man names the conceptual targets directly: "Thinking about cult behavior, contemporary femininity, and the way belief systems are spread via social media. I wanted this project to deep dive into the absurdity of the Instagram graphics that epitomize this kind of online phenomena." The sourcing was manual and archival: "I spent weeks collecting examples of actual graphics on Instagram that served as the inspiration for the project's language and design. And it took me months to get the output feeling just right on both an individual and collection level."⁵

The biography frames the method. Man describes meeting the Processing community while studying computer science, attending the first p5.js conference in 2015, and making generative work ever since: "Generative art was the first genre of art I ever pursued." Of her own formation she says, "I still can't draw, but I can make websites."⁵ The dossier summarizes the practice: "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."²

She also speaks candidly about entering crypto: her first NFT was part of Feral File's first show Social Codes curated by Casey REAS, and she had "been very cautious about how I engage with NFTs because I've felt unsettled by how divisive they have been within my community", while welcoming artists "experimenting more conceptually with the technology".⁵ FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, her largest body of generated work, carries that conceptual experiment onto the chain.¹⁵

How the work was constructed

The full artist script was retrieved from the official indexed project record at the Art Blocks mainnet GraphQL endpoint, filtered by the exact slug fake-it-till-you-make-it-by-maya-man and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 337. The retrieved script is 39,032 bytes with SHA-256 digest 52b169d166cf2e527e4c3ce837389f341fe7e880eb0401d47dab22f451247271, and it was read in full.¹⁶

The randomness uses the dual-stream sfc32 arrangement standard in this cohort: two generators seeded from the two 32-character halves of the token hash, run through a one-million-pair warmup and alternated on successive calls.⁶ The script is legible and feature-driven: named palette sets including a checkers palette, a layout switch whose branches call noLoop after drawing, an affirmations word bank collaged by the generator, and a decorative Orb class. Two details are notable for a generative text work: the layout branches cover wall-of-text repetition, single-statement gradient pieces and waving text columns, and the Orb class seeds its drift velocities with Math.random rather than the token-seeded stream, a deliberate or incidental fleck of live randomness inside a deterministic system.⁶

There are no event listeners and no audio pathways in the script.⁶ In the live renderer the reported hash of token 337000658 matched the chain record exactly, the composition rendered as a static frame that stayed identical across a five-second interval, and the page held one canvas with no audio or video elements.⁷

The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 20, 2026, shows a sale of just under forty-seven minutes.¹⁸ Edition 0 was minted on July 28, 2022 at 19:58:42 UTC, thirteen days before the public sale, and the project was activated on August 3, 2022 at 00:33:10 UTC.¹ The registry's sale-start timestamp reads August 10, 2022 at 17:00:00 UTC; the official collection page carries "Released Aug 10, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC", and the artist's own site states the release as "August 10, 2022 at 10am PT / 1pm ET", the same instant.¹⁹⁴

The public sale moved at a steady clip: edition 1 minted at 17:15:24 UTC, edition 10 at 17:32:51 UTC, edition 20 at 17:40:36 UTC, the AB5D treasury's edition 658 at 17:46:34 UTC, and the final edition 699 at 17:46:40 UTC, the recorded completion time.¹⁸ The minted count equals the maximum of 700, the largest edition run in this batch, and the project is marked complete and active.¹ The registry's current price field reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout administrative value; no dated 2022 source inspected here states the original mint price.¹ The AB5D collection holds exactly one edition, number 658, held by wallet 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045.⁸¹⁰

Copyright and licensing

The project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY-NC-ND 4.0" for FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, with the terms URL recorded in the record.¹ This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.¹ The deed grants the freedom to Share, to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, under three conditions: Attribution, giving appropriate credit with a link to the licence and an indication of changes; NonCommercial, no use for commercial purposes; and NoDerivatives, distributing only the unadapted material.¹¹ The ND condition has a specific bite for this work: its method is the remix of found Instagram affirmations, yet downstream re-remixes of the generated outputs may not be distributed.¹¹¹

The script carries no licence header or copyright comment of its own, so no code licence is reported for this package; the absence is recorded rather than resolved.⁶ The registry lists zero external asset dependencies; the sole runtime dependency is the p5.js 1.0.0 library noted in the script type.¹⁶ Because the work's text fragments were "manually sourced from existing graphics on Instagram", the originality boundary between the sourced phrases and the artist's system is a question the sources raise but do not resolve.⁴ Owning a FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT token conveys no copyright by itself, and no conflicting licence statements were found in the inspected sources. Images in this essay are referenced through canonical Art Blocks token pages and media rather than republished.⁸

Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, and the header was additionally exercised in the live renderer.⁷³

Edition 658 (token 337000658, minted August 10, 2022 at 17:46:34 UTC, forty-six minutes into the sale), the AB5D-held header, reads "YOU'RE RICH AND YOU DESERVE A BLESSED LIFE" in bold white letters with soft shadows over a pink-and-lilac checkerboard: the work's promise stated so flatly that its absurdity lands.¹⁸¹⁰³ In the live view the frame is completely static, a poster rather than a program in motion.⁷

Edition 0 (token 337000000, the July 28, 2022 pre-activation mint) delivers the work's thesis in one line: "BE DISRESPECTFUL TO ONE ANOTHER", white on a pale blue-to-pink gradient, the cheerful design delivering an anti-affirmation.⁸³ Edition 1 (token 337000001, the first public mint) is a wall of imperatives on lilac: "UPGRADE YOUR LIFE. ENJOY YOUR BREAKFAST. TAKE A PICTURE... LATHER YOURSELF IN COCONUT OIL. DRINK WATER. MAKE YOUR BED...", the wellness checklist remixed until repetition exposes it.⁸³

Edition 10 (token 337000010) runs waving columns of "SIS, GIRL, IN THE MOOD TO BE SAD" across hot pink, the phrase multiplied into pattern.⁸³ Edition 20 (token 337000020) repeats "DESERVE IT SO YOU CAN ADMIRE IT." in waving pink columns on olive, one clause folded into pure texture.⁸³ Across the five, the sugar-coated typographic grammar is constant; layout, palette and the gap between tone and meaning vary.³

Significance and limitations

FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT is the batch's most literary work and its largest edition run: 700 text graphics that turn the affirmation industrial complex into both subject and material, from an artist whose practice treats the screen as an intimate theater.¹²⁵ Its afterlife in books, billboards, a gift shop installation and an Instagram account also makes it the batch's clearest case of an Art Blocks series escaping the chain into physical and social media.⁴

Unresolved research questions, flagged for review:

• The original mint price at the August 2022 sale is not established by any dated 2022 source inspected here; the current registry price reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout value.¹
• The registry records a script count of 5 while the retrieved blob is a single self-contained script; the count's semantics are unresolved.¹⁶
• The Orb class uses unseeded Math.random for drift velocities; whether this produces visible per-load variation in any layout branch was not fully mapped, though the header edition rendered as a stable static frame.⁶⁷
• The affirmations word bank was manually sourced from existing Instagram graphics; the provenance and potential rights status of the source phrases is not documented in the inspected sources.¹⁴
• The project's off-chain manifestations (book, billboards, gift shop installation, Instagram account) are listed on the artist's site but were not independently verified beyond that page.⁴