How the Post-Pandemic Generation Is Changing Digital Art

0:04There isn't this big divide between being online and living your life. I'm very anti the IRL acronym because the internet to me is very much real life and you can't escape it in anything that you do in the way that you think.

0:21I'm Ben Davis and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:29every rising generation reinvents the rules of how art works what are the new ways of working what kinds of spaces serve those needs i keep coming back to these questions and that's part of the reason why i decided i wanted to talk to maya man man got her mfa from the famous media art program at the university of california in 2023 she makes art that's fun and very online mine, looking at the online world and the way it blurs reality and performance. Right now, her work, A Realistic Day in My Life in New York City, is the first ever work commissioned by the Whitney Museum for its On the Hour program, taking over the museum's website every hour for 30 seconds.

1:07So set your clock if you want to catch it. Mann is also a scene maker herself. I first heard about her experimental art space, Heart, after it had already closed earlier this year, but in its brief frenzied life, it left a big mark. It was a space where a certain kind of experimental online, offline art scene that feels very now started to define itself. And I'm excited to talk with Maya about her work and what that scene is. Maya, thank you for coming to talk to The Art angle. Thank you so much for having me. So you are part of a creative cohort that has come up in the pandemic and after the pandemic.

1:51Do you feel like that shaped your experience and how you relate to the world and art? Yeah, definitely. I think during the pandemic, there was a lot of excitement from artists who were working on the internet and making work about the internet because there was kind of this... That was all there was. That was all there was. And there was this energy around the idea that you could share work online, you could present work online, which has been part of the conversation since the beginning of the internet, artists working in net art. But over the years of the pandemic, there was kind of this disillusionment with the idea of presenting work online.

2:22And a lot of artists were starting to feel like there needs to be the opportunity to be able to talk about work on the internet and show work about the internet, but in physical space. And so I think myself and a lot of artists were consuming a lot of content, but we needed the time and space to be able to kind of digest everything that was happening together in person. It's interesting. I mean, it's almost like sort of a warp speed experience. I mean, it was like the internet was all people have. I mean, it's kind of hard to go back to that moment and think, you know, so much changed so fast.

2:56Like people talk about how, you know, in the museum world, there was like six years of disruption in like six months or it's even hard to remember, you know, that's when TikTok really exploded and really took over just because that was people's social life for a little while. Yeah. There were a lot of people on TikTok and I've always been really into the thesis of dispersion by Seth Price, this idea that you could disseminate art online and it could reach people who are totally outside of the museum and gallery context. And I think TikTok in a lot of ways kind of fulfilled that idea. You were suddenly seeing videos by people who are complete strangers.

3:31I think a lot of social media before that, especially like Facebook and Instagram really relied on the network of people that you know, that you know, and you've met before. But for the first time, there were a lot of people who were kind of going viral on the engine that TikTok as a platform had, but it was launching people into these specific scenes who just were totally disconnected otherwise. And so that was really exciting, I think, for a lot of people. And a lot of communities started to form online around the work that people were making and sharing both on Instagram, some on TikTok. And I think those communities really solidified online.

4:07But then after the pandemic, a lot of people were kind of looking for ways to keep them going. So what was your creative background then? Were you already working as an artist? Were you already interested in the internet as a theme or engaged with software? Yeah. As a kid, I was really into being on the computer and that's kind of been like the through line for me and everything that I do. But my background, I studied computer science and media studies in undergrad. And so I was decent at math and I went to college in Southern California and I decided that I was really interested in computer science and programming.

4:41And for me, the gateway to that was making websites. It kind of combined like everything I was interested in into like one process of making. And so I decided to study computer science. And at the same time, I also was studying media studies, which was like more theory, but the two disciplines didn't intersect at all at school. And so I had been studying both of those things. But at the time when the pandemic started was working in tech. I was working at the Google Creative Lab in New York. I was making a lot of really exciting web-based tools, web-based experiments there. But I realized what I actually wanted to be making was much stranger and smaller in scale.

5:21And so I realized that I wanted to be an artist essentially. And that was like this very slow process for me of looking at other artists who have work that is software based and are very critical of technology. And I think I didn't have the language to be able to understand that was what I wanted to do when I was younger. Maybe the first thing that you did that you classify as an artwork is glance back. Am I right about that? Which is a browser extension as artwork? That is to me the first true work that I made that I still talk about. It's a browser extension. So I made it in 2018 and I've been using it ever since 2018.

5:59So many years now, but it's a browser extension. And when you have it installed, consuming your own art,

6:07so with glance back, when you add it to your browser, it's a Chrome extension. Once a day, when you open a new tab at random takes a photo of you and usually there's no expression on your face. It asks you what you're thinking about. You type in your answer and then you slowly start to log all of these photos of you looking at your computer every single day. And I've always been really interested and kind of panicked about self-documentation. I've always been really worried about forgetting who I was in a specific moment. And I was at the time really wanting to have a process for self-documentation that was kind of an antidote to the way that I was performing a self on a platform like Instagram.

6:45And so glance back for me became this kind of daily photo diary of me looking at my computer, typing what I was thinking about. But what surprised me the most was that I released it publicly and now it has eight to 9 ,000 people who use it every day still. Was that about the time when like Be Real went big? It's funny. Yeah. In 2018 was before Be Real, but a lot of people have compared the two and I think they share a lot of similarity, but the really important element of glance back for me was that there was no social component. So there is no ability to follow people or see other people's photos.

7:20I can't see anyone's photos. They're stored locally on your computer. And so I think for a lot of people, it became this kind of diaristic mechanism that they have on their machine. And that's part of their life every day without them needing to remember to do anything specific. But after using it for a long time, I realized it didn't feel like a more true version of me. It was just a different version of me. There's still a little bit of performance embedded in the process of using it. Yeah, I think it contains a lot of the germs of your sensibility in a way, which have to do with thinking about performance online and authenticity and so on.

7:56I guess those questions about what is real when you're real and not online do go back to the kind of post-internet moment that you mentioned. Seth Price, one of the big post-internet artists, the first generation thinking about where the art happened in a digital space, how art could find an audience or different kind of audiences in the digital world. How do you define yourself in relationship to those traditions? I don't know how to define you. Are you like the post post internet generation? Yeah. I mean, I, I, you know, throughout my education and early years as an artist, I was looking a lot at work that was made by artists who were part of the quote unquote post internet generation.

8:41But I feel like we're in a place that's beyond that now. I think a lot of the work that was made at that time was really looking at the internet as a novelty in some way. A lot of... It was literally, sometimes it was like one foot in, one foot out of the internet. And that's kind of what people were thinking about. Totally. Yeah. Digital dualism problem. Exactly. And now I feel like we're past that because the internet is like air. It's everything. All of the artists that I am friends with who are making work about the internet, there isn't this big divide between being online and living your life.

9:20I'm very much real life and you can't escape it in anything that you do in the way that you think. And I think a lot of artists who are making work now are really zooming into specific subcultures online rather than thinking about the internet as kind of like a holistic phenomenon, which I think is the way that a lot of post-internet art was maybe talked about in the early years. Yeah. I do think the pandemic also played this role of just for that moment, which was also the NFT moment, really, like, it was almost like the internet was more real. There was more social stuff going on online. And you participated in the NFT moment as well.

10:00Maybe talk about that. Yeah, definitely. The internet felt so real. And it felt like all consuming and everything during the pandemic. But I think that lingers now that mental model of being online hasn't left us. And I don't know if it ever will. And so in early 2021 into 2022, there was a lot It's almost like the term IRL switched meaning, as in like IRL is the real life is online. And so the term kind of loses some of its ability to distinguish. I know. Reality is completely online. Now there's no place that the Internet doesn't exist, including in your own mind. Like even if you're not on your computer, you're not on your phone.

10:40You're thinking in a way that's been super shaped by your experience of consuming content online. You were studying at UCLA with Casey Reese, who is a very storied experimental code, works with critical code and had a platform called Feral File, which was one of the attempts to make the NFT moment something more interesting or permanent or enduring than kind of some of the more speculative aspects of it that people probably associate it with. Yeah, definitely. The NFT moment was really divisive for a lot of artists who had been making work that's engaged with new media, who have been making digital work for a long time because some people decided to kind of go and fully embrace it and go completely into it and start releasing work as NFTs.

11:28Other people were completely against it. There were a lot of conversations about what it meant for the landscape of digital art at the time. And I found that some friends of mine were really embracing it. And then other friends, I felt like, oh, would cancel me if I made an NFT. And so it was a really difficult time to know what to do as an artist. I made my first NFT through a group exhibition on Feral File, the first exhibition that was on the platform. And the exhibition was called Social Codes. And I really trust Casey and his vision for the platform and his care for software based work. And so I felt really comfortable being part of the show.

12:05And then from there, I realized that there were all of these people who really believed in the value of digital objects. And that's something that I've always believed in, in the way that I make work. And so it felt really natural to start releasing work as NFTs. But that also came with a lot of complications. And I think the public perception about what an NFT is for anyone who's very distant from it is totally way off from the community of people who really care about art, who are making NFTs and involved in NFTs at all, because a lot of maybe what is seen most publicly is really ugly and speculative.

12:41And I think for artists who really care about digital art and who makes software based work, it was the first time that there was this super native way to present and sell work that was true to their practice. That part of it was really exciting. Yeah. And again, for a hot second, it really was like the laws of physics in art inverting, where I think a lot of people in digital art who make experimental digital art look at the art market world where there's a lot of paintings and objects as this speculative space with auctions and so on. And then for this moment, because of this emerging technology that was very controversial, it has lots of issues, but lots of, but some potentials, you know, the people had been looking at it for a while critically and for its creative potentials.

13:31Suddenly, because of the whole nature of the pandemic, that became the center of the action for a hot second. And then it flipped. I think an interesting thing about that moment is that people were still thinking about what was happening in digital art through the metaphor of the object-based art world. And one of the things I came to realize as it went on is that these things sometimes actually function more like performances. Like you're really like an NFT is really like a thing that's happening online often. Like there's like energy and attention that's around a project and people are kind of like participating in a community moment around things.

14:08Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think about code in relation to performance a lot because of this kind of sense of liveness that you can have when you're making a software based work. And a big part of the moment with NFTs was this popularization of this type of work that a lot of people were calling the generative art movement. Now it's complicated to talk about because when people hear the word generative, they think about AI. But at the time, there were a lot of artists who were writing an algorithm and releasing a work that was driven by that algorithm but could have X number of outputs.

14:41But when they release the work, they're releasing the algorithm and someone could quote unquote mint or buy an NFT and the algorithm would run and generate an output. But the artist doesn't know exactly what's going to be output. There's this element of chance and kind of this performance to the code that was so impossible to represent in an image or really even a physical install that's not running the code live. It's hard for anyone to get a sense of that process. And so I think that was really exciting for a lot of people to have a way to show that type of work. Yeah, maybe there's a little bit of a tangent.

15:14The reason I wanted to bring up these thoughts I have about the NFTs of performance is because I do think it kind of relates to your work in an interesting way. I mean, the work that you did through that was kind of related to these self-help graphics. Yeah. You can describe that. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, one of my generative art collections that I released is called Fake It Till You Make It. And it was released on a platform called Art Blocks. And it is essentially at its core an algorithm that is collaging together found text. So I actually saved a lot of those types of Instagram graphics that are about self-help or wellness.

15:49And they often have these pastel color palettes and bubbly text. And they say things like believe in yourself or three things to let go of today. And I almost was seeing them as little prayers. And I felt very cynical about them at the beginning. But I wrote this algorithm to kind of mimic their very cheerful tone and then regenerate new phrases from the found text. It's collaging together text kind of in the way that a Mad Libs story would. So it's not AI, but it's just kind of piecing different parts together. And it's generative. And so the outputs look from afar very similar to the graphics that you would see on Instagram.

16:24But they actually read as often very absurd. like today is your newest thought or be disrespectful to each other or scare the people that follow you. They say things that they would never actually be written in a handmade graphic. Sort of like self-help surrealism. Exactly, exactly. And what I realized making the work is that actually a lot of the outputs I found deeply meaningful, even though they were completely algorithmically generated, I realized that the meaning that anyone can get from these types of graphics is totally derived from their own personal psyche. So it doesn't really matter what anything says.

17:00What matters is how you interpret it. And I thought that was really beautiful that you can see an algorithm with a level of randomness and still be able to find meaning in what it generates. And that's kind of a core thesis that I have. A lot of the work that I make is language-based and generative to some extent. And so I believe a lot in the power of luck and the algorithm. Yeah, and I think that that connects some of the energy around digital art to the history of conceptual art, which is about this, the power of context, the power of community and location to make meaning. And in my head, I guess I'm drawing these connections between your interest in online performance and then your work with this alternative space heart, which you founded last year, right?

17:43Yeah. Less than a year ago. Less than a year ago. And has this big afterlife or big legend around it. attracted a lot of people and came a bit out of this thought about the need to get offline or to take online stuff offline or find the point of the Venn diagram between them, right? Yeah. Heart came about kind of through a series of fortunate events. I started renting a space in Soho that was quite sizable, larger than I needed for my own personal studio. And I wanted to start doing some curatorial work that was thinking about artists who were specifically engaged with, this is what I always said with Heart, artists who are engaged with the internet software and pop culture.

18:25That was kind of the trifecta that I really tried to curate everything that happened at Heart around. And Heart started and it was like sprinting all of the time. I was doing almost an event a week, but it was really exciting because I'd been feeling post-pandemic, like we've been talking about, I really wanted to see the work that I was most excited about that was thinking really thoughtfully and critically about the internet presented in physical space. I think people's attention spans are super short online. I know that's true. Mine is. And so I wanted to have a space to be able to present these artists who I think are making really strong work, but have the luxury of time and space when bringing people together through an event or a performance so they can really start to work through people's practices.

19:11Because a lot of these artists work, it's not something that you can understand through an install image in a show. And also a lot of these artists are not showing in New York necessarily because the gallery circuit is not optimized for this type of work. And so, yeah, it came out of a real desire for that. And also a feeling that I wanted digital art to be presented in a place that was not the basement and not the lobby. I wanted to really give it time and space and attention, but also I wanted to generate a lot of excitement around it. It was very fast and loose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it seems so.

19:44And kind of exciting to read about or see you talk about. And one of the things that strikes me about it, though, is that it was an event space. You know, it's not a gallery in a certain sense that serves the needs of this scene. It really feels like it was an event programming space where stuff that was happening online could kind of assume it's event character or the attention around it could kind of coalesce. I wanted it to feel like I was taking these certain moments that everyone was thinking about or fascinated by online, these kind of moments of culture, and bring them into a space where we could talk about them and have an artist really deep dive into their specific work that's about that subculture.

20:37Well, maybe talk about Sacred Screenshots, which is the first event that you did and, you know, has this whole mythology about it now. Sacred Screenshots was the crazy opening evening for Heart. It was the inaugural show. It featured 26 different artists who were all New York City based. The invitation was that each artist was to choose a screenshot that feels sacred to them in some way. That was all I said. And uncropped, unedited. So all of these artists submitted one screenshot and we printed them on Ultraboard. The artist Jason Isolini helped me print all of them. So they were really large, like four feet tall, much larger than a screenshot on your phone.

21:18And we installed them around the gallery and I invited everyone to come. And there were screenshot readings at the event. And it was the first event that I ever did. And it was one of those New York days that was just absolutely so, so hot out. and I was really nervous because it was the first event that I was hosting and you know, it's like, you host any event, you host a party, you're like, is anyone gonna come? Is anyone gonna like it? But a lot of people came. So it was a really hot day. I didn't have AC and it was extra, extra hot. And all the photos I have of the artists with their screenshots and of everyone at the event, everyone is fully sweat through their clothes.

21:56It looks like they just jumped in a pool. Sounds like a great party. Yeah, so it was really fun. And I think it kind of encapsulated the core of the energy that I wanted to carry Hart the entire time. You know, this was not the artist's work. It was a screenshot from their phone, but it was this group exhibition that was bringing together all artists who work in some way with new technology, the internet, software, pop culture. But they were also artists that I saw as kind of siloed in some different set of scenes or groups. And I wanted this to kind of mix everyone up. Yeah. I mean, I have to say it's a very Maya man idea in the sense that there's a sort of and sincerity to it.

22:30I mean, I think that's a, in a way, I think that's sort of a hallmark of this post, post, post internet scene is a sort of sincere attachment, sort of post ironic sensibility where the prompt is literally just show me something that's very meaningful. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm really glad that you say that. I think also the name heart, I had been thinking a lot about the heart as a symbol of emotion and the way that it's so ingrained in the social media platforms that we use, But also this very feminine, very feminine symbol. And also just this idea of genuine love. And that's really embedded in meme culture and internet culture in general.

23:08But this embracing of irony and detachment. And I think people were really craving kind of a way to express true love for what they're into, essentially fandom. That's something that I think really drove heart conceptually for me is that I am just a true fan of a lot of these artists work that I was showing and everyone who was in the Sacred Screenshot show. And I wanted to bring everyone together in a way that was exciting. And it felt like going to a concert to see your favorite band. And it was indulgent in that way. Another of many examples from sort of interesting modes of presentation that skirt this line is this lecture that took place on Instagram stories, but in the gallery.

23:56Yeah. So that was a really, really fun event. It was a performance lecture by Mindy Su, who is an amazing. The photos look spooky. Yeah. Yeah, the photos look a little scary. Mindy Su is an amazing researcher and designer. And Mindy had been workshopping this new performance lecture of hers called A Sexual History of the Internet. And it took place totally on Instagram stories. So there were maybe 100 plus people who came to the lecture. And we had chairs all around the space. We blacked out the windows. And the way that it worked was Mindy instructed everyone to open up Instagram on their phone, go to a specific account and then click a story at the exact same time.