Meaning Making with Maya Man
Finding meaning in algorithmically generated art.
Published May 22, 2024
Finding meaning in algorithmically generated art.
Published May 22, 2024
Maya Man is an artist making work about Internet culture and identity. She joins me to talk about her recent projects, Fake It Till You Make It, Ugly Bitches, Little Darlings, and (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes.
Listen to an extended version of our conversation on Spotify. Find out more about Maya’s work on her website, or follow her on Instagram.
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USURPATOR: I guess before I introduce you, I’ll ask what you qualify yourself as— digital artist, net artist, post-net artist?
MAYA MAN: I would describe myself as an artist.
U: No prefix.
MM: But I've been described as a lot of different types of artists. My primary interest is in contemporary internet culture and the way that we form identity in relationship to the media that we produce and consume online. Sometimes I'll say digital, new media, or Internet.
U: Are these titles even fully distinguished from each other?
MM: They're extremely blurry, and also sort of contentious. I think ten years ago, post-Internet was the big word that encapsulated artists who were focusing on the Internet as a medium. That included artists who were making work on and about the Internet, but also a lot of artists who were making physical work that was engaged with concepts related to the Internet. We're definitely in a post-post-Internet age now, but there's no term that I've seen emerge to encapsulate a lot of the artists that I feel are my peers right now. Plus, it's been complicated by the advent of Web3. A lot of my work is algorithmic, and for a while, people used the term “generative” to describe work that's algorithmic or has an element of chance, even if it's not code-based. In 2024, “generative” now has this heavy AI connotation, so it's complicated. And because I haven't found the perfect prefix, I just go with the artist.
U: Maybe this is just my feeling, but the title “NFT artist” became a dirty word, or something that people don't really want to be associated with.
MM: I live in fear of it.
U: When they first came out, everyone in the space was described as an NFT artist. Now, it seems like the platform upon which you market or share your stuff is not necessarily how you want to be defined.
MM: Yeah, I've made a lot of NFTs and it's been beautiful and complicated in different ways, but I don't actually care about NFTs. I believe in the inherent value of digital objects, but the NFT aspect is a mechanism to me. It's not conceptually the most important part of the work.
U: It’s akin to the title “gallery artist.”
MM: It's kind of like “market artist” in a way, which is sometimes useful in the right moment to describe a person's practice.
U: When did you start putting your stuff on the blockchain? How were you selling or sharing your work before, and did it seem like a natural progression?
MM: It was pretty natural for me because from the beginning, since I’ve made code-based work—writing my own software to produce artwork. Previous to NFTs, a lot of the artists that I admired had these really expansive practices that often weren't tied to the traditional gallery world as their primary way of showing work, because for years there wasn’t a clear way for software-based work to operate within that system. I didn't really see artists that I felt aligned with working in that way.
Initially, in 2021, the energy around NFTs was so contentious. I'd been in the art and technology space for years and suddenly so many of my friends and people I admired in the space were so divided. It was extremely polarizing and was all really colored by the sensational headlines around big sales. Some work that was getting the most attention I found to be not totally representative of the aspects of the scene that I loved and the work that I thought was strong.
All of these conversations around NFTs were really tense. I'm very conflict averse, so I was like, “I'm not making NFTs, I'm not getting mixed up in that universe.” But then in in early 2021, I was invited to be in the first exhibition for Feral File, which is an online gallery that was cofounded by Casey Reas, who's an incredible artist I've looked up to for a long time and have a lot of respect for. He asked me to contribute a piece to a show called Social Codes that was about artists who are making code-based work. I really trust Casey, and having someone like him deliberately invite me into the space was my gateway into the world. It was exciting and in many ways very sweet; all of the artists got one of each other's work, so there was this network or peer-to-peer support that was built into the show and into the method of collecting. From there, I learned a lot more about what different artists were doing and got more excited about what was possible.
U: Was it all online?
MM: All online, and Feral File shows continued to be all online. But this was still in the midst of the pandemic times.
U: I think NFTs would have popped off anyway and obviously it was happening before, but it was this great coalition of everyone being at home all of a sudden. Even if you were a traditional artist, you had to be doing your shit online anyway.
MM: Definitely. I think it was an exciting, shiny way to introduce an Internet native way of collecting work and having a market for digital artwork that was totally at the right place, right time. I think everyone being at home contributed a lot to the swell of interest. But now, I mean, four years later, I think myself and a lot of other artists are feeling disenchanted with the online-only utopian rhetoric, and crave going to things in-person and doing shows in physical space. I've definitely been trying to prioritize that in my work.
U: Yeah, just because you make digital art doesn't mean that people will always want to engage with it on a phone or on a computer.
MM: In my experience installing shows and thinking about the best way to present my own digitally native work, I’ve been observing people come into the gallery and seeing the gravitational pull that a physical work has over a screen based work. Even though we spend so much time on screens, people will glance at a screen for a few seconds and it just doesn't hold the attention that a physical object does in gallery space.
U: Do you think that it has something to do with—not the nature of the work but—the actual parts that make it up? I think Carla Gannis has done a couple of pieces that are huge and have so much motion, so many different moving parts, but that does seem like a rare example of something that I want to look at for a really long time versus a really intricate painting that I need to unpack and gaze at for an extended period.
MM: Yeah, I think some of the digital work that struggles the most to be shown in gallery spaces that holds people's attention in the way that it deserves is more narrative digital work. I think the work that is successful has this ambient presence where someone is able to look at it at any moment and still grasp what it's wishing to communicate. But a lot of artists who make digital work are making video work, and I think it's difficult to get people to really spend the time with the work in a gallery setting as opposed to a screening.
U: Do you have any feelings about how digital art is best presented in gallery settings?
MM: Yes, I have so many feelings about that. It's something that I'm really working on right now to evolve in my own work. But I think it's best when it's kind of sensationalized in some way. What I love about making work that is Internet native is that to me, if I'm making a website as an art object that someone looks at on their phone or computer, you don't need to see the piece in a gallery space to see it in its truest form. It's true form is however it loads in your browser. But if I’m going to present it in a gallery space, more and more I feel that I need to add something to it or create an environment for it that feels sacred and special and validates its need to be shown there, because it can be seen in so many other places. Unlike a painting or sculpture where you actually can't see it in its true form unless you're physically there.
I've been really interested in artists who make digital work, but also make more sculptural installations that complement the video or digital work really nicely and in a way that augments the experience of seeing it in the gallery. I also think about Maggie Lee, an artist who does a lot of video work. She’s always installing her work on these specific TVs that she decorates with accessories or stickers or other details that really complement the work that she's showing.
U: Yeah, I mean, obviously it’s meant to be so subtle, because you aren’t necessarily supposed to notice these things in terms of installation. It's supposed to contribute to the ambient environment in which you're consuming the work. But it can go wrong so easily, like, everyone was clowning on the Tezos pole at Art Basel last year. What was up with that?
MM: Yeah, I think there's such a privilege of digital space that happens in the Web3 world. It's very digital-first, and I think people sometimes forget the level of craft and care needed to nicely install digital work in physical space, which sounds basic. But the more installs I've done, I've realized that to make something look minimal and polished, it's just so, so much effort, especially with work that requires cords. You really have to think about every element, and the install is often very complicated. If left to the last minute, without enough thinking about the details of where everything's going to plug in, it can quickly become very messy. But I think that example was a big lesson for everybody who's making work and selling work in this space.
U: Is that something that you have to exert control over when you're showing work at certain galleries or at different spaces? Are these questions that gallerists or handlers will be asking and keeping in mind?
MM: Yeah, I definitely feel like it's on me to keep in mind. It's up to me to say what type of cords or materials I want to bring. With cords specifically, people have all different kinds of philosophies. I'm kind of into visible cords, if it's the right kind of visible cord or projection on a material. I've been iterating a lot and each new show feels like a new opportunity to experiment with how I want to display things.
But when I think back on the shows that I've done over the past couple of years, I can see more and more that I'm leaning toward producing physical objects that are representative of algorithmic output with one or two screens, rather than having a lot of screens in the space. I'm trying to minimize the screen heaviness of physical shows.
U: You were just in L.A. right?
MM: Yeah, a couple of times. I was there in March with Ann Hirsch, an amazing artist, and we collaborated on a performance lecture at MOCA around our NFT collections, Ugly Bitches and Little Darlings. Then in February, I did a solo exhibition at Heavy Manners for my collection Fake It Till You Make It, which was also a book launch, which was also a gift shop.
U: What was the gift shop centered around, what were you selling? I know it was all featuring the same text that you had been generating in the NFT series.
MM: Yeah, Fake It Till You Make It was originally a collection of 700 NFTs that was released on the platform ArtBlocks in 2022, and the gift shop coincided with the book launch in February.
FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT #536
I knew that I wanted to do an install around Fake It Till You Make It and the obvious thing would have been to print some of the outputs, frame them, and show them. But I wanted to do something that reflected the circulation of this style of language in physical space. I have a studio now in Soho, and I get off on Canal Street. Every day I walk by the New York City gift shops and I've always been obsessed with the kitschy objects that are in there—the keychains, the mugs, everything. That brings me so much true joy, and these shops really run on printing text on different objects. I was thinking that it was the perfect marriage of the way that I viewed this generative art collection and how I would want it to be presented in physical space. So, I created a wide range of objects, bought some slat wall, and then printed T-shirts, short shorts, thongs, teddy bears, keychains, stickers, shot glasses, and riso prints so the installation had a really wide range of objects. I wanted the text that was on each object to reflect something about the object itself; the teddy bears have a T-shirt that says “dumb soulmate,” the keychains say things like “go where your destiny feels awesome,” or things that you would want to see every day. The other constraint I had was I was only using texts from the 700 official output, so I wasn't generating new text.
The gift shop was functional, so people could actually buy things, and it was reasonably priced, I think. I was thinking about my relationship to art and value and circulation, and an essay I return to a lot is “Dispersion” by Seth Price, which was initially released in 2002. He's talking about the ways that artists can take advantage of circulating their work on the Internet, and he's saying that a strength of being able to do that is that you can have your work fit into these generic, dominant forms and then people that see it who are beyond the walls of the gallery, museum, institutional art world. That, to me, has always been a really exciting provocation. It's something I care a lot about within my work, that I don't want it to only be exclusively engaged with by people who are in this relatively niche scene. So, in a lot of ways the gift shop also reflects that, where I wanted the products that were in there to feel like products, even though they are a manifestation of the artwork. I wanted them to be accessible. It was so fun, and a feeling of joy that was different from a more traditional solo show because people were really looking at the objects, and friends now have these pieces.
Via @mayaontheinternet
U: Literally dispersing it into the world. You should do a pop-up on Canal Street.
MM: I'm opening a space this summer in Soho. So, I've been working out of there for a few weeks. It's pretty grungy and needs some cleaning up, but I'll have it for a little bit and I want to do some screenings, some art events, but I also want to do a gift shop in New York.
U: I was just walking on Canal Street the other day because my friend was visiting me and she wanted to buy some fake sunglasses. I was like, “Strap in”—Canal Street is, so disorienting. By the time you get to the end of that stretch with all the gift shops, you've been holding your breath the whole time. The idea of putting a gift shop in a more digestible, fun environment where people can actually actually engage with the things that are in it, instead of when you're actually on Canal Street and you're like, “Fuck, I guess I need this shot glass” and trying to get out as fast as possible.
MM: No, I really like taking these tried and true forms that are culturally kind of lowbrow and then bringing them into my work. I like twisting them in some way to make them related to what I'm doing, but also recognizable as a reference to the original thing. Over time, I've realized that's one of my primary ways of making work.
U: Even just in terms of the actual content of your work, I feel like that contrast of lowbrow and highbrow carries over—in your use of the language that's used online that's so generic. Maybe I'm making assumptions here, but I see that contrast in the Fake It Till You Make It stuff, and also I'm Feeling Lucky. I was wondering what the text for those pieces were based on—it was horoscopes, right?
MM: Yeah, I'm Feeling Lucky was all about horoscopes and astrology, the title of the collection comes from the button that was on the Google search page. I moved to L.A. in 2021 because I was starting grad school, and I was really struck by—it sounds so cliche but—how into astrology so many people are in Los Angeles. To me, it was conceptually so obviously tied to this idea of generative art or an element of randomness, and finding meaning in that randomness. I really wanted to produce a collection that tied all those different ideas together. And so for both Fake It Till You Make It and I'm Feeling Lucky, I created a library that acts as the source for all the language. There's no AI, it's just collaging language together in a fill in the blank system. So for I'm Feeling Lucky, it was from a combination of horoscope websites; apps like Co-star, The Pattern, or vintage horoscope books and I would input different sentences, but then put lists of verbs and nouns I was creating in the code. It's basically swapping out language in a Madlib style way. So I have fine control over what's possible to be produced, but I also like that there's no premise of intelligence; the algorithm produces a lot that sounds really absurd.
With I'm Feeling Lucky, I was really curious because there was always this lingering question for me reading my own horoscope wondering, is it random or is it real? That surfaced this question of if I could find meaning in something that I knew was random because I wrote a random algorithm to produce it. But could I still find meaning in something that was produced in that way that it reflected on me? That was the big question of I'm Feeling Lucky.
I'm Feeling Lucky #7
The outputs are essentially these random seed-based generated readings that come in different forms. You could have longer sentences or you can have just a few prominent adjectives to describe you. Releasing that as an NFT collection, I was really enticed by the idea of one person actually owning one piece that was generated at random; the owner having a relationship to that single visual output and being able to decipher whether or not it aligns with them. I've been into meaning-making lately, and it was a good exercise in thinking about that.
U: That's basically what horoscopes are, especially with the old ones. While I would like to believe that Co-star has real astrologists working on these outputs, they’re probably still random. But the horoscopes that they used to publish in Cosmo or whatever definitely felt that way. Like, a one-line horoscope that was completely meaningless. It felt the same as a fortune cookie, when you have your lucky numbers and then you start retroactively assigning meaning to them.
MM: Totally, I've also gotten really into numbers in the past few years. My desire to believe in something like horoscopes and numerology—certain numbers that I see in different places—I've realized it’s my way to fight against my own tendency towards cynicism and nihilism. I just want things to be meaningful and beautiful. For a long time I thought that not believing in that type of stuff made me smarter or more intelligent. Now, I just want to believe. I want to not be in control. I want the universe to give me signs.
U: Going back to Fake It Till You Make It, a lot of your work is about being a girl online and building identity. I don't know exactly what era you were pulling from for that project, was it pre-Girlboss?
MM: I was pulling from those Instagram graphics that were really popular that rolled out of Tumblr. To me, they are very set within the Girlboss era from 2016 to 2021.
FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT #592
Now, I feel that Fake It Till You Make It almost represents an archive of culture from that moment, because we've definitely moved past that in terms of trends. Definitely pulling from the Girlboss era.
U: I think I read in your Dazed interview that the project is rooted in why being a girl is embarrassing— being a girl online specifically, or being a girl in general?
MM: Yeah, I wrote that in the Fake It Till You Make It introduction for the book and I’ve noticed that people are really pulling that quote. I wrote “When did being a woman become so deeply embarrassing?” or something like that. I think I realized that was really what I was trying to work through when I was making this project. When I became so fascinated by these graphics, I was following a bunch of accounts that posted this type of content on my new account that I'd made to only do that, I was saving hundreds of them. I just felt just so embarrassed for women. It really was this feeling of watered down, commodified feminism, but was being treated as if it was a poster for feminism in the Instagram era. I found it so cringey and embarrassing and I was feeling really cynical about it. But at the end of the introduction, I talk about making the piece Fake It Till You Make It, and by the end, I started to find the output that the algorithm generated was often super meaningful to me, and they almost became little prayers. Sometimes it would output something, and I would be like, “That's honestly really deep.”
Then I warmed up to the idea of someone finding meaning in this, and how it’s great if someone finds meaning in anything in the world. I don't need to be so critical of that. In a way, maybe there's parts of myself that I can indulge in, too.
U: I also wanted to talk about what you wrote for Outland recently, “The Artist is Online,” Specifically about the way that artists have to market themselves online and command their presence. Do you feel like you have to create this divide between personal and public, or more essentially that they have to be a “public figure”? As a digital artist, your Instagram is your Instagram, there's no divide between the artist persona and private self online.
MM: Yeah, I mean, I think about this all the time. My general thesis that I've arrived at is that I don't believe in authenticity online.
U: I was just talking about this with Molly.
MM: Yeah, I always agree with Molly. I think she has the right mindset around performing online. She's been in it for so long. But everything online is performance. No matter what you do, you're always constructing a version of yourself in these digital spaces that reflects how you want to be seen by other people, which is not so different from you being at a party in a physical space.
I bring him up a lot, but I was very affected by Irving Kaufman's book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life from the late 50s, way pre-Internet, but he talks about how he uses dramaturgical analogies to describe the way that we are socially. You're always thinking about performing when you're around other people. That's just natural. But on the Internet, you're performing for thousands sometimes. I felt very freed once I realized that my Internet presence is this abstraction of myself with a really direct desire to present myself as an artist, which is what I primarily use my Instagram and Twitter for. I have a very rich life with my family and friends offline, but that's not something I really want to share in that context because it's not appropriate; it doesn't contribute to the performance of myself that I want to exist in these profiles. But it also becomes so complicated, which is what I was writing about in the Outland piece. I think a lot of artists are feeling like they have to become their own marketing manager and think of themselves as a weirdly corporate entity that needs maintenance online.
Brad Troemel talks about this in his essay in The New Inquiry which is from 2014, a really different time on the Internet. But it’s about this hyper pace of production that artists feel like they need to be engaging with online. Now, especially with the advent of NFTs, it's directly tied not just to cultural capital, but economic capital for a lot of artists, which is increasingly complicated.
U: Do you think that there's added pressure when you're a digital artist to perform that way, or does that exist with all artists, or even just anyone doing anything? Personal branding!
MM: Yeah, it's definitely an issue for everybody right now, especially people who have some kind of artistic medium—writers, musicians, whatever. But I think it's extremely intense for digital artists specifically, because a lot of these artists or are cut out of opportunities within the traditional gallery world, and they're relying on the Internet to show their work because they're not getting as many opportunities to show their work in physical space because of the medium that they work in. They're essentially needing to use these platforms to exhibit their work.
U: This was also something that I was talking about with Molly when I asked her why she moved back to New York. With the boom of digital art, I think part of the appeal was that you can do it from anywhere, you don't have to live in one of these art hubs. But then it kind of ended up that you do, a little bit.
MM: I know, I was just thinking about this. I mean, people live everywhere. But I think we've been talking about this with the importance of events and spaces. I think you just can't connect with people or understand them or their work without engaging in the physical space, ideally. It's important to physically be in a scene if you want to be part of something.
U: I just keep seeing all these tweets from the tech/culture/community guys, asking “How do you connect with people offline? How do we build a scene?” Like, go outside, dude.
MM: Yeah, I've become pretty disenchanted with the community-building online thing. Even us, we have our Discord that we're part of, but meeting up in person is where we hang out. We're kind of hanging on the Discord, but I think you need both to have the most successful process of building any kind of community.
For 2024, my one word New Year's resolution was “hang.” Opportunities to hang in a specifically unstructured way is something that you can't really do online. You can have a meeting online, but you can't just ambiently hang out. That needs to be done in person.
U: Also, when you were in L.A., you were doing an IRL event for Ugly Bitches.
MM: Yes, so the last time I was in L.A, Ann Hirsch and I did a performance at MOCA that was titled Little Ugly. It was a performance lecture talking about our collection Ugly Bitches, an NFT collection that was a sequel to Little Darlings. Ugly Bitches focused on aspirational femininity online and Little Darlings focused on subcultures of aspirational masculinity online.
We did the performance in these Elizabeth Holmes-esque black turtlenecks, white overall outfits. It was really fun; I've done a lot of artists talks, but this was the first super explicit performance lecture I had done where we were embodying these cult leader-style characters that were trying to entice the audience to engage with these collections, saying it would set them free from their aspirational desire on the Internet. We really dove into different extreme gender stereotypes that are circulating online, so there was a lot of humor.
Via @mayaontheinternet
U: What kinds of extreme gender stereotypes?
MM: Well, for Ugly Bitches, it was really about, again, Girlboss culture and thinking about NFT collections that were promoting women, like World of Women or whatever. They're just flat illustrations of skinny hot girls in different colors. So it’s a reaction to both the feminine ideal needing to be aesthetically perfect in terms of how it visually operates online, but also morally perfect aspirations that are borne out of cancel culture. All of that culminates in people feeling so nervous to express certain beliefs or be quote unquote a bad person. We talk a lot about how Ugly Bitches aspire to nothing. They're lazy and they give up on life, and that's what you should embrace when you think about Ugly Bitches.
Ugly Bitches #389
Then with Little Darlings, we were thinking about four different aspects of masculine culture online. There's fitness/gym bro culture, then hustle/grind culture. Then there's mogging culture; guys who are trying to be more visually handsome, mewing and doing these different activities to improve their looks.
U: Looksmaxxing for men.
MM: Then there's also this genre of male that's like woman worship. Trying to be the perfect liberal, woman-worshiping guy. Male feminist kind of attitude. We were looking at these different extremes of masculine subcultures. In the official collection, we collected over 1000 images of action figures, creating these different combinations of them that we fine-tuned a StableDiffusion model on so we could prompt them to do different activities. We had these weird looking action figures with comments from fitness bro male comment sections.
Little Darlings #140
U: And Ugly Bitches were plushies?
MM: Yeah, the Ugly Bitches collection is trained on images of dolls that we ran through a model. The dolls are kind of fucked up and they're paired with comments from hot girl influencers like Kendall Jenner or Addison Rae. But for the MOCA event specifically, we created a Little Ugly plushie, and she's this creature who has custom printed fleece and satin fabric patchwork on her body that features dolls from the Ugly Bitches collection, as well as comments. And she's intended to be this physical representation of the spirit of the Ugly Bitches collection. Limited edition of 25, but each one is a little bit different. Yeah. So they're all visually in the same universe, but the eyes, facial expressions, and patchwork are different on each one. So kind of in the spirit of the generative collection.
Via Ann Hirsch
U: Also the point of aspirational femininity relates to “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes.” What was that about, it was based on Depop?
MM: Yes, it's a browser-based piece that I scraped Depop for. It's based on the fairy tale titled The Red Shoes by Hans Christian Andersen. There's this young girl who intensely desires this pair of red shoes that she first sees on another girl. She begs for them but once she gets them, they curse her and force her to dance forever until she eventually dies.
This is the very broad version of the story, but it's a pretty famous fairy tale that's been told through other forms of media. There's a well-known 1948 film that tells that story through the lens of a ballet dancer. Then Kate Bush has an album called The Red Shoes and a song on that album called The Red Shoes. So there's been ways of retelling the story in different mediums.
To me, the story's very much about girlhood and desire, and I was curious to bring this fairy tale that’s been retold so many times into a hyper-contemporary context, thinking about Depop specifically. In the original story, there's a shoe salesman, but on Depop, the people who are trying to sell the shoes are the girls themselves who once desired the red shoes, got them, then decided they didn't want them anymore. Now they’re trying to pawn them off to other girls.
U: The re-pop.
MM: Yeah. It's this cadence of manufactured desire that is so fascinating to me. So the piece features images from the query “red ballet flats” on Depop that I scraped, as well as their product descriptions. Depop product descriptions are such a very specific strain of language.
U: Even just the aesthetics and the language around that, like “fairy grunge.”
MM: Yeah. #Y2K, cottagecore, Lily-Rose Depp. The language is so visual, but also so intimate and immature, in a way. It's so different from a product description you would see on an actual designer's website.
U: I was going through my Depop recently and I had to clean up some of these captions because I seem so desperate the way that I'm trying to sell off these clothes. Like, “looks perfect with low rise jeans!”
MM: I used to feel so strange after buying something on Depop because the interface looks so much like Instagram, so it would feel like I was on Instagram. But then I would buy something and it would be at my apartment, it would come off the screen into my own space, which was always this really disorienting feeling for me. Like, I thought this was all a digital game, and now it's here.
U: I was saying this to someone the other day, that I had to stop buying stuff on Depop just because the girl is hot and she takes good photos.
So, I feel like you've been so booked and busy lately. What's the stuff that you have coming up?
MM: Yeah, I've also felt like that and I've loved everything I've had the chance to work on this past year, but I'm definitely tired and I need some more space to refocus on what I want to do next. My main focus right now is working on the space that I'm going to be opening up in Soho as my studio, and then also hoping to do some event programming. It's really refreshing because I've been going in every day and doing some cleaning and moving things in. I want to put a lot more energy outward and into thinking about the community over the summer, rather than just thinking so much about my own work. Doing that will open up a lot of space for better work to come.
U: I mean, we were just talking about how events are big right now, but people also really love spaces.
MM: Spaces are having a big come up. Spaces are the new podcast. But I think it'll be a fun summer to have a lot of different places and events happening.
U: Where do people find you online?
MM: You can find me on my website, mayaontheinter.net my Instagram is @mayaontheinternet.
Listen to an extended version of our conversation on Spotify. Find out more about Maya’s work on her website, or follow her on Instagram.
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USURPATOR: I guess before I introduce you, I’ll ask what you qualify yourself as— digital artist, net artist, post-net artist?
MAYA MAN: I would describe myself as an artist.
U: No prefix.
MM: But I've been described as a lot of different types of artists. My primary interest is in contemporary internet culture and the way that we form identity in relationship to the media that we produce and consume online. Sometimes I'll say digital, new media, or Internet.
U: Are these titles even fully distinguished from each other?
MM: They're extremely blurry, and also sort of contentious. I think ten years ago, post-Internet was the big word that encapsulated artists who were focusing on the Internet as a medium. That included artists who were making work on and about the Internet, but also a lot of artists who were making physical work that was engaged with concepts related to the Internet. We're definitely in a post-post-Internet age now, but there's no term that I've seen emerge to encapsulate a lot of the artists that I feel are my peers right now. Plus, it's been complicated by the advent of Web3. A lot of my work is algorithmic, and for a while, people used the term “generative” to describe work that's algorithmic or has an element of chance, even if it's not code-based. In 2024, “generative” now has this heavy AI connotation, so it's complicated. And because I haven't found the perfect prefix, I just go with the artist.
U: Maybe this is just my feeling, but the title “NFT artist” became a dirty word, or something that people don't really want to be associated with.
MM: I live in fear of it.
U: When they first came out, everyone in the space was described as an NFT artist. Now, it seems like the platform upon which you market or share your stuff is not necessarily how you want to be defined.
MM: Yeah, I've made a lot of NFTs and it's been beautiful and complicated in different ways, but I don't actually care about NFTs. I believe in the inherent value of digital objects, but the NFT aspect is a mechanism to me. It's not conceptually the most important part of the work.
U: It’s akin to the title “gallery artist.”
MM: It's kind of like “market artist” in a way, which is sometimes useful in the right moment to describe a person's practice.
U: When did you start putting your stuff on the blockchain? How were you selling or sharing your work before, and did it seem like a natural progression?
MM: It was pretty natural for me because from the beginning, since I’ve made code-based work—writing my own software to produce artwork. Previous to NFTs, a lot of the artists that I admired had these really expansive practices that often weren't tied to the traditional gallery world as their primary way of showing work, because for years there wasn’t a clear way for software-based work to operate within that system. I didn't really see artists that I felt aligned with working in that way.
Initially, in 2021, the energy around NFTs was so contentious. I'd been in the art and technology space for years and suddenly so many of my friends and people I admired in the space were so divided. It was extremely polarizing and was all really colored by the sensational headlines around big sales. Some work that was getting the most attention I found to be not totally representative of the aspects of the scene that I loved and the work that I thought was strong.
All of these conversations around NFTs were really tense. I'm very conflict averse, so I was like, “I'm not making NFTs, I'm not getting mixed up in that universe.” But then in in early 2021, I was invited to be in the first exhibition for Feral File, which is an online gallery that was cofounded by Casey Reas, who's an incredible artist I've looked up to for a long time and have a lot of respect for. He asked me to contribute a piece to a show called Social Codes that was about artists who are making code-based work. I really trust Casey, and having someone like him deliberately invite me into the space was my gateway into the world. It was exciting and in many ways very sweet; all of the artists got one of each other's work, so there was this network or peer-to-peer support that was built into the show and into the method of collecting. From there, I learned a lot more about what different artists were doing and got more excited about what was possible.
U: Was it all online?
MM: All online, and Feral File shows continued to be all online. But this was still in the midst of the pandemic times.
U: I think NFTs would have popped off anyway and obviously it was happening before, but it was this great coalition of everyone being at home all of a sudden. Even if you were a traditional artist, you had to be doing your shit online anyway.
MM: Definitely. I think it was an exciting, shiny way to introduce an Internet native way of collecting work and having a market for digital artwork that was totally at the right place, right time. I think everyone being at home contributed a lot to the swell of interest. But now, I mean, four years later, I think myself and a lot of other artists are feeling disenchanted with the online-only utopian rhetoric, and crave going to things in-person and doing shows in physical space. I've definitely been trying to prioritize that in my work.
U: Yeah, just because you make digital art doesn't mean that people will always want to engage with it on a phone or on a computer.
MM: In my experience installing shows and thinking about the best way to present my own digitally native work, I’ve been observing people come into the gallery and seeing the gravitational pull that a physical work has over a screen based work. Even though we spend so much time on screens, people will glance at a screen for a few seconds and it just doesn't hold the attention that a physical object does in gallery space.
U: Do you think that it has something to do with—not the nature of the work but—the actual parts that make it up? I think Carla Gannis has done a couple of pieces that are huge and have so much motion, so many different moving parts, but that does seem like a rare example of something that I want to look at for a really long time versus a really intricate painting that I need to unpack and gaze at for an extended period.
MM: Yeah, I think some of the digital work that struggles the most to be shown in gallery spaces that holds people's attention in the way that it deserves is more narrative digital work. I think the work that is successful has this ambient presence where someone is able to look at it at any moment and still grasp what it's wishing to communicate. But a lot of artists who make digital work are making video work, and I think it's difficult to get people to really spend the time with the work in a gallery setting as opposed to a screening.
U: Do you have any feelings about how digital art is best presented in gallery settings?
MM: Yes, I have so many feelings about that. It's something that I'm really working on right now to evolve in my own work. But I think it's best when it's kind of sensationalized in some way. What I love about making work that is Internet native is that to me, if I'm making a website as an art object that someone looks at on their phone or computer, you don't need to see the piece in a gallery space to see it in its truest form. It's true form is however it loads in your browser. But if I’m going to present it in a gallery space, more and more I feel that I need to add something to it or create an environment for it that feels sacred and special and validates its need to be shown there, because it can be seen in so many other places. Unlike a painting or sculpture where you actually can't see it in its true form unless you're physically there.
I've been really interested in artists who make digital work, but also make more sculptural installations that complement the video or digital work really nicely and in a way that augments the experience of seeing it in the gallery. I also think about Maggie Lee, an artist who does a lot of video work. She’s always installing her work on these specific TVs that she decorates with accessories or stickers or other details that really complement the work that she's showing.
U: Yeah, I mean, obviously it’s meant to be so subtle, because you aren’t necessarily supposed to notice these things in terms of installation. It's supposed to contribute to the ambient environment in which you're consuming the work. But it can go wrong so easily, like, everyone was clowning on the Tezos pole at Art Basel last year. What was up with that?
MM: Yeah, I think there's such a privilege of digital space that happens in the Web3 world. It's very digital-first, and I think people sometimes forget the level of craft and care needed to nicely install digital work in physical space, which sounds basic. But the more installs I've done, I've realized that to make something look minimal and polished, it's just so, so much effort, especially with work that requires cords. You really have to think about every element, and the install is often very complicated. If left to the last minute, without enough thinking about the details of where everything's going to plug in, it can quickly become very messy. But I think that example was a big lesson for everybody who's making work and selling work in this space.
U: Is that something that you have to exert control over when you're showing work at certain galleries or at different spaces? Are these questions that gallerists or handlers will be asking and keeping in mind?
MM: Yeah, I definitely feel like it's on me to keep in mind. It's up to me to say what type of cords or materials I want to bring. With cords specifically, people have all different kinds of philosophies. I'm kind of into visible cords, if it's the right kind of visible cord or projection on a material. I've been iterating a lot and each new show feels like a new opportunity to experiment with how I want to display things.
But when I think back on the shows that I've done over the past couple of years, I can see more and more that I'm leaning toward producing physical objects that are representative of algorithmic output with one or two screens, rather than having a lot of screens in the space. I'm trying to minimize the screen heaviness of physical shows.
U: You were just in L.A. right?
MM: Yeah, a couple of times. I was there in March with Ann Hirsch, an amazing artist, and we collaborated on a performance lecture at MOCA around our NFT collections, Ugly Bitches and Little Darlings. Then in February, I did a solo exhibition at Heavy Manners for my collection Fake It Till You Make It, which was also a book launch, which was also a gift shop.
U: What was the gift shop centered around, what were you selling? I know it was all featuring the same text that you had been generating in the NFT series.
MM: Yeah, Fake It Till You Make It was originally a collection of 700 NFTs that was released on the platform ArtBlocks in 2022, and the gift shop coincided with the book launch in February.
FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT #536I knew that I wanted to do an install around Fake It Till You Make It and the obvious thing would have been to print some of the outputs, frame them, and show them. But I wanted to do something that reflected the circulation of this style of language in physical space. I have a studio now in Soho, and I get off on Canal Street. Every day I walk by the New York City gift shops and I've always been obsessed with the kitschy objects that are in there—the keychains, the mugs, everything. That brings me so much true joy, and these shops really run on printing text on different objects. I was thinking that it was the perfect marriage of the way that I viewed this generative art collection and how I would want it to be presented in physical space. So, I created a wide range of objects, bought some slat wall, and then printed T-shirts, short shorts, thongs, teddy bears, keychains, stickers, shot glasses, and riso prints so the installation had a really wide range of objects. I wanted the text that was on each object to reflect something about the object itself; the teddy bears have a T-shirt that says “dumb soulmate,” the keychains say things like “go where your destiny feels awesome,” or things that you would want to see every day. The other constraint I had was I was only using texts from the 700 official output, so I wasn't generating new text.
The gift shop was functional, so people could actually buy things, and it was reasonably priced, I think. I was thinking about my relationship to art and value and circulation, and an essay I return to a lot is “Dispersion” by Seth Price, which was initially released in 2002. He's talking about the ways that artists can take advantage of circulating their work on the Internet, and he's saying that a strength of being able to do that is that you can have your work fit into these generic, dominant forms and then people that see it who are beyond the walls of the gallery, museum, institutional art world. That, to me, has always been a really exciting provocation. It's something I care a lot about within my work, that I don't want it to only be exclusively engaged with by people who are in this relatively niche scene. So, in a lot of ways the gift shop also reflects that, where I wanted the products that were in there to feel like products, even though they are a manifestation of the artwork. I wanted them to be accessible. It was so fun, and a feeling of joy that was different from a more traditional solo show because people were really looking at the objects, and friends now have these pieces.
Via @mayaontheinternet
U: Literally dispersing it into the world. You should do a pop-up on Canal Street.
MM: I'm opening a space this summer in Soho. So, I've been working out of there for a few weeks. It's pretty grungy and needs some cleaning up, but I'll have it for a little bit and I want to do some screenings, some art events, but I also want to do a gift shop in New York.
U: I was just walking on Canal Street the other day because my friend was visiting me and she wanted to buy some fake sunglasses. I was like, “Strap in”—Canal Street is, so disorienting. By the time you get to the end of that stretch with all the gift shops, you've been holding your breath the whole time. The idea of putting a gift shop in a more digestible, fun environment where people can actually actually engage with the things that are in it, instead of when you're actually on Canal Street and you're like, “Fuck, I guess I need this shot glass” and trying to get out as fast as possible.
MM: No, I really like taking these tried and true forms that are culturally kind of lowbrow and then bringing them into my work. I like twisting them in some way to make them related to what I'm doing, but also recognizable as a reference to the original thing. Over time, I've realized that's one of my primary ways of making work.
U: Even just in terms of the actual content of your work, I feel like that contrast of lowbrow and highbrow carries over—in your use of the language that's used online that's so generic. Maybe I'm making assumptions here, but I see that contrast in the Fake It Till You Make It stuff, and also I'm Feeling Lucky. I was wondering what the text for those pieces were based on—it was horoscopes, right?
MM: Yeah, I'm Feeling Lucky was all about horoscopes and astrology, the title of the collection comes from the button that was on the Google search page. I moved to L.A. in 2021 because I was starting grad school, and I was really struck by—it sounds so cliche but—how into astrology so many people are in Los Angeles. To me, it was conceptually so obviously tied to this idea of generative art or an element of randomness, and finding meaning in that randomness. I really wanted to produce a collection that tied all those different ideas together. And so for both Fake It Till You Make It and I'm Feeling Lucky, I created a library that acts as the source for all the language. There's no AI, it's just collaging language together in a fill in the blank system. So for I'm Feeling Lucky, it was from a combination of horoscope websites; apps like Co-star, The Pattern, or vintage horoscope books and I would input different sentences, but then put lists of verbs and nouns I was creating in the code. It's basically swapping out language in a Madlib style way. So I have fine control over what's possible to be produced, but I also like that there's no premise of intelligence; the algorithm produces a lot that sounds really absurd.
With I'm Feeling Lucky, I was really curious because there was always this lingering question for me reading my own horoscope wondering, is it random or is it real? That surfaced this question of if I could find meaning in something that I knew was random because I wrote a random algorithm to produce it. But could I still find meaning in something that was produced in that way that it reflected on me? That was the big question of I'm Feeling Lucky.
I'm Feeling Lucky #7The outputs are essentially these random seed-based generated readings that come in different forms. You could have longer sentences or you can have just a few prominent adjectives to describe you. Releasing that as an NFT collection, I was really enticed by the idea of one person actually owning one piece that was generated at random; the owner having a relationship to that single visual output and being able to decipher whether or not it aligns with them. I've been into meaning-making lately, and it was a good exercise in thinking about that.
U: That's basically what horoscopes are, especially with the old ones. While I would like to believe that Co-star has real astrologists working on these outputs, they’re probably still random. But the horoscopes that they used to publish in Cosmo or whatever definitely felt that way. Like, a one-line horoscope that was completely meaningless. It felt the same as a fortune cookie, when you have your lucky numbers and then you start retroactively assigning meaning to them.
MM: Totally, I've also gotten really into numbers in the past few years. My desire to believe in something like horoscopes and numerology—certain numbers that I see in different places—I've realized it’s my way to fight against my own tendency towards cynicism and nihilism. I just want things to be meaningful and beautiful. For a long time I thought that not believing in that type of stuff made me smarter or more intelligent. Now, I just want to believe. I want to not be in control. I want the universe to give me signs.
U: Going back to Fake It Till You Make It, a lot of your work is about being a girl online and building identity. I don't know exactly what era you were pulling from for that project, was it pre-Girlboss?
MM: I was pulling from those Instagram graphics that were really popular that rolled out of Tumblr. To me, they are very set within the Girlboss era from 2016 to 2021.
FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT #592
Now, I feel that Fake It Till You Make It almost represents an archive of culture from that moment, because we've definitely moved past that in terms of trends. Definitely pulling from the Girlboss era.
U: I think I read in your Dazed interview that the project is rooted in why being a girl is embarrassing— being a girl online specifically, or being a girl in general?
MM: Yeah, I wrote that in the Fake It Till You Make It introduction for the book and I’ve noticed that people are really pulling that quote. I wrote “When did being a woman become so deeply embarrassing?” or something like that. I think I realized that was really what I was trying to work through when I was making this project. When I became so fascinated by these graphics, I was following a bunch of accounts that posted this type of content on my new account that I'd made to only do that, I was saving hundreds of them. I just felt just so embarrassed for women. It really was this feeling of watered down, commodified feminism, but was being treated as if it was a poster for feminism in the Instagram era. I found it so cringey and embarrassing and I was feeling really cynical about it. But at the end of the introduction, I talk about making the piece Fake It Till You Make It, and by the end, I started to find the output that the algorithm generated was often super meaningful to me, and they almost became little prayers. Sometimes it would output something, and I would be like, “That's honestly really deep.”
Then I warmed up to the idea of someone finding meaning in this, and how it’s great if someone finds meaning in anything in the world. I don't need to be so critical of that. In a way, maybe there's parts of myself that I can indulge in, too.
U: I also wanted to talk about what you wrote for Outland recently, “The Artist is Online,” Specifically about the way that artists have to market themselves online and command their presence. Do you feel like you have to create this divide between personal and public, or more essentially that they have to be a “public figure”? As a digital artist, your Instagram is your Instagram, there's no divide between the artist persona and private self online.
MM: Yeah, I mean, I think about this all the time. My general thesis that I've arrived at is that I don't believe in authenticity online.
U: I was just talking about this with Molly.
MM: Yeah, I always agree with Molly. I think she has the right mindset around performing online. She's been in it for so long. But everything online is performance. No matter what you do, you're always constructing a version of yourself in these digital spaces that reflects how you want to be seen by other people, which is not so different from you being at a party in a physical space.
I bring him up a lot, but I was very affected by Irving Kaufman's book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life from the late 50s, way pre-Internet, but he talks about how he uses dramaturgical analogies to describe the way that we are socially. You're always thinking about performing when you're around other people. That's just natural. But on the Internet, you're performing for thousands sometimes. I felt very freed once I realized that my Internet presence is this abstraction of myself with a really direct desire to present myself as an artist, which is what I primarily use my Instagram and Twitter for. I have a very rich life with my family and friends offline, but that's not something I really want to share in that context because it's not appropriate; it doesn't contribute to the performance of myself that I want to exist in these profiles. But it also becomes so complicated, which is what I was writing about in the Outland piece. I think a lot of artists are feeling like they have to become their own marketing manager and think of themselves as a weirdly corporate entity that needs maintenance online.
Brad Troemel talks about this in his essay in The New Inquiry which is from 2014, a really different time on the Internet. But it’s about this hyper pace of production that artists feel like they need to be engaging with online. Now, especially with the advent of NFTs, it's directly tied not just to cultural capital, but economic capital for a lot of artists, which is increasingly complicated.
U: Do you think that there's added pressure when you're a digital artist to perform that way, or does that exist with all artists, or even just anyone doing anything? Personal branding!
MM: Yeah, it's definitely an issue for everybody right now, especially people who have some kind of artistic medium—writers, musicians, whatever. But I think it's extremely intense for digital artists specifically, because a lot of these artists or are cut out of opportunities within the traditional gallery world, and they're relying on the Internet to show their work because they're not getting as many opportunities to show their work in physical space because of the medium that they work in. They're essentially needing to use these platforms to exhibit their work.
U: This was also something that I was talking about with Molly when I asked her why she moved back to New York. With the boom of digital art, I think part of the appeal was that you can do it from anywhere, you don't have to live in one of these art hubs. But then it kind of ended up that you do, a little bit.
MM: I know, I was just thinking about this. I mean, people live everywhere. But I think we've been talking about this with the importance of events and spaces. I think you just can't connect with people or understand them or their work without engaging in the physical space, ideally. It's important to physically be in a scene if you want to be part of something.
U: I just keep seeing all these tweets from the tech/culture/community guys, asking “How do you connect with people offline? How do we build a scene?” Like, go outside, dude.
MM: Yeah, I've become pretty disenchanted with the community-building online thing. Even us, we have our Discord that we're part of, but meeting up in person is where we hang out. We're kind of hanging on the Discord, but I think you need both to have the most successful process of building any kind of community.
For 2024, my one word New Year's resolution was “hang.” Opportunities to hang in a specifically unstructured way is something that you can't really do online. You can have a meeting online, but you can't just ambiently hang out. That needs to be done in person.
U: Also, when you were in L.A., you were doing an IRL event for Ugly Bitches.
MM: Yes, so the last time I was in L.A, Ann Hirsch and I did a performance at MOCA that was titled Little Ugly. It was a performance lecture talking about our collection Ugly Bitches, an NFT collection that was a sequel to Little Darlings. Ugly Bitches focused on aspirational femininity online and Little Darlings focused on subcultures of aspirational masculinity online.
We did the performance in these Elizabeth Holmes-esque black turtlenecks, white overall outfits. It was really fun; I've done a lot of artists talks, but this was the first super explicit performance lecture I had done where we were embodying these cult leader-style characters that were trying to entice the audience to engage with these collections, saying it would set them free from their aspirational desire on the Internet. We really dove into different extreme gender stereotypes that are circulating online, so there was a lot of humor.
Via @mayaontheinternet
U: What kinds of extreme gender stereotypes?
MM: Well, for Ugly Bitches, it was really about, again, Girlboss culture and thinking about NFT collections that were promoting women, like World of Women or whatever. They're just flat illustrations of skinny hot girls in different colors. So it’s a reaction to both the feminine ideal needing to be aesthetically perfect in terms of how it visually operates online, but also morally perfect aspirations that are borne out of cancel culture. All of that culminates in people feeling so nervous to express certain beliefs or be quote unquote a bad person. We talk a lot about how Ugly Bitches aspire to nothing. They're lazy and they give up on life, and that's what you should embrace when you think about Ugly Bitches.
Ugly Bitches #389
Then with Little Darlings, we were thinking about four different aspects of masculine culture online. There's fitness/gym bro culture, then hustle/grind culture. Then there's mogging culture; guys who are trying to be more visually handsome, mewing and doing these different activities to improve their looks.
U: Looksmaxxing for men.
MM: Then there's also this genre of male that's like woman worship. Trying to be the perfect liberal, woman-worshiping guy. Male feminist kind of attitude. We were looking at these different extremes of masculine subcultures. In the official collection, we collected over 1000 images of action figures, creating these different combinations of them that we fine-tuned a StableDiffusion model on so we could prompt them to do different activities. We had these weird looking action figures with comments from fitness bro male comment sections.
Little Darlings #140
U: And Ugly Bitches were plushies?
MM: Yeah, the Ugly Bitches collection is trained on images of dolls that we ran through a model. The dolls are kind of fucked up and they're paired with comments from hot girl influencers like Kendall Jenner or Addison Rae. But for the MOCA event specifically, we created a Little Ugly plushie, and she's this creature who has custom printed fleece and satin fabric patchwork on her body that features dolls from the Ugly Bitches collection, as well as comments. And she's intended to be this physical representation of the spirit of the Ugly Bitches collection. Limited edition of 25, but each one is a little bit different. Yeah. So they're all visually in the same universe, but the eyes, facial expressions, and patchwork are different on each one. So kind of in the spirit of the generative collection.
Via Ann Hirsch
U: Also the point of aspirational femininity relates to “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes.” What was that about, it was based on Depop?
MM: Yes, it's a browser-based piece that I scraped Depop for. It's based on the fairy tale titled The Red Shoes by Hans Christian Andersen. There's this young girl who intensely desires this pair of red shoes that she first sees on another girl. She begs for them but once she gets them, they curse her and force her to dance forever until she eventually dies.
This is the very broad version of the story, but it's a pretty famous fairy tale that's been told through other forms of media. There's a well-known 1948 film that tells that story through the lens of a ballet dancer. Then Kate Bush has an album called The Red Shoes and a song on that album called The Red Shoes. So there's been ways of retelling the story in different mediums.
To me, the story's very much about girlhood and desire, and I was curious to bring this fairy tale that’s been retold so many times into a hyper-contemporary context, thinking about Depop specifically. In the original story, there's a shoe salesman, but on Depop, the people who are trying to sell the shoes are the girls themselves who once desired the red shoes, got them, then decided they didn't want them anymore. Now they’re trying to pawn them off to other girls.
U: The re-pop.
MM: Yeah. It's this cadence of manufactured desire that is so fascinating to me. So the piece features images from the query “red ballet flats” on Depop that I scraped, as well as their product descriptions. Depop product descriptions are such a very specific strain of language.
U: Even just the aesthetics and the language around that, like “fairy grunge.”
MM: Yeah. #Y2K, cottagecore, Lily-Rose Depp. The language is so visual, but also so intimate and immature, in a way. It's so different from a product description you would see on an actual designer's website.
U: I was going through my Depop recently and I had to clean up some of these captions because I seem so desperate the way that I'm trying to sell off these clothes. Like, “looks perfect with low rise jeans!”
MM: I used to feel so strange after buying something on Depop because the interface looks so much like Instagram, so it would feel like I was on Instagram. But then I would buy something and it would be at my apartment, it would come off the screen into my own space, which was always this really disorienting feeling for me. Like, I thought this was all a digital game, and now it's here.
U: I was saying this to someone the other day, that I had to stop buying stuff on Depop just because the girl is hot and she takes good photos.
So, I feel like you've been so booked and busy lately. What's the stuff that you have coming up?
MM: Yeah, I've also felt like that and I've loved everything I've had the chance to work on this past year, but I'm definitely tired and I need some more space to refocus on what I want to do next. My main focus right now is working on the space that I'm going to be opening up in Soho as my studio, and then also hoping to do some event programming. It's really refreshing because I've been going in every day and doing some cleaning and moving things in. I want to put a lot more energy outward and into thinking about the community over the summer, rather than just thinking so much about my own work. Doing that will open up a lot of space for better work to come.
U: I mean, we were just talking about how events are big right now, but people also really love spaces.
MM: Spaces are having a big come up. Spaces are the new podcast. But I think it'll be a fun summer to have a lot of different places and events happening.
U: Where do people find you online?
MM: You can find me on my website, mayaontheinter.net my Instagram is @mayaontheinternet.