It’s an age-old debate at this point: Is the internet the salve we’ve been praying for to unite us once and for all? Or the toxin catalyzing our demise one post, meme, or hate comment at a time? From the ’90s net art movement to the 2010s post-internet era, internet artists have long grappled with this question. Now, deeply entrenched in the murky ethics of AI and infinite social media feeds, a fresh crop of internet artists are embracing these new technologies and mediums as the foundational material for their work. The art that emerges doesn’t exacerbate our chronic overconsumption of mindless content; rather, it self-referentially reflects the dystopian times that social media and algorithmically-fueled content have left us stranded in.

Among this new wave of digital artists is Maya Man. From parodying the ultra-bubbly rhetoric of Instagram affirmations in algorithmically-generated works like FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, to embedding an iPhone displaying TikToks of herself dancing onto a baby pink punching bag in installations like love/hate, her body of work blurs the lines between performance and authenticity, girlhood and adulthood, physical and digital.

In her inaugural show Sacred Screenshots hosted at her studio in artist-run space HEART, Man curated over two dozen screenshots from the phones of both emerging and veteran internet artists. The resulting line-up was equal parts hilarious and evocative—there was a pixelated toilet, a google search of how to get out of a Chinese finger trap, a camera roll filled with images of open mouths. Separately, the images in Sacred Screenshots were uncontextualized and random; collectively, they revealed how maintaining personal digital archives on our phones has increasing power over what we consider sacred in real life.

One of the artists Maya tapped for the show was Sotce, whose screenshot of a vulnerable text message followed by a modest sugar cookie couldn’t have been more representative of her body of work. She’s even created her own character named flower, a mythical creature that looks somewhere between a bunny, a mouse, and a gerbil and spouts tender aphorisms on womanhood, tragedy, and apathy. Whether placing images of everyday objects next to Helvetica-sheathed musings in meme-like formats on Instagram, or providing her 100,000 followers with guided meditations and intimate self-help blogs, her minimalist approach to digital art inherently subverts the gaudy, hyper-commodified aesthetics of the contemporary internet.

Both artists invoke the internet as an extension of their psyches, an appendage of their consciousness; both indicate a new age of internet artists. Man and Sotce sit down with Document to discuss generative art, identity formation, online performance, and Sacred Screenshots.

Photography by Jason Isolini.

Sofi Cisneros: How have your identities and personal experiences influenced what each of you now create and post online? As digital artists, is the internet inseparable from your identities, or do you see it as merely a tool to publicize and platform yourselves?

Maya Man: I was always desiring to understand who I was, but I could not do that outside of the way that I used the internet and my computer or phone. I can’t consciously remember who I was before I had this process of consuming and posting to self-actualize how I thought about myself. There’s this tension between my desire to post and to share, and also my intense guilt and shame about posting and sharing. It’s a really complex relationship to being online, which is why I’m so obsessed with it.

Sotce: I don’t think I’m obsessed with self-actualization, but I believe very firmly that there are no authentic selves. You could wake up and be a different person by lunchtime if you allowed yourself to be, and there isn’t any fixed identity that you have to adhere to unless you want to. I just try to have fun as much as possible and to let the work speak. Someone else said this, but you can imagine these people in your life, almost like at a round table, and they’re discussing your work and who you are, and what they think about you. I’m just going to keep working.

Maya: I really agree with that idea of the myth of authenticity. I don’t believe in authenticity, and I don’t believe in there being a true self, which is a very, like, Goffman-esque, postmodern collage idea of the self. People online desire to hold each other against this romanticized threshold of authenticity when it’s impossible because it doesn’t exist. There’s no escaping performance. Even if someone is not adhering to the dominant method of posting or curating, it’s still a performance in itself. And I find that very comforting.

Sotce: Me too. It feels very precious to engage with those lives.

Sofi: Maya, in your essay, ‘The Artist is Online,’ you asked, ‘How might we reconcile with the structures of centralized selfhood that a distributed, internet-based art circuit encourages?’ As internet artists who have built up followings around themes of identity formation and online self-reckoning, is this a question you have asked yourselves?

Maya: When I wrote that, I was feeling concerned with the way people talk about the internet as a utopic method of distributing artwork. There’s this essay by Seth Price that he first published in the early 2000s called ‘Dispersion.’ He has an idealistic call to artists to be like, ‘Look, artists can distribute work outside of the museums and galleries,’ and you can reach people who are not necessarily physically going to visit these institutionalized art spaces. I’ve always thought that was a really beautiful way of approaching the internet as an artist. But over the past few years, I started to feel very aware that it still falls on the artist to cultivate an idea of themselves. I think I felt afraid of pretending that wasn’t happening amidst the positive aspects of artists working online too.

Sotce: I see a lot of artists express the sentiment where nowadays you have to be an advertiser for your art. You can’t just be an artist. How do you feel about that sentiment?

Maya: For me as an artist, it’s all part of the practice. It’s your work to make the identity for yourself as an artist that you want to convey. The internet has exacerbated the tools that are available to you to do that, but it’s also created this opportunity for exaggerated performance. And I think that’s beautiful, actually. I’m always skeptical of people who just want to come at it from this angle of it’s all negative, it’s all narcissism.

Sotce: Yes, intention is everything. My work means a lot of different things to different people. I think it’s generous to share your attempts at expression, just to say that I am here, I am alive. It’s a beautiful thing to even seek connection.

Sofi: Both of you engage in girl culture on the internet and online self-reckoning. In terms of growing up on the internet, do you think this practice is a healthy catharsis? Or is it more hurtful to the traditional coming of age process? What does the mainstream discourse surrounding ‘girlhood’ leave out?

Maya: The public conversation about girlhood over the past couple of years has really emphasized its aesthetics, when really it’s about the desire for the allowance of big feelings. Sotce and I were talking about this, but people view the young girl with an expectation that she’s dramatic or as expressing big feelings, but that’s actually a really sacred allowance to have for yourself, to feel like there’s a space to fill with what you feel. That’s something that’s really productive for everybody to allow within themselves.

Sotce: Girls have been writing solipsistic diary entries for ages, and now it’s just crossed with the dopaminergic element of externalizing it publicly, like having viewership online and potential detention through it. The Sotce-core format, for example, is quite a melodramatic, to-the-point sentence with a really clean image of a deer or a flower. It’s very sentimental. I feel really proud that I’m able to encourage introspection or community.

Maya: Sometimes I look at the way that certain people post online, and I can just feel through the screen that it’s from the heart. I feel that in the way that you post, Sotce. It’s like that Carly Rae Jepsen song ‘Cut To The Feeling.’ Your posts cut to the feeling.

Sotce: Thank you. I was showing someone your FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT account a while back, like, out of context, and they misconstrued it to be an inspirational quote account. They were like, Oh my god, is she being serious? And I thought about it for a second, and said ‘Actually yes, she’s completely serious.’

Maya: I appreciate that because I don’t indicate it’s generative. The affirmation-style posts that FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT algorithmically replicates are very pseudo-religious. They’re like little prayers. The initial reaction people have is to laugh because they don’t make sense and sound absurd. But it’s also so serious. I feel more and more attached to these abstract, blurry methods of meaning-making, which I believe those affirmations do because they’re collaging language from actual Instagram graphics written by people. It doesn’t even matter anymore that it’s from a code; I can read it and just pull meaning from it. Sometimes there’ll be one that I think is so applicable to my life, it stays with me in a really intense way.

Sotce: Do people get upset with you for making generative art?

Maya: The conversation over the past year has shifted a lot with all the AI technology that’s come out, and people are definitely quite incensed by all of that. I find the whole conversation of if it’s me making the art or the computer kind of boring. The artist has the idea for the work, how they show it, and how they contrast it, so if someone wants to make an AI generated image, I’m so interested in why. It’s exciting to me. The fact that the computer made it is auxiliary.

Sofi: On the topic of internet-conscious art, what would you say are the main differences between both of your internet-focused works and the widely circulated works of the NFT world?

Maya: Internet art has always lived in this shadow of the art world. When NFTs came out, they offered a contemporary art market for digital work, but they were super divisive. It was very weighed down by complications with blockchain, crypto, and cultural connotations that sucked, honestly. The social value is corny and a lot of popular NFTs were really ugly, so people formed a mental model of NFTs that was attached to grotesque aesthetics. Unfortunately, as an internet artist, it’s hard to then discern what the right pathway is and structure a serious practice because of these intersecting perceptions at play.

But I’ve been interested in the intersection of these universes and released projects that have conceptually made sense to exist as NFTs. For example, in the Ugly Bitches collection with Ann Hirsch, we focused on a lot of the cultural dynamics of the NFT space and extreme gender stereotypes on the internet. I’m feeling lucky are generative artworks that came to fruition with a code. And I do installation work. My personal philosophy is to be distributed in my practice and not lock into one method of sharing or making artwork. The contemporary artist is evolving to be someone who is able to embrace that.

To me, Sotce, you are an artist that is emblematic of a new way of sharing work because you exhibit what you make on platforms like Instagram, Tiktok, Patreon. I wouldn’t say that as a blanket statement about anyone who posts art. I think it has to come from a place where you recognize a very clear intention and practice in relation to those ways of sharing, which is what I think an artist is, whether that place of sharing is a studio, physical gallery, or an online account. It feels like showing and sharing work with an artistic intention.

Sotce: The artistic intention really came later. I feel like they wanted that from me and I was a little bit reluctant at first. I think it’s very interesting for you to be interested in this space that, at least to me, seems pretty unacceptable and intimidating, and has a weird social currency to it. How did you get into this?

Maya: I studied computer science and media studies in college, then I went back to do my MFA for grad school. Casey, my thesis advisor, invited me to be part of the first show on this online gallery that he co-founded called Feral File back in 2021. At the time, people were extremely critical of both the environmental impact and the hyper capitalist financial ecosystem that NFTs encouraged. But I was also intrigued because I really believe in the inherent value of digital art. I released a lot of these NFT platforms that focus on generative artwork where you upload your code, someone presses ‘mint,’ and it produces the artwork at that moment. Selling it that way felt exciting and like it held onto its truth as a digital object.

Left: Courtesy of Princess Gallery.

Photography by Jason Isolini.

Sofi: The lines between art inspired by the internet in physical spaces and actual internet art are becoming increasingly blurred. For example, the CUTE! exhibition at Somerset House in London, or Blade Study’s exhibitions downtown, or the installations you’ve shown in galleries Maya—the internet is creeping into traditional gallery settings. Would you like to see those lines increasingly blurred?

Maya: Oh yeah. My feeling is that it’s time.

Sotce: Like let’s be fucking for real.

Maya: Let’s be for real—life is on the internet. I don’t believe in this dichotomy between real and online life. People are socializing and feeling emotions online. I’ve had a long frustration with the lack of representation of internet engaged work in galleries. Of course a gallery is not going to show that style of work as often because they’re a business and they’re going to choose to show work that assists them. But I feel really energized by shows coming out that are engaged with online culture. I have a piece that’s in my friend Tess’s new curatorial project, Princess Gallery, that’s up on Henry Street right now. But yeah, I’m ready. Everyone’s ready to embrace it.

Sofi: Speaking of the blurred lines between online performance art and internet art in galleries, Maya, what were your intentions in putting on the Sacred Screenshots show? Why did you choose the artists that you did, such as Sotce?

Maya: I wanted to localize a really large group of New York-based artists because it’s a physical gallery space and to present something that wasn’t exactly the artist’s artwork, per se, but instead was something a little bit behind the scenes related to their practice. Most of the artists are friends of mine who I really admire and are working in some way with the internet or new technologies. When you take a screenshot on your phone, you have to consciously move your hand up the neck of the phone and kind of choke it in an aggressive way. That, to me, is so intentional because everything else is so frictionless.

There’s a wide range of screenshot styles; some are very utilitarian, like a QR code, some are emotional moments that were important to save, and some are fascinating things you came across in your feed. The prompt for the artists was to choose one that they considered sacred. Some are really funny, others are really meaningful. A lot of them have a backstory that might not be apparent at first. It came together in such a beautifully varied way.