A lot of generative art is about systems in the abstract — flow fields, tilings, noise. Maya Man’s systems are about a specific, uncomfortable subject: what it is to perform a self online, and what the internet has decided a girl is supposed to sound like.
Her primary medium is software — usually JavaScript running in the browser, which means her work often has a URL rather than an edition. She has spoken on it at The New Museum in New York, the V&A in London, and MOCA in Los Angeles.
FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT
Her best-known series generates, through a custom algorithm, endlessly shifting Instagram-style graphics borrowing the aesthetics and language of the “Girl Power” and “Girl Boss” internet: girlishly coloured, encouraging mantras about self-love and mental health.
It began as an Art Blocks exhibition in 2022, then moved onto Instagram and a dedicated site — which is the right trajectory for the work, since its subject matter is native to the feed rather than the gallery.
What keeps it from being a cheap joke is that Man refuses the easy position. The project started from her suspicion of these mantras, but she has been explicit that the intent is not to mock their wisdom. As she put it, as she generated more and more of the graphics, she started finding some that were “honestly kind of deep.”
That’s a harder and better artistic stance than satire. The work sits with the fact that a format can be commercially cynical and occasionally sincerely useful at the same time, and it declines to resolve that for you.
Glance Back
The other piece worth knowing is a browser extension that randomly takes a photo of you at your computer, once a day.
It’s a tiny idea with a large effect. You are not posing. There’s no filter, no chosen angle, no caption. Over months it accumulates a record of what you actually look like while using a computer — which is nothing like what you look like in the images you publish of yourself.
For an artist whose subject is the performance of self online, building a tool that captures the unperformed version is exactly on point. It also inverts the usual relationship: rather than critiquing surveillance, it hands you the camera and asks whether you want to see.
Man’s own talk on navigating the self and body on the internet.
Why now
She is one of four artists in Dataland’s first cohort of AI artist residents, alongside Lucia Rebolino, Penny Slinger and Jess Starns. Announced in July 2026, the six-month programme gives each artist a $25,000 grant, access to the museum’s computing infrastructure, Google cloud tools and the Large Nature Model, plus mentorship from Refik Anadol and his studio. It’s run in partnership with Google Arts & Culture and concludes with a presentation of the residents’ work in December 2026.
That pairing is worth watching precisely because it’s a mismatch of scale. Dataland is a museum built around vast models and immersive, room-filling output. Man’s work is small, textual, browser-shaped and frequently funny. What she does with an institutional AI infrastructure — or whether she pointedly does something modest with it — is the more interesting question of the four.
Related Reading
- Navigating the Self + Body on the Internet | Maya Man — AIxDESIGN (YouTube)
- Wellness Program — Maya Man on Art Blocks, Outland
- Maya Man’s self-help mantras are designed to make you cringe — Dazed
- Maya Man on Generative Meaning — Le Random
- Dataland Announces First Cohort of AI Artist Residents — Right Click Save
- The Choreography of Posting Online — interview, Autre Magazine