FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT — 21st Century Digital Art

May 21

May 21 FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT

Maya Man is an artist exploring the potential for intimacy and performance allowed by translating our offline selves into online content. Her work primarily involves the creation of custom software for websites, generative systems, and installations. With “FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT,” Man adopts the aesthetics and language of Instagram graphics to critique notions of toxic positivity, girlboss culture, and corporatized self-care on social media. The artwork – which released as an NFT on Art Blocks in August 2022 – is a consideration of:

““cult behavior, contemporary femininity, and the way belief systems are spread via social media” with “the absurdity of the Instagram graphics that epitomize this kind of online phenomena” ”

— In Conversation with Maya Man

Examples generated from “Fake It Till You Make It”

To capture the precise aesthetics of the posts she was emulating, Man spent months collecting inspirational Instagram graphics which she stored in an archive entitled “Instagram infographic industrial complex.” Man’s interest is in the rhetorical nature of these posts – to achieve the cheerful yet authoritarian tone of these graphics, Man sourced words and phrases from existing text graphics on Instagram and manually fed them to a generative language algorithm used by a custom software she developed. The found words and phrases are collaged by the software to produce over 80 billion possible combinations, ranging from cliché to absurd.

Example image with radial gradient background and text reading “Success and Thought Look Ugly on You”

The text is packaged in an aesthetic inspired by “girlboss,” “girl power,” and “boss babe” posts, with graphics designed to be eye catching while scrolling through a feed. The text is bold and uppercase, sometimes including a drop shadow for busier backgrounds, and sometimes generating decorative accents including stars, hearts, flowers, and sparkles, calculated in response to the position of the letters. The text is generated over seven distinct backgrounds of various pastel gradients and heart motifs.

Examples of inspirational images scraped from Instagram by Man to develop the project aesthetic.

Man’s critical exploration of this form of content is a consideration of the ritualized nature of wellness and self-care, and how this cultish ideology quickly collapses into marketing strategies. “FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT” considers the role of capitalism in self-care – how companies use ideology and activism in marketing campaigns while ignoring the systemic issues faced by the marginalized communities they profit from. Behind the cheerful messaging of the text is the sinister message that personal struggle reflects personal failure – regardless of systemic challenges – and that ones’ problems can be solved by repeating an affirmation or buying a planner.