MAYA MAN

Maya Man’s A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City builds on one of the most popular formats for short-form content on the Internet, the “day in my life” video, to explore online self-representation. The artist excerpted text mentioning specific hours of the day — for example 8 am, 11 pm — from thousands of publicly posted TikTok videos, stripping them of all visual elements to highlight the “day in my life” genre’s method of storytelling. At the top of every hour, a quote from a “day in my life in New York City” video referencing the specific hour appears in large font size on whitney.org, followed by a stream of animated responses from the source videos’ comment section. Producers of “day in my life” content commonly use the descriptor “realistic” in the title of their videos, striving to communicate an aura of authenticity and relatability on social media platforms cluttered with overt product placement and aspirational lifestyle content. Man’s piece highlights the blurring of lines between living and performance in a format that offers a template for turning every moment into cinema and every person into a star. The “day in my life” genre requires a dramatized performance of the respective creator’s day while capitalizing on every TikTok scroller’s voyeuristic desires. A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City invites its audience to consider both the sincerity and absurdity of this contemporary form of content production.