Internet culture is fascinating because of its breadth and depth. There’s a lot of everything for everyone. In her own words, Maya has explored “dominant narratives around femininity, authenticity, and the performance of self online” for years by making work for and about culture on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. In “Fake It Till You Make It” (FITYMI) she digs deep into the subculture of wellness, self care graphics, and text on Instagram. FITYMI is a collage of text fragments, symbols, and colors that were directly sourced from existing materials. Maya selected these elements carefully by hand. Her reassembly of these elements through her code mimics the cheerful tone of the source materials while enhancing the feeling of cliche and absurdity. In total, her text system includes 250 phrase structures as well as lists including 145 nouns, 194 adjectives, 213 adverbs, and more. She calculates the total possibilities as over 80 billion, which means the 1000 in the official FITYMI series is a tiny subset of what was possible. I think everyone has their favorites in the FITYMI series and mine include “STOP BEING GENUINE TO BE TOXIC” with a graphic of a winking flower and “HEY GIRL, FEELING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EGO.” In placing this work back on Instagram through her daily “fake_it_till_you_make_it_lol” account, Maya is in dialogue with her original source material. While the work feels like it fits on Instagram, it was completely unique within the space of generative art when it was released on Art Blocks in August 2022. The embedded themes and approach to generative art expanded what many people thought was possible. — Casey REAS