11:59 a.m. The tiny clock at the bottom of the screen counts down to the top of the hour, and like a bizarre bell chime from a digital clocktower, large pink text overtakes the Whitney Museum’s website.
"A quick bus ride and transfer to the F gets us into the city nice and swiftly at noon, where I’m greeted by this food truck."
Then, the comments tick in.
"What headphones are those"
"Been loving your vlogs in NY!"
"Shes like a character out of gossip girl"
"How is this financially viable"
"I like her soft girl era"
Within seconds, the screen is wallpapered with text, and then it all disappears. The tiny clock resets and begins counting down to the next hour.
This hourly experience is Maya Man's digital art project A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City, featured as part of the Whitney Museum's "On the Hour" series. Man created the piece by scraping text from TikTok "day in the life" videos, which are vlogs that both influencers and normies post documenting their lives.
The genre of video has its roots in YouTube, where lifestyle vloggers would post the specifics of their routines with titles that included searchable keywords about their online identities, like "6am morning routine, healthy habits & productive mindset | Days in the Life in Japan as a Homebody" or "NYC VLOG: Winter Day in the Life Exploring the City + Achieving New Goals." It’s a successful genre for influencers because it provides a capsule escape for viewers into their lives, but also because it's such a tidy way to package the particular brand of lifestyle they might be selling. There are DITL videos for people living at sea, deployed soldiers, teenage nail techs, elementary school teachers, and even mail carriers. I've watched DITL videos consistently for the last decade, so the form's bizarreness has fallen away for me. But when I engage with Man's piece, I encounter that bizarreness again.
One o'clock p.m. "The day started around 1pm. That was my call time and I toured the space. This venue had so much natural light."
"Your voice 😍😍"
"Love this top!! Where is it from?!"
"You're so cute, I just love you"
"These vlogs make my day"
"Adore this"
Disconnected from the original context of these videos, the viewer is left with a snippet from an anonymous, disembodied experience, just a portion of a stranger's day, with no sense of how it begins or ends, or what comes next. I don't know whose life I'm spending a day in. I don't know why I would want to. I don't know what came before and after the moments documented on screen. I don't know who is leaving these comments. And the people leaving the comments likely don't actually know the person who posted the video. What is usually an ordinary part of consuming information on the internet has been rendered strange. The piece makes a quotidian behavior uncanny.
A lot of Man's work re-alienates the meatspace self from the amalgamated self performed within the conventions of the social internet. When something becomes such a deeply woven part of how one both connects and performs their identity, there are parts of looking at it up close that they can simply miss. Another project of hers, Glance Back, is a browser extension that takes one webcam photo of users each day. Eventually, the screenshots accumulate into a collaged diary of a user's relationship with their computer. On the Glance Back website Man writes, "When using our devices, we're pulled into and solely focused on the glowing world that exists on the screen. We lose both an awareness of self and of the real world context surrounding us. Glance Back is ready to disrupt that trance and remind you that you are here and your computer is there and you are just staring at it getting lost in its eyes."
Three o’clock p.m. "At 3:00 I take a SoulCycle break, shower, and finally change into a real shirt."
"I need this"
"You low key inspire me"
"Fit is so cute!! What are the fit details?"
"Out of topic but your eyes look amazing with that makeup!"
I thought of Man's piece a lot this week as I watched a trend of AI POV videos from historic events take over my feeds. I've seen videos from Pompeii, Chernobyl, multiple perspectives of the Titanic and the Titan submersible, the Black Plague, and 9/11. I've also seen a Michael Jackson one, a Diddy one, and an Anne Frank one (don't worry, these are all G-rated in what they show). They're surreal and bad and often hilarious because they're so ridiculous.
These are all bizarro AI-slop interpretations of the DITL genre, "filmed" from a first person perspective, often prominently featuring hands and feet with too many fingers and toes and the sounds of labored breathing to indicate fear. Their value lies not in their accuracy but in their uncanniness. There is no danger of mistaking them for something made by humans, but their depictions of historic tragedies are compelling in a bleak and voyeuristic way. When I was a teenager, I would watch the Today Show broadcast from the morning of September 11, 2001 on YouTube and wait as the horror unfold as if for the first time, like pressing on a bruise. Watching these videos feels a bit like that.
Nine o'clock a.m. "I got up around 9:00, took my sweet time. I mean, I was also filming this vlog, so it took a long time for me to get moving."
"Girl I'm exhausted just watching this"
"Please do a skincare routine!
"Omg I miss nyc"
"THAT BAG😍😍😍"
It got really unsettling though, when I started seeing videos made by real people spoofing the AI videos, which were themselves imitations of human-made videos. In "POV: you wake up as a 20 year old girl after a night out," the character's hand hovers eerily in the foreground above a plate of food while her friends stifle laughter, accompanied by the sound of coughing from the black plague videos. In another video depicting life in New York in 2025, the top comment is "I TJOUGHT THIS WAS ACTUALLY AI FOR A MIN 😭😭"
It is almost certainly Not That Deep, but dread churns in my stomach as I watch the interplay of creation and distortion between human and computer. There's a world where these videos could be a heartening reminder of the messy marks human hands leave behind in the act of creation, but for that to be true, there would have to be a degree of self-aware commentary detectable in the human-made videos that overtakes the act of contributing to the trend. The distinction between sincere and ironic collapses in this context, though, rendering any potential commentary secondary to the fact that the form is being replicated in the exact same medium the original was in, and its success is defined by the same metrics of attention and virality. The parody videos smash against the originals in the feed, and both compete for validation from an algorithm that deems them compelling enough to be served up to humans, or not.
Man's artwork and the humans-spoofing-AI-imitating-humans videos are both in their way commenting on the DITL genre's falseness, its formula, its faux-intimacy. Both obliterate the fiction that these videos are sincere, genuine depictions of realistic days in people's lives; instead, they are evidently a vehicle for slotting the complexity of human experience into a phony simulacrum carved into tidy squares, tagged with the right keywords for the algorithm to pick up and sort into millions of strangers' perfectly attuned feeds.
They're both teasing to the fore what's already uncanny and vaguely repulsive in both the first-order human-made DITL videos and in their AI imitations. But my algorithm knows my desires better than any breathing human on Earth does, and when it serves it up, I devour it before I realize what I've done.
