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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone, and welcome to this Le Random podcast. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the Editor-in-Chief at Le Random. And today we have two incredible guests. They are Ann Hirsch and Maya Man, for our Friday podcast episode.
And as usual, we also had another piece of content this week. This Tuesday we published an interview with the wonderful multidisciplinary artist Jess Tucker, who examines how contemporary surveillance technology tracks our bodies and also manipulates our minds.
But today our podcast episode is with Maya and Ann. We look at the themes and the topics that are central to the duo's collaboration, specifically the projects Ugly Bitches and Little Darlings, which both explore femininity and masculinity online in the 2020s. I wanted to get their take on how those projects relate to this so-called vibe shift that's happened over the last several years, and just get their takes in general on the extremes of online gender performativity. We also talk about the Solana avant scene, and both points of contact and maybe where they depart with that scene. We also talk about a lot of other things, and I'm very excited to share. Let's begin.
I'm excited for the chat and excited for some of the things that we might get into. But I just would like to know if you could tell us how you met and then how you began working together originally.
Maya Man: Yeah. I was a big fan of Ann's, and we met in LA when I was living out there doing my MFA. We became friends after we met and started talking. We started working together because Ann at the time was doing this NFT criticism series online, and I would watch the videos, and she had a video where she said, I really want to see a collection called Ugly Bitches. And I said, That's a really good idea. And then that was it.
Ann Hirsch: Yeah, and she started sending me all these ideas of what it could be. And I was like, Let's just make this together. I was doing these criticism blogs, videos for Outland about NFTs, and the one Maya is referencing was about women in NFTs, so World of Women, all those really cheesy girl boss projects from the 2021 era. But I think Maya just knew me from the work that I had done when I was in my 20s and 30s. And there was just a lot of overlap in our mutual interests in terms of girl performativity online and what that means. And so we had a lot of areas of overlap.
Maya Man: Yeah, I'd seen Ann's work before, her piece Scandalishious, her performance work on YouTube, and it was really informative for me when I was starting out making my own work.
Peter Bauman: I'm interested in the main topics. Maybe we can start there, with the work that you decided to make together and what it explores. You had talked about these women-centered NFT projects that were around in the 2020s and how your work was in some ways a response to them. I wonder if we could talk about that. What was Ugly Bitches, your collaboration? What was it speaking to back then, at that time, when those projects were popular, but also popular with celebrities and seeming to make millions of dollars? How were these projects born, and in some ways responding to those projects?
Ann Hirsch: I think, first of all, women in NFTs is already a very small niche thing. There weren't that many of them, generally. But then there was a whole slate of projects that were like, No, women have to be in crypto and NFTs, too. And we're going to girl boss this and lean in. But all the projects were just images of beautiful women or illustrations of beautiful women. And that was it.
And then also, when you looked deeper into a lot of these projects, it was teams of men, mostly. So it was like, All right, is this really by women, for women? Although some of them were, but they just didn't have a lot of depth to them. And then if you went deeper down the rabbit hole, which I do in the original video for Outland, there's women with weapons. There's 8SIAN. It was celebrating all kinds of Asian women, and just all these beautiful images of these Asian women. It's like, how much is this really for women, or is it just women that are for men, basically? Like an NFT project of women for men.
The idea with Ugly Bitches was to counteract that and be like, actually, women are ugly and they suck. That's just how we are. It's what it is. I was just tired of the idealization of women, because I think that's very limiting. The idea behind Ugly Bitches was just a more realistic depiction of who women are. The women are warts and all.
Maya Man: Yeah, I think we were both really exhausted by the girl boss-esque rhetoric that was also popular and is popular to an extent outside of NFTs. But in NFTs it felt so concentrated. And one note, Ugly Bitches was our run for freedom.
Peter Bauman: So it's exploring ideas of femininity, and then Little Darlings seems to be exploring similar things with masculinity. These projects have come to pass during this interesting time period in, I don't know, socioeconomic, political history, this vibe shift that's happening, this so-called vibe shift, I suppose, is happening. I just wonder how your work is registering it, or how you're commenting on it, or how you see this vibe shift.
Maya Man: We're both really interested in culture and pop culture, and like to observe through our work what is happening. Both of the projects, Ugly Bitches and Little Darlings, zoom in on extremes of gender performance online that we were really fascinated by.
And with Ugly Bitches, for example, the text that's featured in Ugly Bitches are comments from hot influencer Instagram profiles like Kylie Jenner, Addison Rae, and looking at the comment section and seeing the way that people are talking about this archetype character in pop culture that exists on Instagram.
And then similarly with Little Darlings, we were interested in, okay, what is the extreme of masculinity online right now, which has, I think, very serious political implications, across the board, for the way that gender is performed online. But with Little Darlings, technically and visually we had a really different approach from Ugly Bitches, because the culture had a lot of parallels. Both of the projects are about aspiring to a very specific ideal mode of performing a gender extreme.
And with Little Darlings, what we found going down these rabbit holes online was that our video Hustle. Grind. Gain. Success. adds together a lot of TikToks that are really targeted at a young male audience, with men in the gym and on podcasts giving advice, that type of thing. We found that the language was so absurd and the lifestyle that was encouraged was so extreme and isolating. And we really wanted to draw that out.
But I think in both projects there's this drawing out of all these different examples of these cultures, the Instagram comments, or with Little Darlings, they're comments on male influencer Instagrams, and then asking people to really look at what this means. Even looking at one or two comments together, I think, starts to paint a picture of something very serious about culture right now and gender online. So yeah, I think with both of those, we wanted to really draw attention to what was happening.
Ann Hirsch: Yeah. And I was going to say, with the increasing wealth inequality, you have this hustle culture, which is dominant online. It's like we're in peak bootstrapping times, and it's like, nothing's wrong with the world. The problem is you. So I think that's been this vibe shift. And I think both projects try to capture that. Both projects show, both Ugly Bitches and Little Darlings, that they're trying so hard to be this thing, but they're just failing miserably, and you just see that failure on them.
Maya Man: Yeah. And I think with Little Darlings, especially watching so many of the TikToks that have this rhetoric about how you need to hustle, grind, gain success. It's so much pressure and agency that's implied in the way that people are talking about how you should live your life. And like Ann is saying, it's just ignoring a lot of larger structural factors that affect the way that you are able to live your life.
So doing that project for me was really enlightening, because I think both Ann and I make a lot of work about gender and performance online, but especially about the performance of femininity. And I think that was a real deviation, but also it resonated with a lot of what we're both interested in in terms of performing femininity.
Ann Hirsch: I think we've also seen this interesting feminization of men online, which has been interesting to watch. Because originally, first, no one could show themselves online. That was so embarrassing. And women could show themselves online. And then slowly, slowly, okay, now men can show themselves online, and it's normal.
And I was thinking about this meme on TikTok where it shows men at the club, and they're all standing on the tables, and all the women are mad. They're like, The women should be standing on the tables. The men just go to the club to peacock. So there's this interesting switch where men now more want to peacock and show themselves off, that I don't think existed before.
Maya Man: Yeah. No, I agree. I think that's what was also surprising watching all these TikToks. It felt like a new genre of content for men to be making. And I've always felt like most of these straight men in my life are very uncomfortable with posting online. And I think that's because they don't have the experience of living and feeling so much as non-men people. You're conditioned to always feel like you're watching yourself in some way. And then posting on the internet is an extension of that feeling. But I think for a lot of straight men in my life, it's a very new feeling, which makes it very uncomfortable.
But I do think that there is this whole evolution of this side of culture where, yeah, now men want to be able to participate in that way a little bit more. But it's also interesting, because in NFTs and crypto specifically there's a lot of men, but people don't like to... It's a culture that really runs on this cloak of anonymity, too, which I think makes so many people a lot more comfortable participating.
“You're conditioned to always feel like you're watching yourself in some way. And then posting on the internet is an extension of that feeling.” — Maya Man 12:48
Peter Bauman: Yeah. It's interesting that your work teases out these questions about masculinity and femininity, and how, in some ways, they're becoming more extreme and more polarized themselves. And then as people are also becoming, in real life, more isolated, which is something that we mentioned. But at the same time, they're also blending and becoming confused with one another. And then with people being able to be anonymous or pseudonymous online, then it's unknown. The online is offering these different spaces for people to perform.
I'm also interested in how, and maybe we did talk about this already, but how Ugly Bitches and Little Darlings, I guess specifically, how they orbit the false promises that are pushed at women and men online. Is it as simple as, if these camps are getting further and further from each other, that that's a bad thing, and the more that they blend, that that's a better thing? Is that how you see it? I don't know. How do you think about that?
Maya Man: I don't think it's such a distinct dichotomy of it's good or it's bad. I think that in all directions it's very restraining to have these certain ideas infiltrating your mind about how you should move through your life and perform online and perform your gender identity online.
Something both Ann and I talked about a lot when we were making the project was, as of 2025, we acknowledge that gender is very much a performance and a spectrum and fluid. But also, with more and more people acknowledging that, at the same time the extremes of gender performance online with masculinity and femininity are moving apart and doubling down into these forms of subculture that are really intense. And I think it's very mentally polluting to have these ideas that you should be participating in the world in a certain way, or thinking about yourself in a certain way, because of your gender identity.
And I think Ann and I also share a sense of humor, which I think comes through in the work as well. And I don't know, I always have this feeling when I'm looking at the projects we were talking about before, that Ugly Bitches is somewhat inspired by, that are about, women are beautiful, yay women, women in different colors, purple women. It's like, be for real. It's just sometimes like, Okay, let's escape this.
But I think it's complicated, because it's not a neat narrative. Because obviously it's not all bad to celebrate women or whatever. But I think the reaction we have to that specific brand of feminism is nuanced, but it's also then hard to make grand statements of, Oh, it's better for things to move in this way or that way. But I think Ugly Bitches and Little Darlings are acknowledging that there are these imposed extremes, and we want to free people from them. With our Ugly Bitches.
Ann Hirsch: Yeah, and I think that for me, the whole thing of, All women are beautiful, automatically implies that beauty is the most important feature for a woman. So I found that very frustrating as well.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. I think, like you mentioned, that humor is an important element. By adding humor, you're also making it more approachable. You're making, I guess, especially with Little Darlings, the bro culture, by parodying it and sensationalizing it, it brings attention to it as something that can be analyzed and something that can be approached objectively, away from its original context.
I also wonder how AI helped you achieve that, or how AI served what you're trying to achieve artistically with those two works. Because that's another thing that they both have in common, as opposed to being complementarily making these nuanced points about masculinity and femininity. They both also use AI. I just wondered if you could talk about that decision to use AI, and then how GANs specifically serve the concept of the work, and then why you thought it was essential to use AI in both works.
Ann Hirsch: Yeah. So I think with Ugly Bitches, that's a GAN that we used, which we trained on all these images of all different kinds of dolls. And I think what a GAN literally is doing is it's taking all this data and trying to output what it thinks the data is. But the GAN is a bit of an older technology. So what the GAN ended up spitting out was this failure recreating these beautiful dolls. It spit out this just Frankenstein of dolls.
I felt like that was very akin to the process of being a woman. You're taking in all this data of what it means to be a woman, and then you're spitting back out your own image. But a lot of times you just end up coming up short, or you fail in some way, or you feel that you fail in some way. I think all women probably feel that even if they are succeeding.
And with Little Darlings, we trained a model on a lot of action figures, and then we took the figures that came out and put that into Midjourney to give them an action. I think that was very different and similar to the hustle culture. You're training yourself on these images of other men. So I think that process is akin to what we did with the model training.
Maya Man: When we were talking about it, working on both, we really wanted the method of training each of the models to reflect conceptually what we wanted to communicate with the work. Like Ann is saying, the inherent performance quality embedded in the process of training an AI model, it's trying to replicate something that it's already seen. It's very reminiscent of gender performance to us.
“I felt like that was very akin to the process of being a woman. You're taking in all this data of what it means to be a woman, and then you're spitting back out your own image.” — Ann Hirsch 20:07
And so it was great to do it with Ugly Bitches using the GAN, because the aesthetics of the GAN make the dolls that come out look really fucked up. And that really, I think, served the visual component of Ugly Bitches really well. But with Little Darlings, we took such a different approach, using a Stable Diffusion model and then filtering that through Midjourney. And so the images have a much shinier quality to them, which also felt very relevant to the commentary we wanted to be making about this specific aspect of masculine culture online.
And so it was interesting doing Little Darlings as this sequel to Ugly Bitches, because we had a format that we felt worked really well conceptually with Ugly Bitches, but then figuring out how to take that format but warp it in a way to make it something newer for Little Darlings was, yeah, a good constraint and challenge.
Ann Hirsch: Yeah. And I think whereas Ugly Bitches seemed to be about failure, Little Darlings was about extremes. Those figures look just like, to the max crazy, to the max masculine. They're doing all this crazy stuff.
Maya Man: Yeah. And for Ugly Bitches, we changed all of the comments, where we replaced adjectives that were beautiful, gorgeous, with ugly, and then words like woman and babe with bitch. And then with Little Darlings, we were taking the comments from these male hustle influencers' Instagram comment sections. But the comments were so insane on their own and so powerful, honestly. We were debating about changing them in some way, but felt ultimately they were so special left alone, so we didn't alter the comments, which gives them, I think, the right emotional quality with the images.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I was interested in that, how the aesthetics are clearer, and so is the text, with Little Darlings. The intentionality involved with that, or whether that was like, Oh, it just happened to be about the... Because it was about a year later, right? Maybe the GAN model was just more sophisticated at the time or something. But that's interesting. Was it to highlight and to maybe depict more precisely the extremes of male, masculine culture that you were observing at the time?
Maya Man: Yeah. I mean, looking back at Ugly Bitches, which came out in January of 2023, which is not that long ago, the GAN aesthetics look super vintage now in terms of AI aesthetics. I think that was definitely something that we took into consideration making Little Darlings, because of the way that AI-based visual culture had shifted over the year. It gave a very different read on a GAN-based image versus a diffusion-based image. So they're markers in time also.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. And one thing that I'm also really interested in, especially with you two, is your relationship to the Yeche Lange scene, or this avant, schizocollage, Solana scene that is also called gay NFT. I'm assuming you guys are all friends, right? I know Maya, I mean, you've shown together in shows that you've hosted and curated, right, Maya?
Maya Man: Yeah, I know.
Peter Bauman: And you've tweeted about it quite a lot, and I think you're a collector, and maybe you're both collectors. I don't know. It seems like there are many points of contact. And yeah, I'm just curious, what are some of those points of contact? And then also, where might you part ways?
Ann Hirsch: Yeah, I would say I'm an admirer of the scene, but I don't really see myself as being part of it beyond being a collector. What they're doing, I think, is really cool, but it's just not what I do. So I don't feel like, Oh, I want to be a part of that. I'm like, That's cool. You keep doing what you're doing. I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing.
Maya Man: Yeah. No, I feel similarly. I'm a fan and friends with some of the artists. And yeah, when I was running my curatorial project HEART out of my studio here, I showed some of the artists here, which was really fun. And so, yeah, I feel like also a fan, but I haven't released a project directly into that universe. And so I'm an admirer and a fan, and I think I relate a lot to the very collage-based aesthetics and formal qualities of what they do, what a lot of the projects do.
I think a point of departure for me is that in a lot of my work, which I think, to an extent, Ugly Bitches and Little Darlings is a little bit of an exception, and I think the projects that I've done that are visually closest to that world. But a lot of what I do, I'm really interested in working with custom software and writing my own code and doing that type of thing. And I'm really interested in the way that code executes and performs in a work. And I think that's less of a core element of what's happening in that scene. It's a very visual culture and less concerned with the software element. So I think that's something that for me, I prioritize a lot in my practice. But yeah, I'm a fan.
Ann Hirsch: Some people have said to me that they think Ugly Bitches is a proto-gay project. So I'm like, Yeah, maybe. But I do think that we are influenced a lot by each other, in ways like my Annie project. I think even though the gay scene is primarily using HashLips and just a shit ton of layers or whatever. And with the Annie project, I was doing layering, but all with AI, and the outputs were more emotional and sentimental. So I think the feeling and the vibe was meant to be different, but I definitely borrowed. I love this idea of different layers.
Maya Man: Yeah. And I think something else that I'm just thinking about now is that a lot of the work that's coming out of the gay NFT scene, I feel, looks maybe the most similar or the most related to contemporary internet culture outside of art. Visually, I think it reflects a lot of what I associate with internet culture very specifically, which I'm interested in in the work that I make.
But I think that's something that I find, that a lot of what people would say is more of the generative art scene often is less interested in mimicking aesthetics of internet culture. And so that's a departure that I feel from a lot of the generative art scene. And then that's something that I feel very aligned with in terms of the work that's coming out of the gay NFT scene. I think it captures something hyper-contemporary about visual culture and is reflecting that through the collections that they put out, that I feel like is missing a little bit in other arenas.
Ann Hirsch: Yeah, I think that term schizo is really significant for this scene, because I think really what they're trying to do is capture that crazy feeling we all feel when we go online and we're bombarded by so many different images and stuff. And that's what those NFTs capture really well. I think that's what they're interested in, this barrage of content.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. I think there's an additional challenge for code to capture that, where it's easier for it to convey, I guess, abstract geometric concepts. It seems like, with math. Whereas a lot of the gay NFTs, a lot of those guys don't really know how to code, and so they skip that. It becomes more about the... They're almost like scavengers online for visuals. I think what they literally do is go on Pinterest and Instagram and find all these visuals and create a database, and then put that into a blender on HashLips, and to varying degrees of success come up with these snapshots of that barrage of culture and what it's like to be online. I think just the method itself lends itself to being able to do that a bit better with their tools, it seems.
Maya Man: Yeah, but it's funny. I've never used HashLips, but whenever I hear people talk about it, I'm like, I think you could... It's just layering images, is my impression. And in terms of software, it's a super simple piece of software. And so in a way, I feel like, well, I really love being able to be closer to the code. And I feel like, oh, if you are able to be on the level of the software, even if you want to have something like HashLips, you could unlock a lot of exciting potential with it.
But I think it's interesting to get in the weeds a little bit when thinking through generative, the way that people are usually writing code to produce what many people term generative art now. Often people are using graphics libraries. So it's a very canvas-based approach that, like you're saying, does really lend itself to geometric or abstract work. Also, rather than using canvas, if you're interested in interfacing with the DOM, the web page, and not using a graphics library, that gives you the ability to make a lot of... I think visually that lends itself even a bit more to making something that has a very inherent internet-native quality to it.
Ann Hirsch: I think also with the gay scene, if you want to be part of it, you have to be online constantly and in all these crazy group chats. I just don't have the time for that.
Peter Bauman: That's a huge barrier to entry.
Maya Man: Yeah, I'll say. Yeah, I guess I might be in a couple of those group chats. Yeah, I feel like I don't always have the time to respond to them, or yeah, very rarely.
Peter Bauman: One thing that is interesting about that scene, that I feel like maybe your work is responding to, and I'd like to know, is it consciously or maybe unconsciously? Yeah, maybe just not at all. Is that in that scene everything seems to be very intentionally vague and unserious, and you never know if it means what it's saying, or if there's a wink. It's that Poe's law, that you never know if what's being said online is sincere. But then I think, Maya, especially your work with HEART that you curated, it seems to respond to that by deliberately being more sincere. And I'm just wondering, to what extent do you see those things as related?
Maya Man: Yeah, I think that a lot of, quote unquote, scenes or collectives oriented around internet culture in the past, or that exist now, that a lot of artists are part of and have a perspective on art, many have felt very boy-coded and boy-oriented to me, which is a generalization. But I think there's also a real truth about the attitude that's embedded in the fabric of a certain community, or the visual communication of a group.
And with HEART, my project that I ran out of my studio, it was a pretty direct translation of what I'm interested in, which is feminine aesthetics online and feminine online culture. But at the same time, and I think only in retrospect am I able to fully articulate this, I was feeling very exhausted by this adoption of an attitude of irony that I think is really endemic to being online. And I do resonate with a lot. But I think also I really work in my life, zoomed out, just to really fight that cynicism that I tend toward a bit.
And what I am most excited about in the world and what I care most about is art, and art on and about the internet. And I really wanted, with HEART, for that to earnestly come through in the way that everything was communicated. And I think I found the most rewarding part of being an artist for me is being a fan and being excited about what other artists are making and talking to them about what they're making. And HEART was a real vehicle for that.
And so I wanted it to feel curatorially a really strong program. I wanted to show artists' work that I only felt was really strong and that I was excited about. But at the same time, I wanted the attitude to feel celebratory. I think that's why it came through the way that it did. I'm saying all this because I'm thinking about it in retrospect. In the moment, it was very fast and loose. I was doing an event a week. It was crazy. The communication just came out very seamlessly without a lot of thought, because there was no time to think about anything. But now that's what I think about it.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. And Ann, I guess a similar question with you and Annie. I guess you did already touch on it, but do you see that as a response, as a bit of actual sincerity? And is that a response to some of that same masculine-coded insincerity and cynicism that is online a lot?
Ann Hirsch: Yeah, well, I'm a big believer in a term that I'm making up called ironic sincerity, which is basically something that seems ironic but is actually very sincere. So for example, in my Instagram profile it says I'm a prayer warrior, which probably seems like, oh, I'm making fun of prayer warriors. And I am, but I also am a prayer warrior. I believe in the power of prayer and spirituality and all this stuff.
I think Annie is along those same lines. There's a saccharine emotionality to it that is almost ironic, but also for me is very sincere. I would watch the website that I had made, and I would cry. I'd be like, This is so sad. Just thinking about being a tween, or those big feelings that I had experienced at that time. And recognizing that those feelings, the teenage girl feelings, are insane, but also they're very, very real.
And I think the gay scene does do the ironic sincerity as well. I mean, it is a lot of jokes, but they are very serious and sincere, I think, too.
“Yeah, well, I'm a big believer in a term that I'm making up called ironic sincerity, which is basically something that seems ironic but is actually very sincere.” — Ann Hirsch 38:00
Maya Man: No, I agree. And I think talking to the artists who are in that world, there's a true love for what they do and for the group of artists that are involved, and that is the best. And I think also I relate a lot to this newly coined term, ironic sincerity.
But especially even going back to us talking about Ugly Bitches and Little Darlings, in my own work I always have this fear of being pulled in two directions with people reading my work. One is that people think, Oh, you're making fun of this aspect of culture, and you're above it, and you're saying you're smart and they're dumb. And that's totally not at all how I feel. And that read can be very frustrating. And then the other read is that, Oh, you're totally part of this culture, and you're not being critical of it, and you're dumb.
And so those are both much neater narratives than the truth. The truth is somewhere in between, and that's why I make work about it, because it feels complicated, and it's confusing to me, and the work is about working through that in my own mind and in my own practice. And so I think the idea of ironic sincerity captures that, because it's intentionally ambiguous, and you're not adopting one end of the spectrum or the other. I think that comes through in a lot of the work that we're talking about.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. In a cheesy way, you're also leaving it up to the audience to maybe decide, or to also internalize continuously that ambiguity.
So Ann, that reminded me what you were saying about Annie. I've read it, too. It's very honest and emotionally raw work about a time. I mean, this is even pre-teen, but about that coming-of-age time. What's fascinating is I think that some of the gay NFT projects that are most successful deal with almost that exact same thing. Like Drifella. I wrote an article about how it was a coming-of-age story, and there's a lot of raw emotion and a lot of angst, teen-like angst, in that project. But yeah, it's from a very male coming-of-age story, I think. Both projects really highlight those different perspectives.
Well, I guess, are you working on anything together now? Is maybe the first question. So I know you've done a few things in 2025. Yeah, are you working on anything together now, or is there anything that you have immediately coming up, or anything for 2026 that you want to talk about?
Maya Man: We are in conversation about expanding the Ugly Bitches universe.
Ann Hirsch: Yes. It was always... Well, in my mind, it's been a trilogy for a long time. So we're just starting on the final iteration, starting researching how we're going to do it. Yeah, so that's exciting.
Maya Man: But I feel like this is still a long... We're not close to release. We can't say too much, because we don't...
Ann Hirsch: I would say, but Maya, you have a show coming up.
Maya Man: Yes, I have a show opening next week.
Peter Bauman: StarQuest, is that right?
Maya Man: StarQuest. Yes. I'm super excited to share this work. I've been working on it for a really long time, and it's the first larger AI-based work that I've done by myself. Really, most of the AI work has been the work that I've done with Ann.
And so it's an AI video-based work, and it consists of a data set of 111 AI-generated scenes that focus on competition dance culture in America, specifically focused on Dance Moms, the reality TV show, if you're familiar, that I watched many years ago. And I also grew up as a competition dancer for all of my childhood, basically. And so it's very also autobiographical, and I think making this work has been psychologically very revealing for me, and challenging.
But for me, making StarQuest has really been a process of better understanding so much of the root of my interest in performance online in my art practice. And previously, the first NFT I ever made was on Feral File, in Feral File's very first exhibition ever, called Social Codes. Previously to that, I'd been doing a lot of work with dance and code, using my own body and doing image and video analysis. And I think that piece, can I go where you go?, which was on Feral File, was the last project that I really did that was so overtly dance-specific.
This project is coming out over four years later, and I think I've moved through a lot of phases in my practice and reoriented around what specifically about performance I'm interested in. And StarQuest embodies everything that I've been interested in about technology and performance that's come through in all my other work. But I'm returning to dance, which, yeah, it feels significant for me. So I'm excited about it, and I'm nervous. I'm excited.
Peter Bauman: No, that sounds very exciting. Yeah, definitely. And are you working on anything? Or what can you tell us about what you're working on or what you have coming up?
Ann Hirsch: I'll probably do one project in 2026. I'm a one-project-a-year person, so I'll probably do another AI-related project in 2026. But I don't put pressure on myself. Wait, Annie was this year, right?
Maya Man: Yeah, it was 2025.
Ann Hirsch: So 2025 completed.
Maya Man: And you did two. The group show was...
Ann Hirsch: When I say one project, I mean one solo.
Maya Man: We're on the edge of our seats. You're like Lorde.
Ann Hirsch: Yeah. But a more frequent one. So we'll see. I want to do something maybe a little darker. I don't know. We'll see.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. Looking forward to what you have coming up and to that project. Yeah, thank you so much for the chat.
Maya Man: Thank you. They're really fun questions. I feel like you have such a good perspective and overview on a lot of different parts of the NFT scene. And I feel like the questions, yeah, were great and fun to talk about. So it's nice to see you make all these links.
Peter Bauman: No, thank you. And yeah, I've been wanting to talk to both of you for a while. And then, yeah, we talked a couple of times before, and it's really nice to finally get to chat officially here. And I hope we can again soon. Maybe when this third of the trilogy comes out, maybe we can chat again.
Maya Man: Yeah. Once we're closer to that being realized.
Ann Hirsch: Yeah. We'll keep you in the loop.
Peter Bauman: Yes, please do. Okay, amazing. Well, yeah, thank you. Thank you so much.
Maya Man: Thank you. Yeah, we'll be in touch. Bye.
Ann Hirsch: Take care. Bye.
