My Machine and Me

Greta Rainbow chronicles her year though Glance Back, a net art piece coded by Maya Man.

By Greta RainbowJanuary 3, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

ONCE A DAY, at a random time, my laptop webcam photographs me. A masochistic ritual that still startles: to open a new Google tab and see my own face. I dash off a response to the prompt—What are you thinking about?—and this capture is added to my personal archive. So there I am: in bed in my softest sleep shirt, eyes half-closed (captioned “positive outcome”); in bed, nostrils flared (“sarah paulson”); backlit by a window framing bare trees (“morsel”); at my desk, hand over my mouth (“chevy to the levee”); on a velvet couch, my left eyebrow extra high (“ssense sale?”).

A year ago, I installed the Chrome extension Glance Back, a net art piece coded by Maya Man. Three hundred–plus pictures of myself scrolling, and in most of them, I look awful. Really, so ugly. I know I look ugly because I have the attributes women are supposed to get rid of: under-eye bags, hooded eyelids, nasolabial folds, a furrowed brow, double chin, tangled hair, chapped lips. Only rarely am I smiling. This is what it physically looks like to interact digitally.

“When using our devices, we’re pulled into and solely focused on the glowing world that exists on the screen,” Man writes of her project, which launched in 2018. Man has since graduated from art school in Los Angeles and extensively exhibited her work, including, most recently, A Realistic Day in My Life Living in New York City (2024) at the Whitney Museum, a video work that builds on the genre of “day in my life” content. “We lose both an awareness of self and of the real world context surrounding us,” she writes. “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.” A Cronenbergian image: fingers running over a sleek, gray touch pad, caressing the 1080p Retina display. Baby, let’s get lost.

As a freelance writer and a research editor for an online women’s lifestyle magazine, I log 12-hour days on my beloved laptop. I fact-check profiles of newly-of-age It girls and 3,500-word articles on skincare supplements, editing out the unverifiable claims about Botox and liquid collagen. I segment time by going on X, reading other people’s articles, watching vlogs by 22-year-old influencer Eva Meloche. I love doing all this. I love being online! Ever since I could be here, I have. Glance Back is a pretty obvious callback to Apple’s Photo Booth, first introduced in 2005. Slightly low-qual and grainy, distinctly horizontal and framed by a banner of outtakes, today’s webcam pic is sexy precisely because it recalls fashion shows at the middle school sleepover. The e-girls who repopularized screenshots of an open Photo Booth window made a brand out of looking like Hello, I am playing on my computer.

I have a few of those Photo Booth pictures. Hip arched, knees tucked, hand disappearing into my wild hair. Meanwhile, my face in my Glance Back archive is a crow’s-eyed scowl or a pursed-lip glower. I don’t look like I’m playing. I look like I am hard at work, which I am. Beyond piddling around in a Word document on words that make me a little bit of money, all those other internet things I do are performances of tacit labor for the information economy.

Lately, I’ve been parroting the Annie Dillard line “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” applying it to affirm the simple desires of the people I love. My friend wants to go on vacation. My boyfriend wants to quit Instagram. My parents want to move to an island. It’s cheesy, easily found on Etsy as a Papyrus-font poster print, and yet it’s the best I seem to have. Dillard meant it as an aphorism about choosing presence over productivity. Her ideal daily schedule was that of a turn-of-the-century Danish aristocrat who got up at four in the morning to go hunting with his friends. They converged at a babbling brook where they swam, drank schnapps and ate a sandwich, had a smoke, rested and chatted, and hunted some more—until he showered, dressed in formal wear, ate a huge dinner, smoked a cigar, and slept like a log. His wife, meanwhile, birthed and tended to their three children. This is not the writer’s life, but the writer must also contend with a schedule, must build a scaffolding of mundanity that allows the reading and writing to be done. And though each day is the same, “you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”

If how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, we will spend much of life hunched over a hot MacBook. Burned in my memory is “Mindy,” the fear-mongering render of how humans could look in the year 3000, with a tech neck and text claw, and milky, blue light–blasted eyes. While the claw has been debunked, the other things are supposed to be real. I was freaked out by her name too—this extra-girlie avatar that feels more backward than futuristic. No, we are never making it out.

It’s alarming how many Glance Back photos are of me in bed. In October, I traveled to London and attended Tracey Emin’s show at White Cube, where the paintings were mostly of her reclining body, a tangle of lines in blood-red, sad-blue, medicine-pink. Decades after the installation My Bed (1998) put her dirty underwear on display at the Tate, she’s making us confront a vision of her middle-aged sickbed. When doctors discovered Emin’s cancer, a surgeon removed her bladder, her ovaries, her lymph nodes, her urethra, part of her vagina, and, to make a stoma, part of her intestine. There is a close-up video of her stoma pulsing and bleeding out. I walked around the cold gallery hugging myself. I bought a tote bag because I was so impressed with her redefinition of “bodily representation,” and with how close I felt to her after seeing so much of her literal guts—and then regretted getting the tote. How could a tote carry all of that? That night, I had dinner with my friend Molly, who told me that she had seen Emin in the market just the other day, yelling about fancy cheeses. “She’s totally mad,” Molly said. I was happy again about the tote bag. To support madness, to have a container for it at the ready.

If other people are using ergonomic chairs and standing desks for their backs, necks, wrists, and posture, and I’m typing lying down with my chin to my chest, I must be mad, or at least being bad. But that’s how it feels on a good work day, when the words are coming to me clearly, and the actor’s publicist is responding quickly, and I don’t say something weird in the meeting, and I go on a run at 2:00 p.m., and I read my book in the early evening when the light floods our west-facing walls so that the pages are tangerine. It feels like I’m getting away with it, this business of living my life.

I don’t go into an office or have a company computer. I took the millennial dream of “have laptop, will travel” to heart, and if I’m not working from bed, I might be in the middle seat on an airplane or—as Glance Back caught for the first time recently—on my toilet. The digital nomad mascot is a white woman in a fedora, outside at a cafe, smiling into her laptop and latte. She would be proud of me for buying the in-flight wi-fi.

The last time I worked in an office, I was 23 years old and it was February 2020. I quit my job at a classical music station, which is retrospectively presumptuous for many reasons, not least of which is the rarity of a full-time position in public radio or classical music. There were deep bureaucratic issues, currents of miscommunication that pooled in the executives’ corner offices and seeped through carpeted corridors where staff whispered about the revolving cast of strategists tasked with retaining (or conjuring) our relevance. I was the resident Gen Z staffer, making dreadful Beethoven versus Brahms memes and pitch decks for a website that never materialized. But beyond boredom with the bullshit, my problem was my embodiment of that “Tired of looking at bad screen. Can’t wait to get home and look at good screen” meme. I wanted my time on my computer to be for me; I wanted time to think and write about things I care about. I do not listen to classical music.

That winter, I cold-pitched Money, formerly Money magazine, a piece on the undervaluation of professional social media managers, in both status and pay. Rereading our emails, I’m grateful for the editor’s patience and professionalism; I didn’t know what I was doing, and this comment sums it up: “The writing is great, but the structure and thesis is pretty jumbled.” She took the time to help me shape it. (It paid $800 for 1,000 words, then the most I’d made from writing.) In researching that piece, I discovered the academic Brooke Erin Duffy, who writes about the gendered labor of social media, platforms’ reconfiguration of cultural production, and the visibility bind—a creator’s sense that she needs to show her entire, true life (and face) to the world in order to gain the world’s attention, while knowing that doing so makes her vulnerable to all kinds of abuse.

Glance Back photos are only stored locally. It’s a private relationship between my machine and me. Maybe Instagram will crash, but I’ll still have documentation of myself glaring at a long-forgotten piece about a dead author’s teenage muse. Part of playing is not worrying how you look while doing it, not imagining how it will be folded into a conception of You. “I view every single thing you post online as contributing to this distributed internet avatar that you’re performing,” Man told Vox in 2022. “Performing isn’t a negative thing. It’s the fact that you have a mediated audience in mind, even if you’re posting on a private account.”

Man has been extensively profiled as one of the preeminent internet performance artists of our era. She investigates online manifestations of girlhood and femininity with a kitsch, see-the-seams sensibility and the visual language of a preteen’s pink bedroom, often collaborating with slightly older women (Molly Soda, Ann Hirsch) who led the charge before her. These investigations don’t change the world. Of her algorithm-aided NFT project FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT (2022), The Brooklyn Rail wrote that she “perpetuates a genre of digital art that fiddles with the aesthetics of ‘being a girl online’ rather than attacking the politics and ideology that plagues them.”

Much of Man’s work is generative in the sense that AI makes decisions based on parameters she designed. (For the FAKE IT NFTs, JavaScript code regurgitates the rhetoric of inspirational Instagram infographics to humorously flawed effect, such as “IT’S SUBCONSCIOUS TO NOT BE LOVELY.”) Glance Back is generative because it relies on the user to carry out the production of an image. There are infinite possibilities for the conditions that determine how it looks. Will the sheets be the good linens or the cheap white set? Will I be alone, or will there be another face in the frame, someone who joined me for a screen-time playdate? Those are my favorite captures because I’m more likely to be smiling. Sometimes other people think it’s weird I choose to do this, or narcissistic. It’s just a silly project. And you’re a part of it too, when the screen looks at me looking at you.

One year of this as tiny ritual. Media workers are particularly prone to cynicism about anniversaries and markers of calendar time because we are tasked with best-of lists and remembrance missives. I have not written so many that I find anything terribly wrong with picking favorites from the pile of consumption. I feel comforted by the structure of a day, a month, a year, and the opportunity to wrap it up and put it away. In Solvej Balle’s speculative fiction septology On the Calculation of Volume (2020– ), a woman is trapped in the 18th of November. She records the repetitions and the slightest of aberrations. At first, I thought of this work as an allegory for a romantic relationship that suddenly stops making sense. But now that I’m on book two, I understand that it is really about a single day and all that we miss when we do not observe it.

Mark Fisher described his millennial students as “a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture—a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.” For the next generation, the concept of time is segmented into even shorter media blocks. When is there the opportunity to feel sentimental? Should I feel sentimental about screen time? It is odd to be grateful to the laptop you paid $2,499 for, in 12 monthly installments, for reminding you of your physicality. I doubt Fisher would approve. The laptop gives the illusion of control over work-time when in fact it facilitates the erosion of a distinction between work and life. Still, I will take the help applying pressure to the hemorrhage. I want to be startled out of the trance, to pull my shoulders back and heave myself from bed. I want to remember that I am a body.

One year, and I plan to keep going. Glance Back is a durational art piece, reminiscent of YouTube time-lapse videos, like “(300 DAYS) I FILMED A PEPPER UNTIL IT BECAME DUST,” “Deer Decomposition—Timelapse (4K),” and “AGE 12 TO MARRIED—I Took a Photo Every Day.” This last piece features over 2,500 images, from February 2008 to August 2017, in two minutes and 38 seconds. It seems to grow faster, and I keep pausing on the still frames, afraid for it to end, as if he’s going to die. Then it slows and it’s his wedding day, and the webcam is gone and it’s a handful of professional photos. The implication seems to be that he floated away from the confinement of a computer, or that he no longer needs to procure proof of his existence because he found love instead.

My time-lapse is documentation of a working woman slowly aging. An accumulation in lockstep with decay, and my screen is a grave marker. I’m getting better at writing, here. I’m deepening my frown lines, here.

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Photos courtesy of Greta Rainbow.