Maya ManI'm Feeling Lucky

Two years ago, I moved to Los Angeles and became hyper attuned to spirit of the stars, in the city and online. I learned I’m a Leo sun, Sagittarius moon, and Virgo rising. I learned the signs of my closest friends. I downloaded Co-Star and The Pattern. I’ve always been a skeptic, but I find relief in absolving myself of agency and letting something outside of my own mind tell me who I really am. Horoscopes, for me, used to only exist at the back of, like, Cosmo, but it seems the influence of astrology has spilled out into mainstream.

I’m Feeling Lucky focuses on the contemporary culture of astrology and how it asks us to make sense of ourselves through its structures. Barthes calls astrology a “confirmation of the real” and that’s what’s become enticing about it to me. There is comfort in the promise of realness over fantasy. Even if it's influenced by randomness, confirmation bias gives way to some kind of feeling of faith.

In 1998, when Google first came online, its home page featured two prominent buttons: "Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Since their website first went up over two decades ago, the internet and how we interface with it has changed dramatically. As I started working on this collection, the phrase stuck in my head like a pop song on loop and I returned to the button only to find that it no longer functioned with its original intention. They killed the button but in a quiet way. Now, a ghost of what it once was still lives online at google.com. To me, the story of the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button parallels the face paced commercialization of the internet: The movement away from websites and toward dominant ecosystems that are increasingly difficult to for users to exit.

I don’t feel lucky anymore, but I want to Feel Lucky again.

Theodor Adorno once argued that astrology appeals to ​​“persons who do not any longer feel that they are the self-determining subjects of their fate.” Don’t you feel like that here?

Maya Man