Presented by Feral File in collaboration with curator Nora O’ Murchú, StarQuest turns to the world of American competition dance—its sequins, discipline, and ambition—to consider how we perform, compete, and live through the unreal realities of AI.Still from S21: Telling Myself, Courtesy of the artistStarQuestMaya ManOpening November 20th at 17:00 UTC. feralfile.comWhat does it take to train an image—to make it move, compete, and win? In StarQuest, Maya Man asks what it means for images to perform, and what it costs to stay perfect while remaining endlessly in motion.Built from a dataset of 111 AI-generated dance scenes, each eight seconds long, StarQuest turns data into drama—where performance is coded, rehearsed, and replayed. Collect two or more scenes, and a generative episode powered by Man’s custom-built player automatically emerges from the scenes held at a single on-chain address. Drawing on the emotion and spectacle of the cult reality series Dance Moms, and on her own background, Man transforms the world of competition dance into a meditation on visibility, labor, and control.Still from S29: Exceptional, Courtesy of the ArtistIn StarQuest, the “AI default girl”—a synthetic figure born from datasets and optimized for beauty, obedience, and non-stop performance—takes center stage, caught in endless cycles of training, winning, and losing. Both performer and product, she is trained to compete, to smile, and to never quit—ultimately revealing what matters most: to win.Using custom-built software (which is included with every collected work), Man allows collectors to generate their own episodes of StarQuest. Each episode is assembled from scenes in the dataset, producing unique, non-linear compositions that reveal how AI-generated images work to capture and sustain attention. With every new episode, the show restages itself—rehearsing the logics of training, repetition, and reward that define life under algorithmic visibility. By collecting the dataset, collect