Auriea Harvey on Ancient Magic and Digital Art, This Thursday, Live on Zoom

Artwrld editor-at-large Andrew Goldstein will be hosting a live conversation with the artist on Zoom this Thursday, September 12th, at 12:00 PM EST.

RSVP to join the discussion and take part in the community Q&A at the end—this newsletter is meant to help you prep ahead of the talk.

In this week's email

1. Meet Auriea Harvey: It's hard to express how cool she is, really.
2. Pre-Read: What to know before tuning into the talk
3. Community Box: Come test out this experimental space!

Meet Auriea Harvey

The pioneering digital artist Auriea Harvey doesn’t really want to talk about the future these days—she’s much more interesting in talking about the past. It makes a lot of sense.

Why? It’s a cliché to say that great art is often ahead of its time, but, when it comes to the history of digital art in particular, it's is almost always true. The thing is, eventually that time comes, and work that previously had seemed marginal or bizarre or maybe not even art suddenly comes into focus as essential, fitting the present moment like a key in a lock.

That is emphatically the case with the uncannily seductive creations of Harvey, whose current survey at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, takes the viewer back in a time warp to the lost paradise of the late 1990s internet. Back then, in the wild, wide-open era of Netscape Navigator, Flash, and HTML, Harvey and her lover and artistic partner Michaël Samyn experimented with ways to merge their bodies across cyberspace, using rawly intimate websites like skinonskinonskin (1999) to show how technology could create an intense new erotics unbounded by time, space, or even privacy. (Visitors to the site could pay to witness the couple’s love affair via steamy, deeply poetic multimedia content.)

When the net got colonized by Facebook and ad-targeting, Harvey fled to the world of video games, where she and Samyn developed haunting, emotionally resonant titles through their company Tale of Tales; in recent years, disillusioned by the game industry, Harvey has returned to sculpture, making phygital 3D works inspired by ancient myth. Here, again, Harvey is more interested in the past than the future: instead of using technology to move forward in time, she employs it to reconnect with the spooky, secret verities of the ancient past—the kind of occult mysteries once encountered in the cultic spaces of her adoptive city of Rome. It’s a potent magic, an antidote, perhaps, for our era of viral influencers and Taylor Swift.

This week, for our second Artwrld conversation, we are pleased to sit down with Auriea Harvey to talk about the utopian promise of early net art, where the web went wrong, and how looking back at the past can help the digital avant-garde approach the opportunities of the technological world to come.

Pre-Read

WHY HER SHOW MATTERS: This insightful and context-packed review of Harvey's current survey, “My Veins are the Wires, Your Body Is the Keyboard” (curated by Regina Harsanyi), also provides a valuable overview of the artist's career to date. [Artnews, 1,352 words]

ART HISTORY, RESURRECTED: The best way to experience Harvey's work is not in the museum but through your web browser, its intended context—but for years that was impossible, since the sunsetting of previous generations of internet utilities (particularly Flash, killed off by Steve Jobs) rendered the original art sites non-browsable. Fortunately, Rhizome stepped in to reverse the clock by creating emulators for many of Harvey and Samyn's canon projects, in particular Entropy8 (Harvey's digital autobiography, basically). Delve in, click around, and thank Rhizome! (Artbase Anthologies 001: Auriea Harvey and Entropy8Zuper!, multiple website emulators)

ENTROPY8: Even if you go see the MoMI show, you'll only have a partial view of Harvey's work unless you delve into her rich, moody website, which functions as the artist's autobiography as well as perhaps her magnum opus. Turn off your pop-up blocker and click around! [Entropy8, website]

ENTROPY8ZUPER!: This website, a merger of sorts between Harvey and Samyn (aka Zuper!), contains remnants of the couple's hot-and-heavy collaborative net artworks, though it's mainly the audio because Steve Jobs's "murder" of Flash has made the original site non-browsable. [Entropy8Zuper!, website]

ALL ABOUT AURIEA: In this epic oral history video for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, Harvey tells her life story—including how her remarkable mother onboarded her to computers from an early age while raising her as a gifted child in the projects of Indianapolis—and details her frustration with the squandered potential and broken promises that define much of the last quarter century of internet history. [YouTube, three hours] 

PLAY THE ENDLESS FOREST: The most famous game produced by Tale of Tales, The Endless Forest lets you pilot a deer through the woods and engage in wordless symbolic communion with other cervine players—an otherworldly exercise in empathy that wrong-foots expectations about gameplay in a way that's hard to forget. [TheEndlessForest.org, website] 

Community Box

Ok, week one of our little Community Box experiment was a bit of a dud—no one sent us anything! Perhaps the prompt was too open-ended, so let's try another way. If you read this, please send an email to community@artwrld.com with:

• A photo of, or link to, a technologically entangled artwork you recently saw (or made) and think is really notable.
• A recommendation of an artist you think people should know about and a sentence or so explaining why. (You could also refer a curator, critic, gallerist, technologist, or other fellow traveler if you like.)
• An idea for something Artwrld could do that would help you navigate the art and tech intersection more effectively or confidently.
• A reason why this Community Box section is a bad idea and a proposal for how to fix it, or for something else to do with this space.

Exciting, right? Let's get something going here—who knows what it could lead to!

About Artwrld

Artwrld hosts live talks every week with leading artists, technologists, art professionals, and entrepreneurs about the opportunities and challenges at the vanguard of creativity.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​more at: artwrld.com