Installed on vintage material at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, in chronological order, innovative Internet artist Auriea Harvey’s first career survey tells a story of mortality and survival.
In the worlds of Harvey’s jewels, there are no heroes or villains, just people, lost and loved, caught in the slipstream of technology.
Harvey, born in 1971 in Indianapolis, helped expand the horizons of digital art – utopias, games, collages and all. In the 1990s, he created boundary-pushing images with GIFs, Shockwave animation, and the HTML and JavaScript programming languages. Her lavish personal website, Entropy8.com, revamped for the show, won Webby Awards in 1997 and ’98.
In recent years, Harvey has turned to sculpting imaginary but mythic objects that exist as both 3D printed figurines and glossy virtual models. In the museum, you can make several rotations on transparent screens by waving your hand. The “mixed reality” sculptures incorporate scans of ancient artwork, hand-shaped clay and her own facial features — they look cracked, weathered, at once timeless.
With every technological change, the spark of new possibilities meets the pull of obsolescence.
Her story is also a government romance. As the title of the show says: “My veins are the wires. My body is your keyboard.” The cables are everyone’s, but the keyboard is only for “you” — invoking the still unparalleled intimacy of a lover’s touch.
In 1999 Harvey found love on a website called Hell.com, a portal for hackers, artists and digital misfits. There, he met Michael Samyn, a Belgian digital artist working as Zuper! he has been her romantic and creative partner ever since.
Within months of their meeting, Harvey moved to Belgium. (Now married, they live in Rome.) In this exhibition, organized by Regina Harsanyi, Harvey’s solo works close out the pair’s collaborations. As Entropy8Zuper!, they undertook public displays of affection, radical in their ostentatiousness but heightened by mystery. Their work imbued the mechanical realm of code and terminals with intimate poetry.
On display is “Whispering Windows,” from 1999, where lovers share sultry words on crisp, low-bandwidth webcams. The audience watches from their own screens. Another screen shows one of the couple’s lovemaking sessions. In 1999 Harvey and Samyn collected the cartoon love letters they had exchanged through a secret Hell.com subfolder as the “Skinonskinonskin” site and sold subscriptions. On one page, you can “stroke” an image of Harvey’s face with your cursor and “she” will turn her head.
Like Hell.com, Harvey’s work was meant to be arcane and sometimes confusing—and to reward the curious. The show features influential works by Entropy8Zuper!, such as “The Godlove Museum,” a gothic and farcical digital novel that tells the story of their romance through abstract mini-games and sometimes violent animation. On one page the user has to break the screen with virtual rocks and the broken glass bleeds.
Obviously, they were having fun. In the same gallery, a blurry video clip shows the pair accepting a Webby in 2000. They spent their time at the podium making out. They later turned this image of their entwined bodies into a 3D model, titled “The Kiss,” which viewers can explore on a nearby screen.
In 2003, Harvey and Samyn founded an indie video game company called Tale of Tales. Like their web-based works, their video games feature atmospheric settings, slow pacing, diverse characters, and open-ended (or endless) storylines that are more like real life than movies.
Four major titles are playable in grand views in the retrospective (with gameplay videos of two others, plus two interactive mobile games). On each of my visits, however, at least one had crashed – obviously, it’s not easy to keep the shaky hardware running for hours.
In their cult hit “The Path,” a short horror game from 2009 that riffs on the darkest folklore of Little Red Riding Hood, your only instruction is to “stay on the path” to Grandma, but the most thrills unfold when you disobey. and dive into the forest. The hallucinogenic ‘Bientôt l’été’, from 2012, mainly consists of a walk along a dreamy, holographic beach. Closing your avatar’s eyes is a necessary game mechanic.
Tale of Tales has many fans in the gaming community, but after disappointing sales of their 2015 title “Sunset,” a chore-based game starring a housekeeper who maintains a penthouse during a civil war, they announced the bitter their exit from the industry.
Harvey and Samin came of age online, when indie artists weren’t creating online content, they were building worlds. Almost immediately, these worlds began to fade.
You might be wondering why you should travel to Astoria for a show of art and internet-based video games, many of which can still be downloaded. Driving into digital obscurity is one reason. Harvey’s work — and that of many other web artists — took a hit in 2021 when major web browsers dropped support for the Flash plugin that powers many web projects. Rhizome, an organization that preserves digital art, has restored a handful of Entropy8 and Entropy8Zuper! projects for this exhibition.
But entropy has always enhanced the beauty of Harvey’s art.
Auriea Harvey
Through July 7, Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Avenue, Astoria; 718–777–6800, movingimage.org.
