My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard is the first major survey of the pioneering net-artist and sculptor Auriea Harvey at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. The exhibition features more than 40 of Harvey’s works, including her groundbreaking net-based interactives, video games, and augmented-reality sculptures from a career spanning nearly four decades.
Auriea Harvey has persistently reimagined and redefined the creative boundaries of networked technologies for more than three decades. She possesses a remarkable sensitivity to how the digital revolution of the 1990s spawned a societal shift in the way humans connect. Her trajectory—from creating artwork to be viewed solely in a web browser to challenging lines between virtual and tangible experiences through 3D printing and augmented reality—consistently reflects the paradoxical power of computers to enable intimacy while interfering with corporeal contact and occupation of shared space.
In her groundbreaking, decades-long career, Auriea Harvey (b. 1971) has consistently transcended boundaries across media. Techno-anachronistic in style, her code-based practice has been celebrated for defying conventional trends, intertwining classical art ideologies with the immediacy of networked technologies. A romanticist at heart, Harvey explores the potential of virtual spaces to evoke tactile depth and closeness, capturing a sense of immediacy and viscerality despite physical distance.
Harvey’s work emerged at the vanguard of net art, a time when the web was just beginning to be recognized as a viable platform for artistic expression. She diverged from the minimalist web design of the 1990s and evolved with the expanding capability of browsers, seeking to create more palpable experiences.
A crucial aspect of Harvey’s catalog is her enduring collaboration with Michaël Samyn, whom she met online. Their partnership, rooted in a shared pursuit of intimacy through digital means, was motivated by their own personal experience of “love through the wires.” Together, they have explored the depths of emotionally vulnerable engagement as it applies to the digital arts.
Increasingly disillusioned by the corporatization and standardization of the internet, as well as the commercial gaming industry’s refusal to break away from conventional uses of real-time game engines, Harvey gradually steered her focus back to sculpture. Employing 3D printing, these sculptures manifest her digital concepts in the tactile world, reinterpreting ancient myths with contemporary narratives.
Throughout her practice, Harvey has interrogated and grappled with the dichotomy of the digital: its profound capacity to unite minds while keeping bodies apart. Her works transcend mindless clicks to envelop viewers in an intentional and sensory dialogue with the virtual, where she persists in exploring themes of classical mythmaking, intimacy, and a timeless pursuit of beauty.
Auriea Harvey’s affinity for computational arts was sparked at the age of nine in Indianapolis, nurtured by a mother who briefly worked as a punch card operator, inputting and retrieving data from early computing systems. This gave Harvey’s mother the foresight to enroll her in computer camp, which gave her access to machines like the Timex Sinclair, decades before her peers would encounter similar devices. In her childhood home, Harvey, who demonstrated an aptitude for BASIC, surrounded herself with programming magazines and text adventure games like Voodoo Castle.
At Parsons School of Design, where she earned a BFA in sculpture‚ Harvey’s unique background secured her work study in the college’s nascent computer lab. Here, she taught herself 3D rendering and editing using tools like CrystalGraphics and Photoshop. Influenced by the jazz music that often permeated her household, Harvey’s early artworks blended digital techniques with traditional methods such as contact prints on glass. She advocated for work with digital tools to be recognized as an art form at a time when street art and tactile installation art were prevailing.
Due to Harvey’s ahead-of-her-time knowledge of publishing software and digital graphic design, she was sought out and hired by major entities such as Virgin Records, MTV, and PBS to design their first webpages. Harvey’s defiant approach and aesthetics rapidly garnered critical acclaim. By the mid-1990s, Harvey was central to an evolving art scene aligned with the dot-com boom and the rise of moving images in galleries. Beyond her own award-winning Entropy8.com, Harvey’s contributions to projects like Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon, a net artwork about the tragic story of Brandon Teena, and peer groups that included such artists as Olia Lialina and JODI highlighted her influence among those exploring the internet’s capacity for art.
(extract from the introductory text to the exhibition)
Auriea Harvey: My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard, Feb 2 — Jul 7, 2024, Museum of the the Moving Image, organized by Associate Curator of Media Arts Regina Harsanyi; Digital Art Conservation by Dragan Espenschied/Rhizome.The project is made possible through generous support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Auriea Harvey is a digital artist and sculptor living and working in Rome. Her practice encompasses virtual and physical artworks created with a blend of digital and handmade production. Drawing from her extensive experience in net art and video games, she brings a synthesis of mythology, autobiography, art historical reference and imagination – made visible through form, interaction and immersion. Auriea is engaged across time, media, and material to define what sculptural production means in the present moment.
Her work can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Walker Art Center, KADIST Collection, Rf.C Collection, and Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology. She has exhibited widely with international success, including exhibitions at the Tinguely Museum, Basel; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the New Museum, New York; and ZKM, Karlsruhe. Auriea is represented by bitforms gallery, NYC.
images (cover 1): Auriea Harvey, «Control», extract from skinonskinonskin (1999), Courtesy of the Artist (2-3) Auriea Harvey: My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard, exhibition view, Museum of the Moving Image,New York (4) Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, «Sunset», 2015, Still frame from video game for PC/Mac, Courtesy of the Artist
