With the retrospective My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard, The Museum of the Moving Image in New York celebrates the work of Aureia Harvey, a pioneer in experimenting with code to shape matter, materials and life in networked space.
The works on display, more than 40 over a period of time from 1987 to 2023, include interactive net-based works, video games, augmented reality sculptures and the dual analogue-digital version, which from a certain point onwards focused Harvey’s interest and creative drive towards ‘sculpture’, pushing the traditional boundaries of her own education area as well as those of technology to the limit.
“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”.
The synthesis by Regina Harsanyi, Associate Curator of Media Arts at MOCA and curator of the exhibition, clarifies the reading of her work in this retrospective gaze, bringing into focus a creative approach that emerges in response to a very strong and genuine ‘sensitivity’ to her own time.
As is often the case, the retrospective view of a large group of works created over a lifetime generates a narrative of the relationship between works and context so clear that even those who experienced it forget how much experimenting with technology in the early 1990s amounted to a niche operation and the exploitation of the potential of machines and software in favour of the most varied diversification extremely complex.
It has to be said that, although these experimental fields have struggled to become known, Aureia Harvey has gained a certain recognition, not least due to her parallel involvement in the development of sites and video games, counting several successful collaborations in the world of music, such as with Virigins Records, MTV and PBS. Her Entropy8 (1995), a pioneering net artwork that considered the Internet as an priviledged place to realise works designed solely for digital, received much media attention and was awarded a Webby in both 1997 and 1998.
Now this work also returns to the centre of attention with a discussion related to production and preservation by Rhizome.org, a pioneering platform that was already active in the 1990s in support of digital experimentation and for several years now has been concerned with reconstructing its history with a commitment to preservation. On their site it is in fact possible to experience Entropy8 through a process of emulation that will be discussed with the artist herself on 3 April 2024 at Onassis ONX’s spaces, in a conversation also accessible online. The history of the exhibition at MOCA is, moreover, closely linked to Rhizome’s work in its commitment to preserve a series of pioneering works no longer supported by current technologies.
What is striking in this retrospective look is how the merging of the real and the digital found its roots in an equally magical fusion of feeling and intellect on an entirely human level. In the early nineties, it was in fact her meeting with her current husband Michael Samyn, whom she met in 1999 at a virtual meeting organised by the hell.com platform, a site set up around a private network of early experimental artists that over time had acquired an aura of mystery.
In the hell.com space, the two artists first shared a ‘secret’ folder, an exchange channel that later became the first collaborative project skinonskin, later transformed into the first pay-per-view net art experience. For 10 Euro, anyone with access to the Netscape 4.0 browser could pry into their private lives.
Their respective websites Entropy8.com and Zuper.com merged into Entropy8Zuper.org. In 2007, with The Kiss, they turned their physical embrace into software, the start of a series of experiments with 3D scanning, at the time used for industrial and scientific purposes. In 2007, The Kiss became a web experience where one could enter inside the scanning, also available as Virtual Reality Modeling Language, a very innovative format at the time for visualising 3D on the Internet.
Explorations of the digital worlds, and of the most sophisticated and significant possibilities of real-time interaction have followed one another over time with an incredibly transversal and trans-disciplinary approach and vision.
From these solid roots, when the duo each resumed their own path, Aureia Harvey’s research has continued with an increasing interest in sculpture between the physical and the digital. Digital models made using photogrammetry of objects and her own body (often her face) are treated in the digital world as complementary to traditional sculpture. The use of polygons, the building blocks of each 3D model, restores the malleability of traditional materials to the digital artefact. In this dimension Harvey finds room for experimentation with new materials, impossible to find in the physical world, at the same time clothed with a tangible consistency that makes their objective existence unmistakable.
The subjects of her sculptures often include features of mythological creatures. It is as if they emerge in a generative process sprung almost out of the artist’s inner self while she is engaged in a research all about matter, about texture, as she recounts in an informal conversation. The sensation is that of a cathartic crossing where the channeling of physical energy is replaced by mental energy.
In the eleven sculptures of the “Gray Matter” series, created from scans of physical works and assemblages of previously discarded fragments and 3D prints, Aureia ‘re-mixes’ scraps of clay to mould them into something else. You can interact with the sculptures, they can rotate, they become elastic, they change shape by shrinking and re-expanding. It is a different and complementary way to enjoy the sculpture in all its angles, to rotate it rather than walk around it, an entirely mental gesture where the physical movement of the mouse is an accompanying, mechanical execution of an impulse.
Gray Matter was presented in 2022 on the “Feral Files” platform, a curatorial operation by Casey Reas, author with Benjamin Fry of the open source software Processing and the community that has grown up around it. “Feral Files” is a project that enters the blockchain and the market in a completely revolutionary way, creating a channel for media art works, as opposed to those that were identified as such by the traditional market during the peak of the Nft bubble, to be shared at affordable prices and in the form of curated exhibitions and then enter the channels (and eventually prices) of the traditional marketplaces. In this case, Harvey’s auction sculptures were accompanied by a physical bronze sculpture and all (digital) works accompanied by instructions for 3D printing. Again, a gesture of reversal, an open door to a new awareness and new questions.
This is a reflection (remotely) of an exhibition that with its work traces the entire history of net art, media art, but basically also of the possible new frontiers of traditional sculpture as well as the process that has led to the shaping of current reality. It all started from the interweaving of what is most human (for the moment) the machine cannot match, that mixture of intuition, listening, emotional and rational intelligence. Even today, the individual work is intertwined with that of the individualities and communities that have grown up together with her and Michael Sambyn, such as that of the aforementioned Rhizome.org, “Feral Files”, but also that of a gallery that has been a pioneer experimenter in the digital marketplace, not only in selling but also in disseminating digital art, such as bitforms, where Aureia Harvey’s work will be presented from 4 April, 2024 for her second solo show.
Aureia Harvey, My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard, curated by Regina Harsanyi, Museum of the Moving Image, New York, 02.02 – 07.07.2024 | Exhibition’s in-kind partners: 4THBIN, Barco, bitforms gallery, and New York University’s ITP / MIA program.
Aureia Harvey, The Unanswered Question, bitforms Gallery, New York, 04.04 – 25.05.2024
Artbase Anthology with Aureia Harvey, Rhizome x MoMI (Rhizome Co-Executive Director Michael Connor, MoMI Associate Curator of Media Art Regina Harsanyi, and Rhizome Director of Digital Preservation Dragan Espenschied) Conversation about net art history and conservation with artist Auriea Harvey, hosted by Rhizome in partnership with Museum of the Moving Image. The event marks the launch of ArtBase Anthologies, Rhizome’s new initiative offering perspectives on digital art history through selected works. Conversation at Onassis ONX will be streamed online. Sign up here for registration.
images: (cover 1) Auriea Harvey, «The Mystery v5-dv2 (Chroma)», 2022, 3D Model (2) Aureia Harvey, portrait (3-4) Auriea Harvey: My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard, Exhibition view, February 2–July 7, 2024, Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria, NY (5) Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, «Sunset», 2015, Still frame from video game for PC/Mac (6) Auriea Harvey: My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard, Exhibition view, February 2–July 7, 2024, Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria, NY
