Installed chronologically on vintage hardware at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, the exhibition is the first career retrospective of innovative net artist Auria Harvey and tells a story about death and survival.
In Harvey's jewel-box world, there are no heroes or villains, only people caught up in the flow of technology, losing and loving.
Born in Indianapolis in 1971, Harvey helped expand the horizons of digital art with utopias, games and crashes. In the 1990s, she created boundary-pushing imagery using GIFs, Shockwave animations, HTML and the Java programming language. Her gorgeous personal website, Entropy8.com, which was restored for the show, won a Webby Award. 1997 and 1998.
For the past few years, Harvey has been working on sculptures of fictional yet mythical artifacts that exist as 3D-printed statues or glossy virtual models. At the museum, you can rotate some of the sculptures on a transparent screen by waving your hand. The “mixed reality” sculptures incorporate scans of ancient artworks, hand-shaped clay, and Harvey's own facial features, and are cracked and weathered, giving them an immediately timeless impression.
With every technological change, sparks of new possibility are met with the threat of obsolescence.
Her story is also a cyber-romance. As the show's title says, “My veins are wires. My body is your keyboard.” The wires belong to everyone, but the keyboard belongs only to you. It evokes the intimacy of a lover's touch that cannot yet be replicated.
In 1999, Harvey fell in love on Hell.com, a portal for hackers, artists, and digital misfits, where she met Belgian digital artist Michael Samin, who goes by the name Zuper!, and who has been Harvey's lover and creative partner ever since.
Within months of meeting, Harvey moved to Belgium. (They are now married and living in Rome.) In this exhibition, curated by Regina Harsanyi, Harvey's solo projects feature at either end of the couple's collaboration. As Entropy8Zuper!, they engaged in public displays of affection, exhibitionistic yet enigmatic. Their work infuses an intimate poetry into a machine world of cords and terminals.
On display is a recording of their 1999 performance “Whispering Windows,” in which lovers exchange sensual words over a low-bandwidth webcam while the audience watches on their screens. Another monitor shows one of the couple's erotic chat-room sessions. In 1999, Harvey and Samin compiled the animated love letters they exchanged in a secret Hell.com subfolder into a Web site, “Skinonskinonskin,” for which they sold subscriptions; on one page, you can “stroke” the image of Harvey's face with your cursor and “she” will turn her head.
Like Hell.com, Harvey's work is meant to be puzzling, sometimes cryptic, and a treat for the curious. The show features influential projects by Entropy8Zuper!, including “The Godlove Museum,” a gothic, mischievous digital novel that tells the story of a love affair between two people through abstract mini-games and sometimes violent animations. On one page, users must smash the screen with a virtual rock, causing blood to flow from the broken glass.
Clearly, they were having fun: The same gallery features a blurry video clip of the couple accepting a Webby Award in 2000, where they hung out, getting cozy on the podium. Later, they turned their entangled bodies into a 3D model titled “Kissing,” which could be viewed on a nearby screen.
Harvey and Samin founded an indie video game company called Tale of Tales in 2003. Like their web-based projects, their video games feature atmospheric settings, a leisurely pace, diverse characters, and open-ended (or infinite) storylines that feel more like reality than film.
The retrospective features four key titles playable on a large projector (along with gameplay videos of two others, and two interactive mobile games), although at least one of them had crashed when I visited – apparently keeping that creaky hardware running for hours on end isn't easy.
The Path, a 2009 cult-favourite horror short game, plays on the dark legend of Little Red Riding Hood; the only instruction is to stay on the path to Grandma's house, but most of the thrill comes when you disobey and venture into the woods. 2012's hallucinogenic Bientôt l'été involves mainly strolling around a dreamlike holographic beach, with closing your avatar's eyes being a key mechanic in the game.
Tale of Tales has a large fanbase in the gaming community, but the company announced its exit from the industry after disappointing sales for its 2015 title “Sunset,” a somewhat old-fashioned chore-based game starring a housekeeper tending to a penthouse during a civil war.
Harvey and Samin came of age in a halcyon era of the internet, when independent artists didn't create online content and built their own worlds, but almost instantly, that world began to fade away.
You might wonder why anyone would travel to Astoria to see an exhibition of web-based art and video games, much of which is still available for download. One reason is that they are being forgotten by the digital age. Harvey's work, and that of many other net artists, took a major hit in 2021 when major web browsers dropped support for the Flash plugin that underpins many online projects. Rhizome, an organization that preserves digital art, restored several of Entropy8 and Entropy8Zuper!'s projects for the exhibition.
But entropy has always enhanced the beauty of Harvey's art.
Aurelia Harvey
Through July 7, Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35th Avenue, Astoria, 718–777–6800, movingimage.org.