Artwrld Auriea Harvey on What Ancient Magic Has to Do With Digital Art
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.
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.