‍

What Does a Digital Artist's Practice Look Like? Auriea Harvey on Sculpture, Net Art, and AI

‍

A curator builds the context around a work. An artist has to build the work itself — and in digital art, that often means building a practice that holds together across mediums, decades, and technological shifts that would have made most people specialize and stay put.

This is Part 2 of our Digital Art Summer Series, a four-part look at digital art through the people who shape it: the curator, the artist, the builder, and the collector. Last week we looked at curatorial practice through Alice Scope. This week, we turn to the artist's perspective through a conversation with Auriea Harvey — someone whose thirty-year career is itself a case study in what it means to create with digital tools rather than just adopt them.

‍

Meet Auriea Harvey

Auriea Harvey is a digital art pioneer, sculptor, and net art veteran whose practice has evolved continuously across three decades. She's best known for Entropy 8 Super, a landmark net art project from the late 1990s, and for her subsequent work in video game design. Her current practice centers on sculpture that lives simultaneously in digital and physical registers, with recent work presented in significant institutional contexts including Prophecy at Arebyte London and C0D3X at Gazelli Art House.

Few artists working today have Harvey's vantage point. She was there at the beginning of net art, has watched multiple waves of digital enthusiasm arrive and recede, and has kept making work through all of them — which means her current engagement with AI comes with thirty years of comparison built in.

‍

An Artist's Practice That Refuses to Choose

Ask what a "digital artist" does and the honest answer, in Harvey's case, is: whatever the work requires, in whichever medium gets it there. Her career moves from net art to video game design to hybrid sculpture, and the throughline isn't a tool or a platform — it's a refusal to treat digital and physical making as separate disciplines.

A few ideas from her conversation with 100 collectors get at what that looks like in practice:

Net art origins that still hold up. Harvey's work with Entropy 8 Super established principles about network, interactivity, and collective experience that remain relevant to everything being made now. Her historical depth makes her read on current developments unusually grounded — she's not reacting to a trend, she's comparing it to precedent.

Video games as an extension, not a detour. The move from net art to game design wasn't a career pivot. It was a continuation of Harvey's interest in the participatory — in how a player relates to an authored world. Those sensibilities carry directly into her sculpture practice today.

Sculpture as genuine digital-physical integration. Harvey's sculptures aren't digital works translated into physical form after the fact. They emerge from a practice that treats digital and physical making as continuous from the start — which gives the resulting objects a materiality that purely digital or purely physical work doesn't produce.

AI as the newest chapter, not a new start. Harvey's engagement with AI is informed by three decades of experience with digital tools, so it comes with both real excitement and hard-won skepticism — a more nuanced position than either the hype or the backlash usually allows for.

‍

Why This Matters for Collecting Digital Art

Understanding an artist's practice — not just a single work — is what lets a collector tell the difference between someone using a new tool because it's current and someone whose relationship to technology has actual depth. Harvey's career is a live example: her sculptures read differently once you know they're the latest expression of ideas she was already working through in 1997.

That kind of continuity is one of the more reliable signals for collectors trying to build a collection that holds its meaning over time, rather than one that ages with the trend cycle it was bought inside.

‍

Listen to the Full Conversation

This article draws from Unlocked, the podcast by 100 collectors — conversations with the artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world, with no market speculation and no hype.

🎧 Listen to the full episode with Auriea Harvey

‍

Go Deeper: Liquid Chimeras at MEET Digital Culture Center

To continue this week's conversation, we're pairing the episode with an article by Eleonora Brizi on Liquid Chimeras, Entangled Others' first solo exhibition in Europe. Like Harvey, the artist duo — Sofia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick — works in the space between digital and physical, using AI and generative systems to render oceanic ecosystems as living, hybrid forms. It's the same digital-physical dialogue Harvey describes, pushed into new territory.

‍

--

Catch up on the full summer series about digital art in 4 perspectives:

Part 1: The Curator's Perspectice

Part 2: The Artist's Perspective

Part 3: The Builder's Perspective [coming out August 17]

Part 4: The Collector's Perspective [coming out August 24]

‍

--

100 collectors is a global membership network for digital art lovers and collectors.

Explore membership benefits→