Auriea Harvey

Biography

Auriea Harvey, born in 1971 in Indianapolis, Indiana, is a pioneering American artist now living and working in Rome, whose four-decade practice has moved from the earliest days of net art into video games and, most recently, digital and physical sculpture. In 1995 she launched Entropy8, an experimental website exploring interactivity and the emerging artistic possibilities of the World Wide Web, work now regarded as a landmark in the history of net art. In 1999 she merged this project with the work of Belgian artist Michael Samyn to form the duo Entropy8Zuper!, whose collaborative net art and later video games, including the acclaimed The Path, helped establish games as a legitimate medium for personal and poetic artistic expression rather than pure entertainment. Harvey and Entropy8Zuper! contributed to the first Internet art project ever commissioned by a major museum, at the Guggenheim, and won the first major prize awarded for an interactive work, from SFMOMA, cementing her role as an early and influential figure at the intersection of art and digital technology. Over the past decade, Harvey has turned her focus toward sculpture, developing a practice that blends traditional hand-modeling and craft with 3D modeling, 3D printing, and mixed reality technology to produce figures and objects that move fluidly between virtual and physical space, and between digital fabrication and handmade finishing. Her sculptural works often draw on mythological, bodily, and folkloric imagery, rendered with an attention to texture and materiality that resists the coldness sometimes associated with digitally produced art. Harvey's work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, and Rhizome's Net Art Anthology. Across net art, games, and sculpture, Auriea Harvey has consistently treated new technology as fertile ground for intimate, embodied, and enduring artistic expression.