Artbase Anthologies 001: Auriea Harvey and Entropy8Zuper!

Launched in 1995, Entropy8 is a landmark in the history of net art, epitomizing Harveys vision of the internet as a viable platform for born-digital artworks. At a time when artist pages made up a significant portion of the nascent web, Harvey stood out by audaciously resisting browser limitations and concerns about loading times. She incorporated elaborate GIFs, shockwave animations, Java, and custom HTML, pushing the boundaries of what was thought possible within the constraints of the era’s low-bandwidth availability. 

Groundbreaking for its time, Entropy8.com was featured on CNN, named by David Bowie as one of his favorite websites, and received numerous awards, including a Webby in both 1997 and 1998.

By the end of 1998, Harvey had radically redesigned the site, centering it around her live webcam, positioned at her desk. This setup invited global audiences to engage with Harvey in real time, further expanding the interactive nature of her digitally grounded art practice.

In the late 1990s, before swiping right and virtual talking stages were commponplace, Harvey and Michaël Samyn met virtually at a gathering on the enigmatic online community hell.com. Hours later, Samyn sent Harvey Breathe, the first of 25 mutually exchanged audiovisual love letters that they'd refer to as an act of DHTMLove. Each interactive page, with titles like Untouched and text such as “I want to feel your muscles strain,“ acts as a desperate plea for closeness through the wires in lieu of skin-to-skin contact. 

While the works were initially meant for their eyes only, it wasn't long before hell.com members discovered Harvey and Samyn’s folder of intimate exchanges, known collectively as skinonskinonskin, and clamored for its visibility. Retaining both an air of privacy and irreverance, the duo responded by paywalling their shared infatuation. With ecommerce in its infancy, Harvey and Samyn utilized early credit card transaction technology, the same used in digital adult entertainment, to transform skinonskinonskin into the first pay-per-view net art experience. For 10 Euros, anyone with Netscape 4.0 could have a window into Harvey and Samyn's private life. skinonskinonskin challenged conventional perceptions of intimacy, voyeurism, and the net art market. 

Credits

Auriea Harvey (b. 1971, Indianapolis, IN) is an artist living and working in Rome. Her practice encompasses virtual and tangible sculptures, drawings and simulations that blend digital and handmade production including 3D printing, augmented and virtual reality. Drawing from her extensive experience in net art and video games in the collaborative groups Entropy8Zuper!, Tale of Tales, and Song of Songs, she brings personal narratives and character development to her practice. She is primarily concerned with making the mythological world visible through form, interaction, and immersion. Her works are a synthesis of art historical reference and imagination, and she is engaged across time, media, and material to define what sculptural production means in the present moment. Before moving to Europe, Harvey went to Parsons School of Design for sculpture, living and working in New York for a decade. The artist’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Buffalo AKG Museum, Walker Art Center, and Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology. Her video games and mixed reality works have had international success, including exhibitions at the Tinguely Museum, Basel; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the New Museum, New York; and ZKM, Karlsruhe. Harvey is the recipient of a Creative Capital grant and a winner of the Independent Games Festival Nuovo Award. She is represented by bitforms gallery, NYC.

This online exhibition is curated by Regina Harsanyi, Associate Curator of Media Arts, MoMI, and accompanies the Auriea Harvey retrospective on view at Museum of The Moving Image, My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard. 

Curation: Regina Harsanyi, Museum of the Moving Image in collaboration with Rhizome
Preservation: Dragan Espenschied, Preservation Director, Rhizome 
Site Development: Mark Beasley, Lead developer, Rhizome 

This project was made possible by a grant from Teiger Foundation.