Auriea Harvey

Auriea Harvey is an artist living and working in Rome. Her work combines digital and physical processes to create sculptures in physical space and mixed 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 a synthesis of personal narratives and character development to her sculptures – making the untold visible through form, interaction and immersion. Harvey’s practice engages time, media, and material to define sculptural production in the present moment.

The artist begins her process by making scans from life. These scans mutate as they are sculpted, materialized, and combined with Harvey’s extensive library including 3D models based on her own clay sculptures, works of imagination that are digitally sculpted, and objects encountered in museums throughout the world. The amalgamation is 3D printed, to which the artist adds organic elements, or translates into bronze, glass or other precious material. The artist also creates purely digital versions of her sculptures that explore virtual materiality, bridging the gap between the digital and the physical, the possible and the impossible.

As Harvey creates her models, she molds characters with their own narratives. Each nexus of elements produces a series of sculptures which she continues until the narrative is complete. Harvey sifts through cultural artifacts, filtering well-known tales through her own retellings to reinvent, reinterpret, and shapeshift.

The artist has been at the forefront of art and technology through many aspects of her career, including seminal net artworks, celebrated videogames, and her current exploration of mixed reality sculpture. Harvey was a pioneer of the first wave of Internet Art, contributing to the first Internet project commissioned by a major institution (the Guggenheim Museum) and winning the first major prize given for an interactive work (from the SFMOMA). She co-authored the Realtime Art Manifesto, widely recognised as the foremost call of the independent games movement in the 2000s. Harvey is a leading voice in the resurgence of digital art today with a major survey exhibition at The Museum of the Moving Image, NYC.

The works of Auriea Harvey can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, HEK Basel, Walker Art Center, KADIST Collection, Rf.C Collection, and Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology. She has had international success, including exhibitions at the Tinguely Museum, Basel; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the New Museum, New York; The Museum of the Moving Image, New York; and ZKM, Karlsruhe. She is represented by bitforms gallery, NYC.