This is the FuturePerfect Podcast where we talk with compelling people breaking new ground in art, media, and entertainment. This podcast is produced by FuturePerfect Studio, an extended reality studio creating immersive experiences for global audiences. Episodes are released every two weeks, visit our website futureperfect.studio for more details. The text version of this interview has been edited for length and clarity. Find the full audio version above or in your favorite podcast app. For episode 004, Wayne Ashley interviews Auriea Harvey, a prolific artist producing simulations and sculptures that bridge both physical and digital space. Over the past decades she has produced net.art, online performances, video games, and sculptures that blend digital and handmade production. Harvey's work can be found in the collections of the Walker Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg, and Rhizome's Net Art Anthology. Her video games and VR projects have been exhibited in venues all over the world. You and I have such a long overlapping history going back to the mid nineties with the emergence of net art. I was extremely inspired by your work, which was so personal and tactile, specifically your online journals composed of these sumptuous collages, poetry, photography, drawing, painting, and 3D sculptural elements. Already, one can see how passionate you were about creating dialogues between analog and digital production, which I completely connect to. There was no hierarchy between these two. When I look at the extraordinary depth of work that you've created over the past two and a half decades, I can easily tease out a history of the internet and digital culture with all its promises of emancipation and boundless creativity, as well as its many discontents, which we'll get into shortly. But first I, I want to go back to the beginnings of your practice. You studied sculpture at Parson School of Design before learning web design, and then founded the game studio Tale of Tales. How did you make that leap from sculpture to net art? Auriea Harvey: I would say that I not only studied sculpture, but I also studied design to a certain extent. Although I was a bit of an autodidact for a long time, meaning that my main skill was computers in addition to sculpture. So the fact that I was so passionate about computers really led me directly into this confrontation. Well, okay love of computers and lack of space, being a young person in New York City in the early nineties. And when I found the internet, it immediately struck me that everything I could do online was a sculpture. You know, it was a time of broadening these definitions of what a sculpture could be. There were people who were asking is video sculpture? Is installation sculpture? It seems obvious now, but at the time it was very much a question. And so I looked at the internet and said, is the internet sculpture? I began seeking the ways in which the internet was sculpture. And in some ways that sculpture was social. In some ways that sculpture was this multimedia and interactive landscape that was totally unexplored. And that was really interesting for me. Out of this you started doing online performance. Back in 1999, we brought you to Brooklyn Academy of Music to perform Wirefire. 23 years ago you were already thinking about the internet as a place to do performance. Can you talk about this? AH: Wirefire was very much a realtime performance. Michaël [Samyn] and I met every week, we had started it before we even lived together when I was still in New York City and he was in Belgium, and we created it as a way to communicate with one another. If you rewind and think back, the only way you could really talk to someone back then through the internet was via text. There was no video and there was no audio really. We thought text was completely inadequate and both of us, being very adept at internet languages, decided to create this system where we could communicate with each other through anything. We could upload sounds, animations, and could have real time chat. We could also invite the audience and offer them a way to interact with the performance and everyone could see it at the same time. And this was something that was kind of unheard of in 1999 or very rare. We did this from 1999 until around 2003. The site is still there and it sort of has a documentation of all the places where we also took it live. After he and I started living together, we started doing these things live also because it creates a big spectacle. It’s something that we did that I'm really proud of. So with the emergence of Web 2.0, you stopped making this work. What happened? AH: Well, the beauty of the early web or Web 1.0 as people will say, was that it was this very big time of innocence. I would say it started with blogging, that was the beginning of the end. That was like the end of it all for me. It felt like it was taking away the power of computing from people. It did open up the web to a different subset of people, but I felt that those people should learn how to program HTML, I felt like this was very empowering. I could see that this was slowly eating away at people's ability to see the computer for what it was, which was an open a box of tricks. And you could pull out any of those tricks and use them in any number of ways. Slowly over the years, indeed, you've seen this closing down, you know, to the point where now websites have a hamburger menu on the side and there’s expected to be good navigation (I’m making air quotes). Whereas we were all about crashing the browser and making people think. Of course there were bad actors who took advantage of the freedom that the web had to offer, but it seems to me like there were better solutions than what Web 2.0 turned out to be. It became much more templatized as well. AH: Yeah it became more templatized, people are basically ignorant about what they can do with their computers now. It's not about computers, it's about phones. It's not about computers, it's about using services. It's about subscriptions. It's not about building anything, you know? Only a few people still build, and it’s made more and more complicated through the way corporations have controlled the computing environment and the internet and our interactions on it. Back then I could see that coming, let's say, and I was like, nope we're outta here, let’s do something else. I want to read something from a manifesto you wrote with your partner Michäel Samyn in 2006. I think this will form a kind of way for you discuss your whole new transformation into working with gaming. Realtime 3D is the most remarkable new creative technology since oil on canvas. It is much too important to be wasted on computer games alone. This manifesto is a call-to-arms for creative people (including, but not limited to, video game designers and fine artists) to embrace this new medium and start realizing its enormous potential. As well as a set of guidelines that express our own ideas and ideals about using the technology. It is much too important to remain in the hands of toy makers and propaganda machines. We need to rip the technology out of their greedy claws and put them to shame by producing the most stunning art to grace this planet so far. (And claim the name “game” for what we do even if it is inappropriate.) I love hearing that. What did you want to accomplish with this manifesto? And why did gaming suddenly become a compelling arena for you to explore and experiment? AH: Well, we really saw video games as an interactive art form. But this was 2002 or 2003, and so video games didn't know that yet. But we just looked at it and we’re like, this is interactive. People spend hours 20 hours playing a video game, and you can't get that with a painting [laughs]. We had been playing a lot of video games and we didn't understand them at first. We played them and questioned why they were doing this with the technology? It's as if we were visiting an alien planet and we could not compute why this was the only thing that was happening—RPGs with random battles, fighting games, driving games, adventure games. There were several genres that you had to fit into in order to sell a video game at that time. There were, of course, exceptions. But this was pretty much the world we were walking into. So when we gave that manifesto, which is called the Realtime Art Manifesto, we really thought that the most remarkable thing here was that you were making something that, like the internet, allowed for realtime communication. People could be inside a world when you played a video game, you were completely lost in it. Now you would look at certain video games and you wouldn't understand what was so special about that world, but at the time when you played, and even now when you play video games, of course it's like being inside a book, but more real, it feels real. That was what was important to us. It was something I had experienced with early VR, for example, but more so in a certain way, because it was these works of imagination. Now our problem was the imagination that we saw within video games seemed extremely limited and we wanted to be able to use it for ourselves, but also encourage others to look at video games as something that was wide open. That was, again, that box of tricks that you could just do whatever you wanted with. Literally it's like, come on creators, you can do anything with this, you can make any world! And we were some of the first to really make a point of this. There was an undercurrent in game studies at that time in 2006 trying to point this out, but there were very few examples. So we really devoted ourselves to creating that example and encouraging other people to change their thinking around video games. And we threw in that last part “even if the word game is inappropriate,” because people were eager f
