| TALE OF TALES |
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game demo project |
ARTIST STATEMENT
In 1999, Michaël Samyn and Auriea Harvey merged their artistic activities as well as their design businesses as well as their lives. Before that both of them had already given up the analog world in favor of the digital one. Auriea received a BFA for sculpture from Parson's School of Design in New York City, after which she started Entropy8, a web design company which made sensually provocative web sites for clients like Virgin Records and PBS television. Michaël graduated a graphic designer at Sint Lucas Academy in Gent, then tried and failed to become first a graphic designer, then a fine artist until he discovered the internet and started Zuper! -web design- and Group Z, Belgium -net.art- which was one of the first featured projects in the pioneering online art site, adä'web.
We started life together as Entropy8Zuper! with a pay-per-view event -first featured on the hell.com web site- called Skinonskinonskin, which was the result of our communication through multimedia at a time when we were physically seperated by the Atlantic Ocean. Soon after that, we launched Genesis at entropy8zuper.org, the start of an ongoing series of interpretations of the books of the Bible. Genesis, as well as Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, deal with the romantic encounter of two souls in the network and their cultural conflicts.
Another result of our attempts to express emotions through interactive media is Wirefire, a web based application that allows us to mix movies, sounds and text in real time for a live audience. Performances take place on line every Thursday but the application can also run by itself, choosing randomly from a database of digital files to which we add new movies continuously.
After refusing an offer to be part of the Whitney Biennial, we were awarded the Prize for Excellence in Online Art for our work by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000. Most of the work that we have done thusfar has used the world wide web is its main medium. Recently we have discovered interactive 3D thanks to a commission by SFMOMA for their "010101, Art in Technological Times" show ( http://010101.sfmoma.org ). We have since gone on to make The Kiss an exploratory 3d environment based on 3dscans of our bodies in embrace, and Guernica a nightmare world filled with objects based on data streams from a LAN (Rhizome.org's Carnivore project, which won Ars Electronica in 2002) and parsed texts from the cnn.com homepage.
There are many more works in our workaholics portfolio, so we suggest that you have a look at our website ( http://entropy8zuper.org ).
Auriea Harvey could be considered an artist who accidentally became a designer and Michaël Samyn a designer who accidentally became an artist. In any case, the distinction between those two disciplines is completely blurred in our work. As are the disctinctions between the private and the public, business and pleasure, and those between the body and the machine. Our work focusses on the humans who use the machines and the network, rather than on the machines and the networks themselves. On the other hand, we refuse to treat the computer or software as simple tools, instead we favor giving them a life of their own or turning them into prosthetics that extend human bodies and allow them to touch each other, at least in the imagination. Our hypermedia environments act as organs that sense the presence of the user and respond to it, or that mediate between the user and the creator. The framework for these lifeforms is often a narrative structure. Narration is usually used as a means to an end in our work, it performs the function of submerging the user in a virtual world. But being the maximalists we are, the stories we choose to use are often bursting with content in and of themselves. Religious texts have been a major inspiration, most notably the Bible (The Godlove Museum, Eden.Garden), but also elements from ancient Egyptian relegion (Sixteenpages) and Islam (Al-Jahiz). These classic texts are usually mixed with romantic, often autobiographic, tales of love and lust.
Formally, our work is often a seamless stream of sensuous imagery, trance-inducing music, surprising sound effects and challenging interactivity. We are not afraid of applying proven dramatic methods to experimental programming. Our main design objective is the emotional involvement of the user. To achieve that, we try to find the perfect balance between interactivity and linearity, between offering options and choices to the user and pushing him or her in a certain direction.
We consider ourselves first and foremost researchers. On the level of content, this involves researching a certain object, looking at it from as many angles as possible, doing tests and experiments, reading, writing and reporting. This report is then called "work of art" by some. On the level of execution, we try to maximize the communicative impact of the report. We have chosen interactive media because we believe they hold a potential for emotional impact that may one day surpass that of the book, the film or even of music. But technically as well as conceptually, interactive media are still in their infancy. A lot of work remains to be done. We try to contribute to this work with our research.
Michaël and Auriea now live and work together in Gent, Belgium, designing web sites and creating interactive works of art. The latter being an extremely natural process in which our skills and talents are perfectly complementary. The first often being a conflict of methods, between Auriea focussing on details and Michaël obsessing over the underlying structure. Usually we work together without the help of third parties, learning new technologies when required. We are currently avoiding distractions in favor of continuing work on the research projects to which we have devoted our lives.
http://entropy8.com/index2.html
http://zuper.com/index2.html
http://entropy8zuper.org
http://kiss.entropy8zuper.org/incorporator
http://entropy8zuper.org/guernica
http://adaweb.walkerart.org/~GroupZ
http://entropy8.com/greatest_hits
http://entropy8zuper.org/skinonskinonskin
http://entropy8zuper.org/wirefire
http://www.sfmoma.org/info/webby_winner_announce.html
http://010101.sfmoma.org
http://eden.garden1.0.projects.sfmoma.org