Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn facts for kids

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn at a game conference in 2014

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn are two artists who work together to create special art video games. From 2018 to 2024, Auriea Harvey was a professor teaching about games at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, a university in Germany.

Early Life and Creative Beginnings

Auriea Harvey at a game conference in 2014

Auriea Harvey is an American artist born in Indianapolis in 1971. When she was in high school, she loved to sketch and paint. At Parsons School of Design University, she used computer programs like Photoshop to make art. She also tried working with many different materials. Auriea first wanted to study painting, but she ended up studying sculpture. She earned her degree in sculpture from Parsons School of Design.

Michaël Samyn is an artist and computer programmer from Belgium. He was born in Poperinge, Belgium, in 1968.

Working Together as Artists

In 1995, Auriea Harvey started a website called Entropy8. This website was a place to try out new ways for people to interact with art online. In 1999, she combined her website with Zuper, a site made by Michaël Samyn. They later got married and created Entropy8Zuper! During this time, they made projects like The Godlove Museum. This website told stories by mixing old Bible tales with parts of their own lives. Auriea Harvey also designed websites for big companies like Virgin Records America and PBS.

In the early 2000s, Harvey and Samyn decided to stop making art for the internet. They felt the web was becoming too much like a shopping mall. In 2002, they started their own game company called Tale of Tales in Ghent, Belgium. Their goal was to make video games that felt more emotional and imaginative. They wanted to create games that were different from what was usually made for teenage boys. For a while, Auriea lived in New York and Michaël lived in Belgium. During this time, they created Wirefire. This was a special computer program that helped them talk to each other in a more creative way than just chatting or video calls.

Auriea and Michaël work as a team, but they each have their own special skills. Auriea is great at computer graphics and making 3D models. Michaël is skilled in computer programming and sound. Together, they have made eight art video games. These include Fatale, The Graveyard, The Path, and The Endless Forest. They are known for their unique visual style and new ways of telling stories and playing games.

After their game Sunset did not sell well, they decided to focus on other forms of art. Their first project after games was called Cathedral-in-the-Clouds. In 2016, Auriea Harvey became interested in 3D printing. She combined her love for making 3D models for games with creating art for virtual reality.

Exploring Their Video Games

The Graveyard

The Graveyard is a simple video game. In this game, you play as an old woman walking around a graveyard. After a while, she leaves. In the full version of the game, there is a small chance that the old woman might die before she leaves.

The Path

The Path was inspired by the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. Players choose one of six sisters to play as. Their goal is to reach their grandmother's house. If you wander off the main path, you might meet the Wolf. What happens when you reach the grandmother's house changes a lot if you meet the Wolf. Once all six sisters have met the Wolf, a seventh character becomes available. This is a mysterious little girl in a white dress. For this game, Auriea Harvey created and experimented with 3D shapes using a game engine.

The Endless Forest

The Endless Forest is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. This means many players can play together online at the same time. However, this game has no set goals. All players appear as deer in a quiet forest. You don't see other players' usernames. Instead, you see icons of their deer characters. Players cannot talk to each other using words. They must use the deer's body language to communicate. A cool thing about this game is that you can play it as a screensaver when you are not actively using your computer.

Sunset

Harvey and Samyn's game Sunset came out in 2015. It takes place in a made-up South American city during a revolution. Unlike many games where you are a hero or a warrior, in Sunset, you play as a housekeeper. This helps players focus on the difficult lives of regular people during a war. The main character is Angela Burnes. She is an African-American engineer who moved from the United States to the fictional town of San Bavón. She hoped for a good life but ended up cleaning a rich man's fancy apartment in a war zone. The game happens in the 1970s. The artwork for the game is very simple and clean. As a housekeeper, you stay inside the apartment. You can do small things that don't seem to change much, like writing notes or changing the employer's radio station to a secret channel. The team got some money to make this game through a Kickstarter campaign. Tale of Tales later said that Sunset did not sell very well.

Art Exhibitions

Auriea Harvey's first public art show was in 1999. She was part of Gallery 9, an online art gallery at the Walker Art Center. In 2000, she showed her work in "The Last Real Net Art Museum." This was an online exhibition focused on internet art.

Since then, she and Michaël Samyn have shown their art in many different exhibitions. These include shows at the SFMOMA museum, the Beall Center, the Provincial Archeological Museum in Belgium, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Laguna Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, and the Neoludica Biennial in Venice, Italy.

A special show called "Year Zero" featured Auriea Harvey's work. It ran from March 6 to April 24, 2021, at the Bitforms Gallery. At Art SG 2023, from January 10 to 20, 2023, Auriea Harvey showed works from 2021. Her sculptures existed in both digital and physical forms. She used symbols like a skull, a face, a rose, and a braid. These symbols remind people of ideas about life and death. By using self-portraits, Harvey included an African-American woman in art history. This was an important step to update the story of art.

Awards and Recognition

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn have won several awards for their work. These include the Emerging Grant in 1999 and the SFMOMA Prize for Excellence in Online Art in 2000. They also received the European Innovative Games Award in 2008. In 2006, they won the Creative Capital Emerging Fields Award. In 2010, they were given the Advanced Prize in Innovative Game Design.