Auriea Harvey

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn are a married team of artists who collaborate on creating art video games.

Auriea Harvey is an American artist who was born in Indianapolis in 1971. She graduated with a B.F.A. in sculpture from Parsons School of Design. Michaël Samyn is a Belgian artist and programmer who was born in 1968 in Poperinge, Belgium.

In 1995 Harvey founded Entropy8, a website experimenting with interactivity and the functions of net art. In 1999, she merged her site with Zuper, by fellow artist and designer Michaël Samyn (whom she subsequently married) to create Entropy8Zuper!. During this period, they created works such as The Godlove Museum, a website that showcased their storytelling strengths by merging Biblical stories with narratives drawn from their own lives and contemporary culture. Harvey has also designed websites for Virgin Records America and PBS.

Harvey and Samyn left net.art for videogames in the early 2000s, when they felt that the web was becoming too much like a shopping mall. In 2002, they founded Tale of Tales, an independent game development studio in Ghent, Belgium, with the goal of creating games of greater emotional engagement and imaginative richness than the kinds of things that were being made for the then-major demographic of teenage boys. For a while Auriea was living in New York and Michaël in Belgium, and during this period they created Wirefire, a multimedia software interface that allowed them to communicate in a way that they considered less predictable and more creative than either chat or video (and less damned painful!).

Harvey and Samyn work as a team, although each has areas of specialization: Harvey in computer graphics and 3D modeling, Samyn in programming and sound. Together they have produced a number of artvideogames including The Graveyard, The Path, and The Endless Forest. They have become known for a distinctive visual style and unusual approaches to both narrative and game play.

In 2015 the pair gave up on videogames to devote the rest of their lives to art. Their first post-games project is Cathedral-in-the-Clouds.

The Graveyard is a simple video game in which the player takes on the role of an old woman in a graveyard who walks around before eventually leaving. In the full version of the game, there is a small chance that the old woman will die before leaving.

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