par Sylvie Parent
entropy8.com + zuper.com = entropy8zuper.org
In March 1999, Auriea Harvey (entropy8) and Michaël Samyn (zuper) merged their individual Web sites to create entropy8zuper, a space in which their visions of the medium meet and where they fully express their passion for the Web as a means of creation and communication. In this universe, art, design and life are inseparable and feed one another. It is a total project, recycling everything on its path and sustained by the utmost use of Web resources to create hypermedia environments likely to engage the visitor, lead her to experiences at once emotional and cerebral, both profound and durable.
Before joining forces, Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn had each created several Web-based works that demonstrated a marked visual inclination, as well as a sensitivity to questions of space and image creation gained from their education and experience in visual arts. Both artists, on their own, built impressive careers in Web design, for which they were frequently awarded prestigious prizes. They owe their respective success in the field to their rejection of the current corporate aesthetic, to their capacity for invention and creativity, initiating projects leading well off the beaten path, and to boundless curiosity for the new tools offered by Web technologies and programming. Similarly, their ongoing career in Web creation/design proves to be a creative laboratory seamlessly coherent with their artistic experiences.
Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn
Over the years, at entropy8, Auriea Harvey developed a particularly personal environment, rich in creations that boldly juxtapose and superimpose unusual references, strange, interwoven images and typography, and evoke worlds that are at times ethereal, at others textured, tactile and opaque, or, on the contrary, transparent, open, luminous. Her productions of impressive visual complexity rely on an attention to the surface effects directing the gaze, or on the perception of a potentially infinite inner space, suggesting a to and fro between the material world and the intangible. entropy8 is also a living, inhabited space, where the artist's presence is felt not only through her creations, but also through the use of webcams, multiple portraits, projects designed around personal family themes, and the abundant publication of correspondence with visitors.
Michaël Samyn, for his part, designed many significant Web projects, such as Love (1995), I confess (1996-1997) (which he presented with other works in the äda´web collective, now hosted by the Walker Art Center), and Heaven & Hell (1997), produced with Olia Lialina. A very active and prolific Web artist (he participated and was awarded prizes in the "competitions" Form Art and Mr. Net Art, and took part in Alexei Shulgin's Desktop is project), Michaël Samyn defines himself as baroque, proposing to fight excess with excess, and not without humour, which he readily turns toward himself. His works are often characterized by an invasion of the viewing area, a profusion of visual elements that fills it from end to end. They often involve a rapport with another, exchange, the intimacy sustained by the nature of networked communications. His site also comprises references to his immediate circle of relationships and to important events in his life. Thus, Michaël Samyn also integrates personal content in his work.
These two artists' projects certainly harbour an element of exhibitionism, as do those they developed together, self expression requiring an openness to the other in the development of every work, and personal content being offered publicly. Furthermore, the border line between the private and public spheres are often blurred on the Web, where the individual is often called upon in a direct and personal manner. In this, their works are truly marked by the nature of the medium. The "exhibitionism" to which these works testify actually corresponds to a point of departure. The works presented by entropy8zuper, just as those produced by the artists individually, do not represent little worlds closed onto their authors and their productions. On the contrary, the visitor always comes away with the impression that the projects were designed especially for her, with her complicity, and thanks to her involvement. The personal content, often very allusive, and always sustained by inventive and striking conceptions, are invariably directed toward the visitor who will have to activate, complete, and experience them.
skinonskinonskin
Both associated with activities at Hell.com (now become no-such.com), which brings together the creations of several well known artists, Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn became partners in work, then partners in life. The skinonskinonskin project, presented at Hell.com at the beginning of their association, consists of a set of tableaux describing this encounter and tells of the search for intimacy that physical distance makes impossible. The desire for the other serves here as engine for the exploration of all the means provided by available tools to facilitate interactivity and telepresence. The original version of this presentation is not accessible for the moment, but the excerpt given on their site nevertheless offers an unusual experience of the expression of desire. The artists manage not only to give creative and subtle expression to desire in a series of variations that accumulate and lead to an evermore charged state of mind, but also to share the passion of one individual for another. This, certainly, is where the power of the work resides, in the passage between a situation or a state particular to two individuals to one that is generalized and shared. The work succeeds in that the visitor feels this state to be her own. The experience is thoroughly moving, as are the couple's other productions.
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus...
Through the initial difficulties of completely realizing their union, Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn developed new methods for fully communicating and creating together. In Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus, the biblical names leading us to expect many episodes, entropy8zuper.org shows us this multi-faceted encounter and joint artistic exploration. Their creations aim to inspire new life in actions and images by decontextualizing them and redefining the terms of interactivity. The works take the visitor by surprise, making her participate when she least expects it, and imposing the experimentation of multi-sensory worlds that consist of metaphors she will adopt as her own by way of personal imaginative investment. Their expertise and their sensibilities meet in these works such as to produce engrossing hypermedia environments that reach the visitor from all sides and with great intensity.
Wirefire
Since July 1999, Web performances have become an important part of Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn's collaborative productions, where the fact of working in tandem touches both on theme and method. Every Thursday evening, the artists offer their viewers a completely new performance. It constitutes a visual and aural conversation, a collaborative collage produced in real time, similar to a musical improvisation, a live composition relying on the expertise and complicity of the two composer-performers. The mechanism developed by the artists allows them to recover archived files (Flash animations, sound files, images) on the server to form the material, the elements of a vocabulary constituted in time. The files are employed by the artists extemporaneously, according to whim, the suggestion of one eliciting a response from the other, melding into the other, and so on. The performances also include real time written conversations and images (webcams) of the artists. The visitor is sometimes invitated to participate as well. The generation of different actions, one from the other and one after another, produces a reverberating and resonating effect that reaches the visitor like a wave crashing on the shore. The spectator oscillates between contemplative and active states, absorbed in the scene, anticipating the next event, ready to respond to the call. These performances are akin to film, and, like film, assume a certain narrative sequence and progression. However, they rely on the unexpected, and this anticipation of the indefinite, of the possible, produces a state of readiness and complicity in the spectator. Also, the distinction between the performer's role and that of the observer is likely to be reassessed at any moment.
One must admit and accept one's "physical need for wonder and poetry" to enter the world created by the authors of entropy8zuper. The unexpected awaits the visitor's every step and, little by little, her whole being may be invaded. Take this as a warning.
Sylvie Parent
Translation: Ron Ross
