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Auriea Harvey Talks Net Art, Tale of Tales and Sculpture

In a new conversation with critic Louis Bury, The Endless Forest co-creator traces a career spent following each medium until the magic ran out.

Auriea Harvey, The Dance of Death and Time, 2026. Image courtesy Auriea Harvey

Auriea Harvey, who co-founded the game studio Tale of Tales with Michaël Samyn and now works largely in digital and 3D-printed sculpture, is the subject of a new interview in How to Look at Digital Art, the newsletter of the critic Louis Bury. The conversation, titled "Following the work that feels like magic," traces Harvey's career from 1990s net art through games to commercial galleries. Bury flagged the interview on Oct. 22, writing that Harvey's practice "has gone through several dramatic evolutions."

Harvey describes early net art as "a categorical rejection of the art world," made in an underground scene with friends in England, Belgium and Russia. The same skills paid the rent: Harvey recalls building sites for Virgin Records acts including Janet Jackson and Lenny Kravitz, the official Depeche Mode site and, with Beth Stryker, the website for Shu Lea Cheang's Brandon.

Tale of Tales began in 2003, Harvey says, because the pair had "grown sick of the Internet" as templates, ads and tracking took over the web. The studio's games, including The Endless Forest (2005) and The Path (2009), started from a question about why so many games involved battling, shooting or driving. Of The Endless Forest, in which players are deer who mostly run and meet one another, Harvey says the guiding rule was that the game "didn't have to look real, it had to feel real."

The move into sculpture came during the pandemic, when VR work stalled and 3D printing filled the studio, leading to Harvey's first commercial gallery shows. On AI, Harvey says the most striking part is that it can code, and that a month was enough to build every custom tool the work now needs.

Killscreen covered Tale of Tales through its game years, including the 2015 announcement that the studio was done making videogames.

For more reading, see This is sad: Tale of Tales is done making videogames, The Endless Forest's playful online world could get a remake, Tale of Tales' Sunset reveals a tourist turned housekeeper and Auriea Harvey in Conversation.