Art Game Duo

This month, the London-based collaborative Furtherfield is hosting an online retrospective of the work of Tales of Tales. Previously known as Entropy8Zuper, this artist partnership is made up of American Auriea Harvey and Belgian Michael Samyn, who were once at the forefront of internet art and now concentrate on game design. The duo came into being with the design of '8,' which they describe as 'an epic single player PC adventure game inspired by the various versions of the folk tale, Sleeping Beauty.' They have since created a number of games borrowing content or form from classical religious or folk literature. Included in Furtherfield's retrospective are 'Eden.Garden,' a browser-like piece in which the activity of the game narrative's characters is driven by the data analyzed at a URL specified by the reader; and 'Guernica,' originally a Doomsday-like 'client' for RSG's legendary network packet-sniffing project, Carnivore. Many of Tale of Tales' projects involve a form of written correspondence between game characters. To some extent, this form of storytelling mirrors the digitally-mediated process by which Harvey and Samyn fell in love and decided to work together. Among these is 'The Godlove Museum,' their newest project, which is 'A series of web-based artworks that mix the personal lives of the authors and political and social commentary with the mythical texts of the Bible,' with references to the War on Terror. These and other projects are linked on Furtherfield's site and are introduced by a major, two-part illustrated interview conducted by Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X). - Angela Moreno