This week, the Department of Communication and Media Studies at JCU welcomed Auriea Harvey for a lecture titled The Sacred Screen, part of the Spring 2026 edition of the event series Digital Delights & Disturbances (DDD).
After 30 years creating with digital media, through the browser wars, the rise and fall of net.art, indie games, NFTs, and now AI, artist Auriea Harvey has survived enough hype cycles to recognize a pattern. Each technological wave promised unmediated access to truth, democratization, or revolution. Each crashed, leaving behind the question: what actually endures? Drawing on Bruno Latour’s concept of the “image wars” and the acheiropoietic image (the sacred image “not made by human hands”), Harvey argues that we’ve misunderstood what makes images powerful. The acheiropoietic image isn’t powerful because it wasn’t made but because it asks to be believed in. What if all images, including digital ones, work this way? After watching platforms rise and fall, what remains is the practice itself and hope in the capacity to make images worthy of belief, to create cascades of meaning that survive the hype cycles. Harvey’s practice moves fluidly between internet art, game design, 3D scanning, digital sculpture, and physical materiality, she treats algorithms with the same reverence as traditional materials. By refusing to specialize, she’s learned that images don’t derive power from their medium or their claim to unmediated truth. They work by connecting to other images, by creating cascades of meaningful interaction with a public, by asking to be believed in. The talk weaved together personal narrative, art practice, and tech/art history to argue that in facing a crisis of fabricated images we are finally being forced to remember how images actually work. Auriea Harvey (b. 1971 USA/BE) is an artist based in Rome. A pioneer in Internet based art since the early days of the World Wide Web, Harvey co-founded the acclaimed studio Tale of Tales with Michael Samyn, where they created groundbreaking videogame experiences that explored the poetic possibilities of digital media. Today she brings a synthesis of mythology, autobiography, and art historical reference to a practice that spans virtual and tangible works: sculpture, drawings, simulations, and installations. Her work can be found in collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Walker Art Center, KADIST Collection, and Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology.
The full lecture is available for viewing here: