Development Intensive Talk March2026
Good morning. I'm Auriea Harvey. I started making art on the internet in the nineties, then designed videogames, and for the last few years I've been making sculpture from software. I model a form digitally, and then it has to become an object. Deepening this practise and questions about how sculptures are fabricated today are my research project. Most of my work, I print on my own 3d printers and my sculpture involve a lot of personal handwork. But...
I've now had three major experiences of fabrication involving other hands. The first was my first marble piece, made by Monumental Labs in New York. While it was being made I never saw it in person or touched it, and when they asked me what I wanted, I didn't know how to answer as I didn't speak the language of stone. All decisions were made via Whats App photos and video calls. At the time, this was a deeply unsatsifactory experience for me. But it did fulfill a desire I had to have a sculpture materialize someplace I could not go. Something deeply interesting to me because I believe digital sculpture solves the often inconvenient demand of having to move my body from one country to another, or having to spend a lot of money in shipping, money which I would prefer goes into the making of the sculpture itself.
The second was Edmonia Triumphalis. The figure was made by Johnson Atelier, at factory scale, and the cost and weight meant I had to compromise on the material: urethane foam with a hard coat, not stone and bronze as I'd wanted. But the installation itself, in Bozeman, Montana, was different. The fountain basin and the Triumphal arch are made of rammed earth. Basically the material is the earth itself. Tinworks Art commissioned it, and with Montana State University students, a local architect and a producer on their team, a whole community built it. I wasn't there, and I still felt part of it. I did go see the sculpture in progress in New Jersey and for the final install and opening festivities in Bozeman, and I'm glad I did. The teamwork made the dream work. But it took 2 years, the producer's sanity, and funding from the Via Art Fund to make it happen.
The third was Mother/Child, milled by robot at the Digital Stone Project in Garfagnana, in Tuscany, and finished by my hand. I was there, and I touched it. Working the marble myself is where I learned how to more directly tie the digital file to the process of CNC milling and it's where the questions behind this research began. It's also where I wrote my first apps, Tincture, Metope and Spolia.
Metope and Spolia
Metope is a relief-carving studio that runs in a browser. Its brushes displace a real height map, so what I paint is real depth that I can light, mill or print. Spolia is the collage plane, where scanned fragments sit in real 3D and weld, carve and overlap, the way spolia were reset into the Arch of Constantine. I built both with Claude, and the decisions are mine.
So my question is this: what if software could carry that knowledge between an artisan and me, so a form made here can be made by many hands somewhere else?
How can sculptors today collaborate and fabricate differently? My proposal is to use AI as a translation layer between digital craft and handcraft, so a form made in one place can be made by many hands in another, as true collaborators and not clients and vendors. My guiding principle is that human judgment must direct the tool, never the other way round.
The research lives in a wiki, built around seven questions. Some pages are still in progress. I'll take you through four.
First, the file. For me the file is the artwork. It's the model I spend months shaping, and every object comes from it. The figure for Edmonia Triumphalis was a file before it was anything else. It's also the least valued part of the art world: people want the marble or the bronze and treat the file as a receipt. And 3D AI is moving into exactly that place, the making of 3D forms. So I have to watch it closely, as a tool, not as a replacement.
Second, the hands. I've been saving makers on Instagram for years: 33 posts from 29 accounts, clustered in Italy, Egypt, Iran and South Asia, and almost nothing in Latin America, Africa or East Asia. So I went looking further and put them on a globe. (Drag the globe to turn it.) The strongest lead is Benin City, where a lost-wax guild could cast directly from a wax printed from my file. None of these people have been contacted yet. This is a map of who I'd like to meet.
Third, institutions. I don't yet know which ones, and I'm trying to start from what I can give them, not what I want from them.
This is the hardest part of the research. The question isn't whether an institution will host a work, it's what role it should play. I see three models. A host shows the work where it was made. A co-producer funds and arranges the making. A broker connects me to local fabricators and then steps back. Which would you trust, and what would make each one extractive? I'll put that to the roundtable tomorrow.
Last, what is best for humanity. My guide is the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV on AI and humanity. I can't summarize it in a minute. What I hold onto is that human conscience and judgment must remain the ones directing any technical process. In practice that means a maker should never have to become a technician for this to work.