Genesis was made before we met physically. It was
intended as a presentation of us joining forces. It tells about the
godlike meeting of souls that we experienced during those days. We
did not know at the time that this was going to be the start of a
series. We just picked the name Genesis because it was about the
start of Entropy8Zuper! and left the rest of that part of the Bible
for what it was. Later we came back to Genesis with Eden.Garden 1.0
and we have discussed doing something with the idea of the flood as
well.
The music in the beginnning is from the Messe in B Minor by
J.S. Bach conducted by the splendid Nikolaus Harnoncourt and
featuring an almost orgasmic Kyrie duet. We found this coinciding of
divine and carnal ecstasy very appealing. Maybe we mistook cyberspace
for heaven.
In any case, it was by making Genesis that we realize
how well our skills and talents complimented each other. We trusted
each other perfectly and thought as one brain.
The second scene of
Genesis is a tribute to the place where we met, an artists group
called Hell, again not without religious connotations.
Then there is
the storm with Auriea and Michael as saints and a sample from a band
we had bonded over: Sonic Youth.
In the ocean, we start playing with
your cursor, a ting we are very fond of doing. The cursor represents
your hand. Playing with it is like touching. When you get caught by
the upper hand (a scan of Michaels hand holding an actual 'real-size'
cardboard version of the famous Netscape pointing finger cursor
-later this cardboard was sent to New York as a present; during the
making of it, Michael cut a hole in his favorite pants and once again
curs the analogue) you end up on the beach, which is like a
mini-portfolio, where things developed in the ocean have stranded and
are available for your amusement. To get to the Ecstasy scene, you
need to go down into the dark depths of the Ocean. Up until this very
day, not many computers can handle the Dynamic HTML in this scene
very well, especially not when you heighten the ecstasy by typing
madly on the keyboard -a thing Auriea and Michael ended up doing
quite frequently during those days...
The orchid was a symbol of our
shameless embrace of the banality of our divine
lust.
Entropy8zuper.org was launched with Genesis and Closer on the
day we first met in the flesh. In room 222 in the San Francisco
Triton hotel. On Auriea's cute and rare tiny Japanese Apple Powerbook
2400.

THE END
An Entropy8Zuper! production.

After
Auriea moved to Belgium, we thought it was appropriate to make a
piece called Exodus. About leaving the places that held us down and
arriving in each others Milk and Honey.
Obviously it starts with the
end, the end of our previous lives. And a quote from James Bond, "You
only live twice", since we both had left the life that we thought we
were going to have for the rest of our lives, since we had both
betrayed the person we had promised eternal loyalty to.
The empty
chair in scene two, the Waiting Room scene, is Auriea's chair in her
apartment in New York as seen through her web cam. The little images
surrounding it are from webcams too.
Airplanes had become part of
the network of technology that connected Auriea and Michael. So the
site has a tribute to them. The soundtrack is a sample from Bjork's
The Hunter, a song Michael played over and over again when he was
preparing things for Auriea's arrival, in the car commuting between
his ex-home and family where he still lived and the apartment in Gent
that he and Auriea were going to share. "If travel is searching and
home has been found, I'm not stopping. I'm going hunting. I'm the
hunter. I'll bring back the goods. But I don't know when." I'm going
hunting, I'm the hunter, I'm the hunter, I'm the hunter.


Like all books in The Godlove Museum, Exodus ends with a red(dish)
"Ecstasy" scene. This one features five cursors, one for every
finger. When you hold the mouse button down, the fingers close. When
you release it, they open. It is one of our many attempts of having a
physical contact with the pixels, of touching the digital skin. The
cursors represent your hand as it has been teleported into the
virtual space on the screen. A space that is made up of love and lust
and sex and honey dripping dripping. Bees bees bees like the
molecules of your body. Touching touching everything. Indecent
behavior. Melting.

Having had a love/hate relationship with James
Bond all her life, You Only Live Twice is Auriea's favorite Bond
film. 

After Genesis, about the birth, and Exodus,
about leaving one life to start another, Leviticus is about the rules
and customs, and the conflicts with them, and the sacrifices one has
to make if one wants to make a new life for oneself. It is the piece
that sticks most closely to the Bible text of the three. We actually
read the Bible before working on it. And the Book still had a lot to
say about our own lives. Or we could make it say a lot about our own
lives.
Leviticus starts with a quote from Genesis: the "biting"
frame borders. And though these make the existence of the lambs
difficult, it is ultimately the users who needs to sacrifice them in
order to proceed. After which Genesis is quoted again. But when the
meeting of hands was glorious in Genesis, it becomes a much less
stable thing in Leviticus. Many factors are trying to prevent this
meeting, which I guess is the general theme of our Leviticus. Many of
those factors are not external but have become part of our being. We
are both products of our environments and as such represent its views
and morals. It took us a while to discover that a lot of the
conflicts we had amongst ourselves, were simply cultural differences
that were caused by the programming of our minds by the
socio-political environment we had lived in up until that day. On top
of that came the practical difficulties like trying to get Auriea to
stay in Belgium legally, which caused us a great deal of frustration.
Not in the least because we were internet beings: we had already
abondonned the concept of country borders altogether and now we were
beamed back down to earth where all sorts of old rules still applied.
The text on this scene is from one of the many documents involved in
Auriea's residency. The spoken quotes from Leviticus were borrowed
from the Audio Bible web site. The drum sound is from Jarboe.
After
making the hands touch three times, a long non-interactive sequence
starts. The Sun and the Moon  meet as throbbing hearts. The Sun and
the Moon represent Auriea and Michaël. Auriea has always felt this
personal association with fire and the sun and Michaël has always
consider himself related to the moon. This was one of many
"coincidences" that came to the surface when we met. After that you
get the recipe for preparing a heart. The heart in the movie is
actually a pig's heart that we had bought in the local supermarket
and sown bock together, a bloody affair. We did not eat this one. We
only managed to swallow some chicken hearts in our research, I'm
afraid to say. The love incantation is a sample from Lamb(!).
The
next scene is expanded from a eufimism that is used in Leviticus for
menstruation: her flowers were upon her. As you can imagine, in
Leviticus, there are some rules involved with this frightening aspect
of the female body. "And if any man lie with her at all, and her
flowers be upon him, he shall be unclean seven days; and all the bed
whereon he lieth shall be unclean." (15:24) We tought this was very
romantic and sexy. So we chose orchids to represent blood flowers.
The text tells the tragic story of us leaving our previous lives and
really shouldn't be read by sensitive souls. Again, the music is
based on a Jarboe sample. I guess we felt Jarboe's music was very
Leviticus...
Next scene is the chewing of the heart (We covered our
faces with oil to record this footage). The background for this is a
towel with flowers upon it. The pump machine and memory clouds with
Diamanda Galas screaming Leviticus: "Unclean!" Click the machine and
now it is your turn to bring the Sun and the Moon together. A nuclear
explosion -fascinatingly beautiful- leads to the Ecstasy.
Scans of
parts of our body, feathers and whithered Tiger Lilly leaves. And our
cover of the infamous Serge Gainsbourg hit, "Je t'aime, moi non plus"
(previously covered by Nick Cave and Anity Lane as "I love you, nor
do I"). A song about l'amour physique that contains lines about
coming in between a woman's kidneys and other Leviticus related
subject matter.
In the end, Leviticus is probably most of all about
the conflicts Auriea and Michaël have within themselves, having both
commited such a horrible crime and the guilt that is caused by the
joy this crime brings us.

Sixteenpages.net was made as a
response to a question from Andreas Broegger, asking us to create a
project for Hvedekorn, a not-for-profit Danish quarterly magazine and
web site for art and poetry. This project would consist of anywhere
between 1 and 16 pages in the magazine as well as any number of
megabytes on line.So we challenged Andreas: "Ok, we'll take the 16
pages out of your magazine and teleport them to the net because The
truth is in here." To which he responded: "Ok, and you get the money
we save by not having to print those 16 pages."Sixteenpages.net is a
search engine interface and www portal. It covers the complete
universe, since it has sections for all four elements and their
corresponding directions of the wind, human organs and gods. Each
leading to four portals from where you can start your journey,
sixteen in total. Technically, the interface is by no means perfect.
It will not work without your cooperation.Michaël Samyn & Auriea
Harvey, Entropy8Zuper!

SFMOMA commissioned us to do a piece for their 2001 "010101: Art in
Technological Times" exhibition. The budget was 12,000 US Dollars and
after much deliberation we decided to use it research a technology that
we had known very little of up until then: interactive 3D.

We wanted to use this technology to make simulated action figures of
ourselves, something we had wanted to do for a long time but never found
the time for. At first we thought about making an interactive sex
application where the user could manipulate our action figures and move
them into poses of the Kama Sutra. But then there was the desire to do
something with the Garden of Eden, an aspect of Genesis that we had
forgotten when we were doing ours.

After many many many hours, days and months of research we discovered
a technology that would allow us to use the principles developed earlier
for Michaël's Websinger application, to a 3D world. The Websinger analyzes
HTML documents and represents them as experimental music. This analyzing
of the code of the web was of particular interest to us because it was a
time when time was starting to chew away parts of the web. New browsers
appeared than were incompatible with old ones, effectlively making part
of the web disappear. We were suddenly confronted with death and decay
in a space that was supposed to be endless. So as an experiment, we
decided to make a whole new kind of browser that wasn't backwards
compatible with anything but that still used the same code as its source
of inspiration. Yes, visualizing this code is an act of creation, turning
the browser into a God.

Here's some of the blurb we wrote at the time:

As a sequel to the 'Genesis' chapter on our site, we went back and visited
the Garden of Eden. "Eden.Garden 1.0" is another way to look at the data
one can find on the Internet. Just like a web browser, Eden.Garden
analyzes the code of a document and renders it visible (and audible).
Unlike a traditional standards-compliant browser, Eden.Garden renders
those documents as scenes in the idyllic (or not so idyllic) setting of
the Garden of Eden, as a 3d environment through which the user can navigate.
We are there as Adam and Eve, dancing to the rhythm of the code. When a
visitor types in a URL and presses the button they set the hand of God
(the browser) in motion. Every location becomes a new environment full
of life. 

This project started as an idea to 'teleport' ourselves into the networked
space. We expanded the idea to show how this new place might look like to
our digital selves.

It is not unthinkable for visitors to feed the machine their own HTML
as building blocks to create their ideal environment... bringing us
all one step closer to Bruce Sterling's "Memory Palaces" (from the
book "Holy Fire"... we highly reccommend it :D) That among other
things: The Web Singer (by Zuper! inspired by the Web Stalker by IOD),
Quake, Tekken, the KamaSutra, online gaming and skinning communities,
and miscellaneous operatic and painterly sources were endless inspiration
for this project.

Eden.Garden is Javascript for 'Garden of Eden' (Javascript is a
browser-based programming language used heavily in this project for
text parsing).
This is the start of a huge project, hence the version number in the
name. Future versions will take advantage of advances in technology
and our growing knowledge in the fields of 3d and real time environment
programming.

[text from the site] 
The Garden of Eden works like a browser. You feed it a URL and it
interprets the data. The text becomes the engine that drives the dance
of the main characters. And the code defines the world. HEAD defines
the sky: SCRIPT is sunny, META is gloomy, STYLE is rainy. Javascript
elements define the things in the sky: var is a parrot, function is a pigeon,
if is an eagle, and window.open is a dragon. TITLE is the sun and /TITLE the
moon. A frameset page will render as a desert, while a page with a BODY tag
will have a grassy floor. In the desert, a NOFRAMES is rendered as a
building and a FRAME SRC as a clickable Belly Dancer. FONT tags show up
as rabbits, varying in size according to FONT SIZE specification in the HTML
document. An EMBED tag is an orange elephant, an OBJECT tag a yellow one. A
FORM becomes a building. !DOCTYPE is a Mountain. A DIV is a metal robot,
while a LAYER is a golden robot. A HR is a very long electric line. Tables
are forests, TD a wide tree, TR a thin one and TH a short one. BRs are
bushes in random sizes. An A HREF is a clickable Buffalo. A P tag is a
flower and an IMG tag a butterfly. These two vary according to alignment
settings. The dreaded BLINK tag is rendered as a vulcano, a BLOCKQUOTE as
a tiger and a CENTER as a replica of a fountain found here in Gent, Belgium.
A Java APPLET shows up as a monkey, A NAME tags as peacocks and every LI
(list item) as a flamingo. Comments are zebras.

The moves Adam and Eve make are based on the traditional moves of
characters in 3D games, like Quake3Arena: death1, death2, death3, taunt,
weapon attack, melee attack, change weapon, weapon idle, melee idle,
crouched walk, walk, run, backpedal, swim, jump forward, jump forward-land,
jump backward, jump backward-land, standing idle, crouched idle, turn in
place. Only we have replaced the traditionally violent attack gestures
from the games by gestures of pillow fights and tickling.
Each letter of the alphabet represents a move. The letters on the left
side of a computer keyboard are Eve's moves, the letters on the right
side those of Adam.

womanonfire: hello there
womanonfire: i was just about to send you another email
womanonfire: wondering if that is you that i see in the distance
zuper: by the way: hello auriea it is SO NICE TO SEE YOU I almost have tears in my eyes
womanonfire: between the green lines of the grid
zuper: yes it is me
womanonfire: i wonder wht your voice is like
zuper: my voice?
zuper: let's try
zuper: it's weird to talk in a silent office at night
womanonfire: yes
womanonfire: i can just barely make you out
womanonfire: how fitting
womanonfire: it sounds so far away but you feel so close
zuper: yes
zuper: i am close
zuper: i don't understand myself
womanonfire: i will write you a very long letter tonight
zuper: I'm falling in love with a 160x120 pixel video...
zuper: Yes please write me a long letter
womanonfire: it is dificult for me here right now
zuper: why is it difficult?
womanonfire: i was just about to write one about this
womanonfire: because i love you
zuper: ...
womanonfire: seems so 
womanonfire: strange
womanonfire: maybe it is lust
womanonfire: i cant tell anymore
zuper: pixellust?
womanonfire: right
zuper: I my case only ASCIIlust...
womanonfire: but i want to make a home for us
womanonfire: in the network
zuper: Have you read Sterlings 'Holy Fire'?
womanonfire: no
zuper: They have places called 'Memory Palaces' on the net
zuper: where they keep all their souvenirs and where people can meet
womanonfire: i just heard you that time
womanonfire: !
zuper: in dutch!
womanonfire: yes!
zuper: (private) I realised today that I have never been in love with somebody who doesn't speak Dutch before.
womanonfire -> zuper: i have never been in love with someone in another country before
zuper: (private) I have never been in love with someone with green dreadlocks before
zuper: (private) let alone black skin
womanonfire -> zuper: yes i hope you wiwll like my skin
zuper: (private) I already do.
womanonfire -> zuper: :)
zuper: (private) Your voice sounded higher than I had imagined...
zuper: (private) (What did I imagine then??)
womanonfire: i long to hear your voice in my ear
zuper: (private) 
zuper: (private) 
zuper: (private) 
womanonfire: the sound is a bit distorted with these things
zuper: (private) yes
womanonfire: if no one was around me here
zuper: (private) the image is distorted too
womanonfire: i would speak to you
zuper: (private) but that's ok
womanonfire: yes!
womanonfire: these are all part of our relationship
womanonfire: these limitations
womanonfire: we must
zuper: (private) 26 letters, no sound, no image
womanonfire: learn new ways
zuper: (private) make DHTMLove to me...
womanonfire: i plan to
womanonfire: its all i want to do
womanonfire: tell eveyone i can no longer work for them
womanonfire: and spend all my time
womanonfire: DHTMLove
womanonfire: image!
zuper: image
zuper: (private) my favorite on fire
zuper: (private) i see
zuper: (private) I'm touching my monitor but it just doesn't feel like you...
zuper: (private) our eyes met
zuper: (private) youdidn't see that of course
womanonfire: i could feel it
zuper: (private) i wish i could type blindly
womanonfire: you are there
zuper: (private) yes
zuper: I'll make you a keyboard with a cast of my body
womanonfire: i am fondleing my keyboard
womanonfire: but it dosent feel like you
womanonfire: oh well the fragments we have are beautiful
zuper: why is a computer screen only 2D?
womanonfire: lack of foresight by the industry
zuper: your eyes
womanonfire: your words...............
womanonfire: your images.........
womanonfire -> zuper: i can hear your heartbeat
zuper: (private) you can?
womanonfire -> zuper: you should go get some sleep
womanonfire -> zuper: it must be late there
zuper: (private) yes it's almost 2 AM
zuper: (private) I can't bare the thought of going to bed without you
zuper: (private) I didn't want to become addicted
womanonfire -> zuper: now i am trembling
womanonfire -> zuper: no addiction 
zuper: (private) I can feel it
womanonfire -> zuper: i have to go
zuper: (private) ok
zuper: (private) you go
zuper: (private) i stay
zuper: (private) just one more cigarette
womanonfire -> zuper: just one more
womanonfire -> zuper: i will write you a long letter
zuper: (private) Yes write me a long letter
zuper: (private) We're here for each other
womanonfire -> zuper: yes
zuper: (private) goodnight, my dear
zuper: (private) kiss
womanonfire: (private) yes
womanonfire: (private) hold
zuper: (private) yes
womanonfire: disconnect only the software
zuper8: disconnect
zuper8: only
zuper8: the software
womanonfire: fade...
zuper8: fade...

Blazon

The layout and structure of our current homepage is based on heraldry.
We have a general fascination for symbolic ornaments. Heraldry is one of
those systems that combine beauty, mythology and information. We like
imagery to have meaning. We are not very fond of the trend in modern art
to obliterate or discredit the meaing of imagery. Instead we prefer to
add meaning to already very pregnant symbols. There is no defence
against the baroque.
The similarity between the shield and motto combination of blazons and
icons and their name on a computer desktop was quite striking to us.
The Blazon homepage is a place where a lot of things are happening. We
a fantasy about putting our whole site into the Blazon movie up to the
point where a browser would not be required anymore to view our work.
Just a Flash player or an executable provided by us would do, while the
site would remain accessible through a web browser.
We have built Wirefire into Blazon. There is a way to access our
portfolio database built into The Close Corporation. Our live webcam
images are there when you roll over the Entropy8 and Zuper! shields.
There is even a real time chat application in the Contact section
(click on Talk), where you can also subscribe to our mailing list
(Dust) and send us an email message.
Blazon contains an XML sockets client which connects all users
currently on our home page to each other in real time. This
architecture is used for the chat, representing the present visitors
and representing their clicks. All of these things are visible to all
users who are looking at the home page at the same time. In a way,
the visitors create the home page, the spectators create the spectacle.
The live clicks on the shields from any user are represented by white
pulsating dots. We also log these clicks and represent the results on
the shields. At the time of writing, hexagons represent the average
number of clicks per day on every shield. This is a way for everyone
to monitor acces to our server (or at least to the home page).
Furthermore we keep track of the number of people who are looking at
this page. Each user has been represented by a bee and later, after the
WTC bombing, as the Arab word for Peace. The number of bees/peace equals
the number of people looking at this page. Note that at this time the
movement of the bees is completely random and has nothing to do with
the activity of the users. Later we will want to represent each user by
a bee and maybe allow for regular visitors to have there own avatar.
Combining this with the already present chat, would turn our modest
home page into a full blown graphic chat application. But would you
notice that without flashy advertising for vaporware?

Blazon is set up in a very modular way. There are seperate layers for
foreground, background, click history and visitor count. All of these
can be easily replaced by other movies. As a result our home page
changes often.

                        
Closer

Closer is our old information section. It still contains
some unique
bits of information, like the credits pertaining to
different projects.

We are seen split in two. Because this was one
of the first meta-sites we made for Entropy8Zuper.org, and it was
made while we were still living far apart the symbolism of the aplit
screen was meant as a way to describe us as two things which online
are one. And when we wrote our Philosophy out for the first time it
was like putting our foot down to not make those same compromises in
our vision that we've made in the past. Together we at last had the
strength to scratch away the myopic vision of those who would hire
us. They will hire us and they will pay and they will see that it is
good.

Entropy8zuper! is committed to delivering fullblown
interactive multimedia to the web. We are not compromising on
anything. Our work is not compatible with any old browser. The
network is a social place. A place where people live and love and cry
and play. Entropy8zuper! makes digital environments for people:
emotional, engaging, entertaining. 
Information technology is not
the future. We are.

This piece was commissioned
by Olia Lialina for het Last Real Net art Museum. She asked many
artists and designers to create a version of her famous "My Boyfriend
cam back from the War" web site, in another medium. She chose us to
do a Flash version.
The movie consists of the the images from the
original website and its text read out loud by Auriea and Michaël. It
is also available as a screensaver.
The background music loop is
made with a sample from a piece by Jean Sibelius.

Like so many
projects we've worked on elements from this haunt us and end up
remixed in Wirefire and in our daily ways of speaking. 

Oh, how
many times has Auriea asked Michael to marry her and he always says
"No, better next month after holidays and the weather must be better.
Yes next month. I'm happy now..." ?
How often does Michael reach for
Auriea and whisper teasingly "Kiss Me ... tomorrow!" ?

On mouse over:
Imagine yourself floating.
                    

PORTFOLIO
We have huge portfolio stored in a MySQL database that contains
commercial and personal projects and drafts by Entropy8, Zuper!,
Group Z Belgium and of course Entropy8Zuper! Currently, though, the
only way to access this database is through the random access in The
Close Corporation on our homepage. But we have plans for more
efficient systems.

                    

The first page of
Skinonskinonskin was made by Michaël the day after we had our first
sexual encounter in a chat application. Parts of this chat session
can be found in the Words page of Skinonskinonskin. The next day,
Auriea responded with Smoke. Skinonskinsonskin became our refuge in
the period when we were falling in love through the network. When
chat and email proved too restrictive, we resorted to Dynamic HTML to
express our feelings and desires, in an attempt to touch the
other.

Skinonskinonskin I was published on the hell.com server.
After we stepped down as active members of this artists' community,
we released Skinonskinonskin II on our own server. Since the release
of the first version, the site had kept developing. We still needed
to communicate to each other. So these later developments were added
to the first when we re-released the site. We haven't added much to
Skinonskinonskin since we have been living together, but the
possibility of future additions is not excluded.

Skinonskinonskin
tells the story of our love. From the first lusty feelings through
the doubt and the pain, the anger and the disappointments. Through
the longing and desire, the memories of beautiful hours spent
together and the betrayal of love. The clash of responsibilities and
duties and promises with the power of passion, love and destiny.
Skinonskinonskin testifies to our happiest moments and also to our
deepest pain. It is very hard to browse through it indifferently.
Even for us.

Skinonskinonskin was at first developed in secret in
a protected folder on the hell.com server, called SeaSideMotel. Later
we decided that some people might enjoy seeing these pages. But as
they were so personal, we had not desire to make it too easy to see
them. First we made a questionnaire that the user needed to go
through before being able to access the site. Ultimately we released
the site as a pay per view event on the hell.com server. This was a
good way to "keep the riff raff out" while also an experiment with
e-commerce. Would people be willing to pay to see a web site? Just
like they pay for the cinema, renting a video or seeing a concert?
The answer was no. It was only because hell.com had such a massive
amount of hits, that we made any money. When we released
Skinonskinonskin II on our own server, hardly anyone visited it. It
was an interesting experiment, offering our visitors the opportunity
to support the artists directly rather than letting them compromise
the quality of their work by having to find other sources of income.
Interestingly, the experiment has failed. Of the 500 or so visitors
that visit our web site daily, about 100 people have signed up in the
year that Skinonskinonskin II has been on line. People are simply not
willing to pay for access to artists' web sites.
                    

A secret project by Michaël initially
developed to become his hidden alter ego. Or his Portrait of Dorian
Gray. A living organism that would be manipulated and transformed by
the visitors of the site and Michaël's darkest secrets. Now, as it
has stopped evolving, Groorg Groorg has become a living fossile. A
memory of a less glorious life. Maybe it should be killed. But we're
not sure if it can be killed. Maybe if we stop paying the Network
Solutions bills?

This site has not been publicized for a long time
and as a result it did not get any visitors. After a year or so, the
site was submitted anonimously to the Rhizome artbase as a test, a
secret response to Alex Galloway's request to submit some of our
Entropy8Zuper! work. But Groorg Groorg still hasn't appeared in the
Rhizome link list and as a result none of our other work has either.
The only link to Groorg Groorg on the net remains the one in our
Airport section. The reason why it is there is because Michaël is not
working on the site anymore and has no intention to do so, really. It
was started before completion of the merger between Michaël and
Auriea. And has become a relic to that time.
In the bubble that
appears when you open one of the creature's shields, you can see the
last 10 shots Michaël's web cam took at any given time. That part of
the site is still live. The sounds were all made by Michaël's mouth.