Body becomes vessel
a tragic journey births the future.
This augmented reality experience brings the Black Ship to life through your device's camera. Point your camera at the mural image to reveal the digital sculpture.
hrough shadow, sculpture, and augmented reality, Black Ship constructs a contemporary reliquary for digital age remembrance. Harvey initiated the work by engaging early Midjourney AI in dialogue about historical atrocity, asking an "inhuman system about something inhumane." The resulting conceptual prototypes, depicting bodies merged with transatlantic slave ships, evolve from digital speculation into material presence. Harvey draws parallels between ancient sacred practices and contemporary technologies, creating spaces where the virtual and physical hold collective memory.
About the Artist
AI inspiration
Black Ship sculpture
uriea Harvey is a pioneering digital artist whose work bridges the ancient and contemporary, the sacred and technological. Based in Rome, she explores themes of memory, spirituality, and digital embodiment through sculpture and hybrid reality installations. Her practice unites technology, collective memory and personal transformation, drawing connections between historical practices of remembrance and our digital age's capacity for creating sacred spaces.
"Excerpts from a dialog (an argument) I am having with the algorithm about Slave Ships. I am seeking a diagram of a ship in which after generations of use one can no longer distinguish between the humans and the ship itself."
"I use prompt based AI not for the images as an end unto themselves but as ideation. In this series I am describing an idea that is both literal: "a ship" and an attempt to visualise how what that ship holds can effect it's outward appearance. In the end I select outputs as concept art for 3d models and texture maps which I will create for a final sculpture."
"While the AI-generated images sparked my initial aesthetic directions, the final sculpture emerged from my own vision: a mother cradling her child formed from the merger of human forms and vessel, accompanied by a digital sea derived from a mythical sea creature I scanned at the Louvre. My hope was to create a dialogue between machine imagination and personal interpretation of the slave ship's legacy."
Black Ship, 2024
3D printed composite PLA wood, lead, epoxy clay, clay, steel, UV resin, sisal twine
35 x 21.65 x 8.07 in / 89 x 55 x 20.5 cm
