Auriea Harvey + Michaël Samyn: City of Refuge

City of Refuge presents a major survey of recent works by Auriea Harvey + Michaël Samyn reflecting the couple’s diverse multimedia practice, which includes immersive installation, multichannel film, interactive software, video games, websites, 3D sculpture, poetry, and virtual reality.

Set against the backdrop of San Francisco, a global nexus for tech evangelism, City of Refuge invites audiences to consider innovation—Silicon Valley’s most persistent dogma—as part of a centuries-long tradition of religious revelation.

For the past ten years, Harvey + Samyn have quietly explored the relationship between spirituality and technology, specifically interrogating the symbols, rituals, and monuments of Western European Catholicism through LiDAR scanning and 3D modeling. With this media, they construct new virtual environments that place viewers at the heart of ritualistic religious experience. In City of Refuge, these environments leap off the screen and into the gallery, transforming Gray Area’s Grand Theater into an immersive techno-sanctum for the contemplation of—and perhaps an encounter with—divinity.

This exhibition is staged at the height of the artificial intelligence market bubble, in the moment when agentic infrastructure has been deployed at the worldwide scale of enterprise. Refined language models have taken an oracular position in society, and are widely used to forecast, imagine, and even define the future. In this context, City of Refuge looks back at the history of prophecy: from the Bible, to the industrial revolution, to the early days of Silicon Valley and the Internet. Through their works, Harvey and Samyn situate themselves among a milieu for whom prompting is prognostication. Here their intercession is a radical, spiritual act that questions fixed doctrine about who and what determine the destiny of our world.