Michael Samyn: About

Bio

Michaël Samyn (Belgian, b. 1968) is a digital artist who has worked in net art, video games and virtual reality.^,^,^, With Auriea Harvey he made net art as Entropy8Zuper! and games as Tale of Tales.^, Their work explores the hybrid nature of life after the internet and the place of the body in digital experience.

Samyn studied graphic design at Sint-Lucas in Ghent and founded the web design studio zuper.com in 1995.^, In 1999 he and Harvey met online as members of the hell.com artists collective, and their websites merged.^, That year they made skinonskinonskin on the collective's server. Samyn was then known online as Zuper!, and the pair's early online meetings later inspired a 2024 video poem by Sasha Stiles.

Samyn and Harvey founded Tale of Tales in 2002, and the studio produced nine interactive and multiplayer games.^, These include The Endless Forest (2005), in which players embody an animal, and The Graveyard (2008), in which they play an old woman about to die. In The Path (2009), players embody six teenage girls growing up. Luxuria Superbia won the IGF Nuovo prize in 2014. In 2016 Samyn was also listed among the artists in “MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture” at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

In 2015 Samyn began to focus on virtual reality. He and Harvey moved from Ghent to Rome in 2019. In 2025 they made the generative work Generato non creato for “Cure³”, a fundraiser for the charity Cure Parkinson's. Samyn had wanted to make generative art based on historical ornamentation.^, It reflects the view that digital objects, like holy relics, require faith.