G.H. Hovagimyan
was born 1950 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. I n 1972 He received a B.F.A from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He is a professor at
the School of Visual Arts in the MFA Computer Arts Department. He lives and works
in New York City
Video Performances 1970's – 80's
In the 1970's GH, along with many other young artists started doing performance art that was influenced by pop culture and mass media. He mixed media and would move from video to video-performance art to text based drawings, using slides, audio tapes, his voice etc.
Often these works would use pop media structures such as rock song lyrics, advertising slogans, political texts, literary texts etc. Most of his early works were done in Ad Hoc temporary exhibition spaces. Very little documentation survives.
Being a young artist of modest means he often did his punk performance art within the context of other people's projects. This was the case with Richard Serra's 1974 video, The Prisoner's Dilemma where he played a street punk. Spalding Grey, a young unknown actor at the time, was the other suspect caught by the police. Richard Scheckner played the interrogator. The whole performance was improvisational. The piece was done as video-performance. The resulting videotape has recently been shown at PS1 in Queens and was reviewed in the New York Times.
In 1979 he played a terrorist bomb maker in Scott B & Beth B's underground film, The Offenders.
He also created a short drumming piece for the sound track of the film. At that time many Punk artist including GH were performing in bands.
In 1979 He played a sleazy drug dealer in another underground film, The Deadly Art of Survival by Charlie Ahearn. For another 1979 video, Deep Gossip by Les Levine, he spoke candidly about the art world and his struggles as a young artist.
The parts he played in these underground film/videos were more performance art then traditional acting. One might say they were more acting out then acting. They involved writing but in a very unorthodox manner. For some pieces, he wrote a script, for others an outline of what he might say while improvising the actual piece.
He was able to do his own performance piece called Rich Sucker Rap in 1978 as part of a video documentary by Davidson Gigliotti about New York performance art called Chant Acapella. The piece was very confrontational and caused quite a stir when it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the Video Views exhibition in 1980.
These early video works became the basis for his later pieces using video in a new media and digital format.
Internet and video
In 1993 he became interested in working with computers. A short while later, he was invited by Remo Campopiano to join artnetweb, one of the first artists' collaborative internet websites in New York. Around 1994 he did his first internet video piece called:
video-affirmations http://artnetweb.com/projects/fauxcon/vid_aff.html .
At the time most people were connecting
to the Internet via modems. The challenge was to make a video work that
functioned within those restrictions.
He made very small digitized Quicktime videos that appeared as clickable photographs. The
conceptual structure for the video was to have people read new age affirmations
of their choice. To heighten the
video He painted their faces in the manner of Modernist painters such as
Picasso. The Quicktimes were set
in a row and if one clicked on them one after another it was possible to have a
chorus of reciting characters!
In 1995 he was invited by Pseudo (a New York internet video site) to do a weekly talk show. This involved live streaming of audio and video that was also archived for later access. He called the show Art Dirt. The show involved not only a round table discussion using Real Media streamed video, but an online chat component. The show was the first of its kind and the archived realAudio and realVideo files are now in the Walker Art Centers digital study archives and can be accessed via web browser at:
<http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/dasc/artdirt/>.
The show continued until 1998.
In 1996 he began to start experimenting with primitive web video-conferencing (Cu See Me). At that time artnetweb was invited to create a web exhibition for the Vera List Visual Arts Center at MIT in Boston. He proposed to do a series of live web jams that involved remote video performance streamed over the web plus live streamed audio mixing; This involved contacting artists from around the world using the internet and getting them to Jam or mix their work live via the web. The title of the exhibition was Port-MIT.
This exhibition is generally accepted as the historical starting point of net
art. The Whitney Museums' web portal ArtPort has put up a historical timeline of net art:
<http://www.stunned.org/imma/press/Whitney%20Artport%20Resources%20%20Net%20Art%20Exhibitions.htm>
It begins with PORT-MIT in 1997.
His piece for this
exhibition was called Art Dirt Im-Port. Indeed, for the opening of the PORT-MIT
exhibition he was in Aix-en-Provence, France doing a workshop. He was able to
stream his performance as well as mixing those of others participating around
the world. For the closing of the exhibition he was in Boston doing a live mix
web jam bracketing the whole show as it were.
Also in 1996 he began
collaborating with Peter Sinclair, a sound artist who lives in Marseille, They
began doing performance and installation works. The resultant work, SoaPOPera for Laptops was performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Marseille, France.
After Pseudo, in 1998, he
moved over to The Thing to do another video streamed talk show called Collider. He was
the crew, setting up the cameras, lighting the set, doing the camera switching,
encoding the show etc. This was a sort of one-man band approach. He bought a
cheap remote control A/B video switcher from radio shack. This allowed him to
switch sources with a remote control. He also used his digital still camera as
an additional video source. Holding it in his hand and moving it around. He
could switch from a live video feed coming from the photo camera to a preloaded
slide show or a still image also on the same still camera. Essentially he was
video jamming on the fly. The webcast show Collider ran from 1998-2000.
Video as Interface / CICV
In 2000 Peter Sinclair and GH won a
residency at the CICV (Pierre Schaefer International Center for the Creation of
Video) in Belfort, France. http://www.cicv.fr This was to develop a work called
Heartbreak Hotel. They pushed the parameters of video both within the work and
within a documentary webcast/ Interview about their work. In the piece Heartbreak
Hotel they used a video tracking
software called BigEye developed at the Steim<http://www.steim.org>.
For Heartbreak Hotel, they developed a bottom lit opaque glass tabletop
that functioned as a user interface. The interface was housed in a custom-
designed, sound proofed room that had eight loud speakers embedded in the
walls(7) and ceiling(1). Painted
plaster figurines with colored dots on the bottom were placed on the glass
tabletop. A video camera was
housed in the table base, scanning the glass top. It tracked the movements of
the colored dots on the bottom of each figure. Each figure represented a character with a different
synthetic voice. As the figurines
(dots) were moved around the table top the corresponding voices would move
around in the space using 8 speaker sound spatialization software. If two figurines were moved close to
one another the BigEye software would see this and trigger conversations
between the two characters.
The actual conversations were selected texts snippets, assembled on the
fly and fed into the voice synthesizer for each character. The underlying thematic database was
created by culling texts from various books, magazines, the Bible and so on to
create realistic and individual manners of speaking for each character.
|
Interface Heartbreak Hotel |
During their CICV
residency they were asked to do a live streamed video interview/ webcast
talking about their work. They used the in-house video facilities to create a
blue screen background with the two of them seated in front of the screen. Superimposed on the blue screen were
the animated lips from the screen of a laptop computer. This represented a
synthetic interviewer that asked us questions using a synthetic voice, synched
to the lips.
The CICV interview
involved a bit of video
chicanery. Peter and GH wrote out
two different types of answers/ essays about their work beforehand. One was a
straightforward technical description of the work process, the other a
critical, philosophical and art historical essay. They then selected key
phrases and words from each of the essays and ran them through a piece of
software called a poetry
generator. They used the resulting mixed sentences as answers to the questions
the synthetic interviewer(lips) posed to each artist in turn. The video itself has several levels of
layered complexity. Starting from a traditional art video interview with simple
special effects. They streamed this over the internet while creating perhaps
the first software robot synthetic interviewer. The escalation of having the
software (poetry generator) actually create the scripted answers pushed this
form beyond normal expectations.
Unfortunately for the English speaking world, the piece was done in
French. An edited flash movie can be accessed via the web on their common web site:
< http://nujus.net/flash/CICV_web320_56k.swf>
|
Still from CICV
interview |
PDA Video - Internet Surveillance
In 2000 and 2001 GH began
to explore the idea of video-performance in Cyberspace. He went back to a form he had been working with in the 1970's, punk performance art made specifically for video. He thought to expand this idea through a series of video-performance pieces for the web and for PDA's or Palm Pilot's. His first performance piece of this type, EntertainMe, was a simple rant confrontation with a video camera. Indeed, he used a cheap low-resolution webcam and it's recording software to create black and white compressed video performance. Rather than go for large sized files and full motion, full
color video, He decided to work in the opposite direction and explore the
unique effects to be had by working within the restrictions of digital
video. The piece EntertainMe, along with two other pieces, Who Pays , and End of America were
encoded using special software for Palm Pilots. Entertain Me, WhoPays and End of America were
presented online for a web exhibition called [re]distributions <http://www.voyd.com/ia/>. The exhibition is also referenced on the Whitney Museum of American Art's net.art historical timeline as an important exhibition.
<http://www.whitney.org/artport/resources/netartexhibitions.shtml
>
In 2001 he used his video piece
EntertainMe in the form of a Quicktime movie, as part of a weekend long occupation/disruption by a group of artists called verbal group. This occurred in an artists' loft that was wired for remote audio and video voyeurism. Every area of the loft as well as all telephone conversations were accessible to the public via the web. All of the artists looked for ways to disrupt the web voyeurs expectations. The name of the exhibition/event was aptly named the Warhol Hijack. One of the most popular voyeur webcam
had been placed inside a toilet bowl. All of the cameras positioned throughout
the loft had motion detectors. The camera inside the toilet bowl had an
additional infrared sensor. Any
movement near a camera activated it and bumped it up the hierarchy of live
feeds being streamed out to the web. If there was any movement in the toilet
bowl it immediately became the soul video being sent out. He used this peculiarity to his
advantage by placing a folded laptop computer over the toilet with its display
screen facing the webcam. He looped the video of EntertainMe so that it
repeatedly played. This caused the video system to only play the toilet cam
essentially foiling the remote voyeurs expectations.
Artist Video-Net Based Performance
In 2002 Peter Sinclair and GH developed a new
interactive, immersive sound installation called Shooter.
Shooter explores the theme of immersion
in games. The visitor enters the chamber and is surrounded by the ambient
sounds of a gaming arcade. In the center, a mirrored cube emits laser beams
that weave a web throughout the space. Upon tripping a laser, visitors find
themselves incorporated into the game, experiencing what it feels like to be
the target. As with any game, you always lose.
Also in 2002 GH received a fellowship from Franklin Furnace as part of its program The Future of the Present. This was to create a two-way live video performance piece, Brecht Machine, for the Internet. The work involved coding special software that would do a two way live video feed and at the same do speech-to-text that would translate what was said from one language to another and then speak the translated text in the other language using a synthetic voice. He used a combination of off-the-shelf software (IBM ViaVoice), appleScript, web translation, and client local hard drive text-to-speech to create this event. The piece was performed simultaneously in Split, Croatia and New York City for the Split Film Festival.
Interactive DVD Ð Slow Scan Video
In 2003 he started to
develop a new work around the idea of a Smart House and Smart Objects. He
thought to do a video-performance as a starting point of an investigation. He
approached the video as a developmental sketch rather than a completed work.
For the piece Smart House , he
wrote the dialog for himself and the synthetic voice. He also did story boards,
shot the video and performed in the piece. For post-production he edited the video using Final Cut Pro.
He also did a unique morphing animation of objects rearranging themselves on a
table. This was shot with a digital still camera. He then programmed an interactive DVD using DVD studio Pro.
Also in 2003 he and Peter Sinclair created a common web site portal for their collaborative works called nujus http://nujus.net . The front page accesses two web cams, one in Marseille, France where Peter lives and one with a view of lower Manhattan where GH reside. They rest side by side and are motion jpegs with a very slow refresh rate. Since the two countries are six hours apart and have different climates, the comparison of the frames over the period of a year can be quite nuanced and interesting.
Early Internet
Works
In 1993 GH bought his first computer. At the time there was an Internet but no world wide web. He joined 3 online (bbs) communities; Echo-nyc, the thing and AOL. He quickly dumped AOL because it was too middle-of-the-road. Echo was fairly interesting because it came out of NYU and had a series of intelligent discussion boards. He had the feeling with ECHO that much of the discourse was generated from the concerns of the faculty and students. This made it hermetic and after a while he signed off ECHO. The thing (thing bbs) seemed to be the most viable community for him. The Thing was started by Wolfgang Staehle. GH knew him from his East Village punk days. The Thing was a refuge for a number of artists who were looking for alternatives to the prevalent post-modernist styles and discourse in the art scene.
In 1994 he did his first artwork on the Internet. It was called BKPC or Barbie and Ken Politically Correct. The work was a series of staged photographic vignettes featuring a white Barbie doll and a Black Ken doll. He scanned the photos and uploaded them onto the thing; one a week for 12 weeks, giving members of the thing bbs a chance to download the work onto their hard drive. One day he was gallery hopping in SOHO (which was the gallery district in New York at the time), and he happened into a gallery called TZ'Art. The gallery showed some interesting works. He was interested in showing with them but he knew they had all their artists and there was little chance of that happening. In any case, he was engaging in some chit-chat with the director Tomas Zollner when he was called away. It was then that GH noticed his digital work BKPC was being displayed on Zollner's desktop computer as a screen saver! He realized that the Internet was a really powerful way to distribute artworks and circumvent the existing gallery system.
Terrorist Advertising
A short while later he was invited by Remo Campopiano to join artnetweb. He had some demo bbs software that allowed for artists to create studios and display digitized works over the internet. It was around that time that Netscape came along with the first viable browser for the Internet making artnetweb's software obsolete. The artist's involved in artnetweb began creating web based artworks. He created several (sites) pieces in rapid succession. The first was Terrorist Advertising (1992-94) http://www.artnetweb.com/gh/terror/. The work was a manifesto/ critique of advertising and mass media in general and featured a billboard project he had done in 1993 using cut-up Artforums' for the image. The billboard was created by scanning separate photos and printing out the finished montage as a billboard print.
The second (site) work was called Faux Conceptual Art (1994) The work involved an exhibition proposal for a series of fake conceptual art works.
In 1995 he
created a more complex web site piece called Art Direct/ Sex, Violence and
Politics. http://www.thing.net/~gh/artdirect/
The site had several sub-works, among them a client pull animation of BKPC <http://www.thing.net/~gh/artdirect/bkpc1.html>and a remake of a 1974 agit-prop piece called Tactics for Survival in the
New Culture http://www.thing.net/~gh/artdirect/tactics.html. Interestingly enough, Art Direct was
never written about in the American art press but was featured in a French
magazine Art Press in a special edition on Techno-Culture. He believes this was because of the
overt sexual content which was acceptable for European art audiences but not
for the US. Indeed one page within
the piece titled Blowjob with Daisies was a direct reference to Andy Warhol and
was reproduced in Art Press. (Grancher, Valery. World Wild Art. eds. Jouannis, Jean-Yves, Christophe Kihm. Spec. issue of Art Press hors serie numero19 (1998) :
98-105 )
Synthetic Voice / Sound Art
In 1996 he started to use
synthetic voices in his work. At the same time he met Peter Sinclair who was in
New York doing a piece for the Lincoln Center outdoor sound festival. They started to collaborate and
produced their first audio cd titled, Talker Talker. They
also began to work on a performance piece called A Soapopera for Laptops. The
SoaPOPera featured 4 laptop computers on radio-controlled cars that sang and
talked to each other. They used
Max cycling 77 software as well as Apple native synthetic voice and voice
recognition software to create the piece.
The piece was shown in both performance and installation format at a
number of venues in France and the US, among them, 1997-Museum of Contemporary
Art, Marseille, France, 1998-Postmasters Gallery, New York, NY, 1999-Museum of
Contemporary Art, Lyon. France, 2000-Interferences Festival, Belfort, France,
2002-Split Festival, Split Croatia.
The work also received a Prix Ars Electronica 98 Honorary Mention
(computer music category).
There is extensive documentation on the web at http://nujus.net/soapop/index.html
Other works using synthetic voice by GH include , Cocktail
Party (2001) a flash animation made for the Whitney Museum of American Art's gate pages. http://www.whitney.org/artport/gatepages/november01.shtml
,
a collaborative cd with Peter Sinclair called The
Last Noel avant LÕan 2000,
An immersive sound environment created with Peter
Sinclair called Heartbreak Hotel (2000)
http://nujus.net/Heartbreak-new-site/index.html
, and a collaborative website & cd with Japanese artist Takuji KOGO.
The website was reviewed in the March 2001 issue of Artforum . http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0268/7_39/75761307/p1/article.jhtml.
He also used synthetic voice for a performance work called Can I Speak to a Human for a performance night at the Kitchen in New York titled Call and Response. The work was reviewed in Wired New online edition, September 27, 2000. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,39063,00.html
Animation
GH's first Flash work (2001) was a Flash MX animation for the Whitney Museum's Artport gate page. The project was called Cocktail Party and is part of the Whitney Museum's online collection. It uses animated text
boxes that float around while a synthetic voice sings a song. The texts are the
lyrics being sung.
He also used a combination of Flash MX and dynamic
HTML to create an experimental navigation page for his homepage (2003). The
idea was to create a gaming interface like the classic Space Invaders
game. <http://nujus.net/gh/index2.html>
Two additional Flash
animations were done in collaboration with Peter Sinclair. One was the front
page for their collaborative website (2003). The page features live webcam
shots with flash animation floating over each frame. The animations are of
doorbell annunciators. When a user clicks on each bell they hear the voice of
each artist as if answering the door. After a moment the page reloads to each
respective artists website. 
The other Flash MX
Animation is also on the web. Peter and GH did a performance called Rant/ Rant
Back/ Back Rant (2003) recently in Paris. As luck would have it the video was
not very good. They were looking for a way to present documentation of the work
that was more interactive. They came up with an interface that shows a timeline
corresponding to times in the performance. They were able to salvage some
slides of the performance as well.
The user clicks on a time and gets the sound from the performance at the
time of the clock.
Interactive Flash page documenting performance
