G.H. Hovagimyan / Interview / part 2/4

“Going to the Whitney Museum Retrospective [of Gordon Matta-Clark, editor’s note] which was really kind of interesting because I saw a lot of people which I hadn’t seen for twenty years and so they basically say to me ‘So what are you doing now’ because ultimately they don’t know anything about digital art they don’t know anything about new media as far as they are concerned you know I stopped, they haven’t seen me in 25 years they don’t know I exist. It’s very interesting. So there is a disjunction.”
In the second part of the interview G.H. Hovagimyan talks about the early days of digital and internet art and his early works in the internet: Barbie & Ken Politically Correct, and other pieces which extended his conceptual art practice and his performance work in the 70s. He was involved in several projects: Artnetweb, the thing, Rhizome, nyu/echo. In 1996 he began to start experimenting with primitive web video-conferencing (CU-SeeMee). He created a series of live web jams for artnetweb and the List Visual Arts Center at MIT in Boston that involved remote video performance streamed over the web plus live streamed audio mixing. The exhibition with the title Port-MIT is generally accepted as the historical starting point of net art (see the Whitney Museums’ historical timeline of net art). G.H. Hovagimyan’s piece for this exhibition was called Art Dirt Im-Port.
New York, March 1, 2007. Interview with G.H. Hovagimyan, part 2/4.

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