Rafael Ferrer, Three Leaf Pieces, 1968

Hovagimyan associated the film with his earliest memories of New York City, and it became a text he continually referred back to, consciously and unconsciously in his work.

When I was in my 20s, I started writing a novel. It was a view of the downtown art scene and club scene interspersed with scenes from the 1962 movie Two for the Seesaw. I never finished the novel and lost the manuscript but revisited the movie 30 years later. That movie and Alphaville sat in the corner of my subconscious as a media dream or a theme. I sometimes think of it as peripheral consciousness, and I believe that’s where my art comes from. It is when I seize these notions floating around on the periphery and explore them that I engage my creative processes. I’ve been thinking a lot about generational narrative. My generation and that of my parents are intertwined in a narrative. The movie deals with my parents’ generations ideas of changing mores and bohemianism à la 1962. It also has a film noir vision of New York City that is very evocative. These create the idea of photography as memory…This is an alternative type of interactivity. When you are on the seesaw, you have a visceral dialog with the person opposite. You also have the kinesthetic sensations of the seesaw. Along with that, you notice you are controlling the projected windows. You try to assemble the jumbled narrative of the scenes you are viewing. This is immersion and deconstruction at the same time. The piece refers to any number of dance performances from the 1960s and 70s, as well as pieces done by Robert Morris. My sculptural references are from Arte Povera and 90s cyber-punk DIY installation. 141

Radios, 2010

Music and sound played a role in Hovagimyan’s art going back to his spokenword rants and drumming for the Communists in the 1970s. The changing media of production and transmission remained a current throughout his early net art and online radio shows up to the multimedia pieces of the 2000s and AR installations in the 2010s. Radios adds the anachronistic component of mp3 chips embedded in old transistor radios playing period music, tapping into a strain of nostalgia also present in See/Saw. Goff

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Above: Still from video of Boxing Rants performance at Postmasters Left: Being Event flyer Opposite, right, top to bottom: Boxing Rants; Boxing Rants performance at Postmasters; Mapped Morphs at Postmasters; Mapped Morphs 3D objects

Goff

Goff

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