Statement
A sheet of labels for floppy disks with my image emerging from a sea of American flags. The URL for "Art Dirt," a round table Internet radio talk show I hosted in 1996, is printed across the front. I actually printed out an edition of 10 sheets and put them in the Untitled art bookstore in SoHo for a Christmas show benefit. None sold. This made it a total success in my book. The hip art crowd that frequents the place didn't recognize it as anything valuable. It's the same thing with "Art Dirt" and indeed much of what I create. The works sit uncomfortable on the borders of categories.
When I made the labels I was thinking of teenage subculture collectibles. The labels are actually a send up of the idea of turning everything into a commodity with a logo or brand name. "Art Dirt"is one of those names that no one would want or bother to copyright. My picture with the flag says two things: the personality is the commodity and the American media environment creates it. All of this contradicts the actual art created, which was a brief moment of positive energy and communication between the guests at the round table. If one looks at "Art Dirt" as a whole, one sees many elements: the media page that is the talk show now archived on the Walker web site, the labels as a sort of advertising signifier, the web persona I created as "the Host" and the communication energy between the particpants on the show. The interesting part of New Media is the blurring of boundaries and the idea that meaning is distributed over networks. An artwork that functions in the networks cannot be dissociated from them.

Bio
G.H. Hovagimyan is an experimental artist. Over the past 25 years he has been involved with various groups and art movements, such as Installation and Video Performance Art in the 1970s, No Wave Cinema and Punk Performance Art in the 1980s and net art in the 1990s. He teachers Telecommun-ication fo Artists at the School of Visual Arts MFA Computer Art Dept. in New York City. His net art can be found at the Walker Art Center, The Thing and artnetweb. He began collaborating with Peter Sinclair in 1996 for the Port-MIT exhibit. Their collaborative work, "A soaPOPera for Laptops," won an honorary mention at Ars Electronica in 1998 for the computer music category.