Futuresex Lovesounds (Artist Post #1)

I found the piece “Love Songs From My Computer” on the Alternative Museum site. The artist of the work, GH Hovagimyan, is known for involvement in text based conceptual art. “Love Songs From My Computer” is a simply put piece of art- in the form of four quick time clips. The four clips are labeled “Love,” “Hello,” “Dream,” “Feel,” “Happy,” “Sell” and “Want.” Each clip features a synthesized voice along with different beats and electronically made sounds. Hovagimyan, although not a professionally trained musician, enjoys creating art involving sounds.

The title of the artwork, “Love Songs from My Computer,” is very telling of the piece and the artist’s intentions when creating it. Each song is completely electronic, and compels the audience to mull over the notion (whether it be absurd or not) of feeling computers. This notion, that computers can feel- or rather simulate- distinct emotions like love or happiness or possess certain desires such as wanting, is as unsettling as it is somewhat comical.








Hovagimyan goes further into expressing both the connections and disconnect between computers and the human experience by stating that his preference in creating this particular project was the synthetic voice because “synth voices can do things human singers can't like sing the same word very rapidly for a long period of time without taking a breath and without making a mistake.” He also used the simple format of distorted quick time players, which not only gives the piece an old juke box feel, but allows spectators to interact with each clip, mixing the sound to create a sound entirely new.

I was drawn to Hovagimyan’s work because I love music! I found the artificial voices used in this piece reminiscent of the voices that were present in Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin's “Listening Post”. I like the idea of combining digital art with sounds, and in my previous years at St. Mary’s, in other art classes, I have worked with programs such as Audacity to mix and integrate music with digital sounds, as well as for the purposes of distortion. I think GH’s project is really inspiring and telling of recent times. So many musical artists today incorporate computer synthesizers into their music (T-Pain anyone?), that sometimes it really does seem that I’m listening to nothing more than a computer.





“We recognize the form of singing but with Love Songs from My Computer the form becomes something else, it's not in the pop song milieu. It's an art work." – GH Hovagimyan






http://www.alternativemuseum.org/exh/gh/gh.html