Vuk Ćosić

Vuk Ćosić (born July 31, 1966 in Belgrade), graduated from Univerzitet u Beogradu (The university of Belgrade) and earned a BA in Archaeology in 1991, emigrating that year to Trieste, Italy, and the following year to the newly independent Slovenia.
Active in politics, literature and art, Ćosić has exhibited, published, and been active since 1994. He is well known for his challenging, ground-breaking work as a pioneer in the field of net.art. His constantly evolving oeuvre is characterized by an interesting mix of philosophical, political, and conceptual network-related issues on the one hand, and an innovative feeling for contemporary urban and underground aesthetics on the other. One of the pioneers of net.art, Ćosić became interested in ASCII code during a long period of research (1996–2001) on low-tech aesthetics, the economy, ecology and archaeology of the media, on the intersections between text and computer code, on the use of spaces in information, its fluid nature and infinite convertibility. Out of this came History of Art for the Blind, ASCII Unreal (an art game), ASCII Camera, ASCII Architecture, Deep ASCII and ASCII History of Moving Images, a history of the cinema converted into text format. He is a co-founder of Nettime, Syndicate, 7-11, and Ljubljana Digital Media Lab. The most notable venues, among many others, include Videotage, Hong Kong; Media Artlab, Tel Aviv; Venice Biennial; MIT Medialab; Walker Center, Minneapolis; Postmasters, NYC; Kunsthalle, Vienna; LAMoCA, Los Angeles; ICA, London and Beaubourg, Paris.
One of his most recent works is the File Extinguisher, an online service that allows you to delete your files with absolute certainty.

Ćosić uses ASCII characters (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) as the little dots or pixels that you find in a print or video image and transforms them into ASCII characters to form a new image or video image. He created his own software to covert the pixels from still and moving images into ACII. Ćosić has also worked and experimented with moving ASCII, ASCII audio, and ASCII camera. ASCII thoughts relevant to this work are briefly summarized through few fragments of text.

Ćosić has put together a retrospective of some of his net.art, including various images from History Of Art For Airports. Ćosić borrowed both iconic and lesser known images, reducing them to resemble the kind of pictograms found on lavatory doors. The sources of many of the images are instantly recognisable, such as Cézanne's Card Players and Warhol's Campbell's Soup.

The show also includes a new work, File Extinguisher, which Ćosić describes as "a project that fixes the web by providing the surfer with a totally free file deleting service. All you need to do is upload your file and we'll delete it for you, completely."

1991

• Basta, Dubrovnik (with Krpan, Martek, Opalić, Talent, Tolj), Dubrovnik

1992

• Ljubljana, Flat Jurij Krpan
• Trieste, Galeria Juliet
• Total Egal, St. Lambrecht (with Antun Maračič & Nenad Dančuo)

1994

• Hollywood, Ljubljana, Ljubljana Castle

1995

• Le Coco Fruitwear (Urbanaria - Part Two, with Matej Andraž Vogrinčič), Ljubljana, Prešernov trg > (Trabakula), Rijeka, Dubrovnik, Split > London, ICA > (Biennale dei Giovani Artisti dell'Europa e del Mediterraneo), Torino

1996

• Velodrome Online (with Luka Frelih & Strip Core, The Drug of the Natyon), Copenhagen, Electronic Cafe International

1997

• Raziskovalni Inštitut za Geo-umetniško statistiko Republike Slovenije: Public presentation of the mobile etalon of the Slovene Mediterranean metre (with Alenka Pirman & Irena Wölle), Piran, Tartinijev trg > Biennale dei Giovani Artisti dell'Europa e del Mediterraneo, Torino
• A Day in the Life of a Net.artist (Media in Media), Ljubljana, Mestna galerija

1998

• History of Art for the Airports, Tank, No. 1, London
• Lascaux, venus, st. sebastien, pieta, Cézanne, duchamp, malevich, warhol, lumiere bros, star trek, king kong, haiku, jodi, bunting, shoulgin

• DEEP ASCII
• TTYvideo software, java, VHS, Vuk Ćosić, Amsterdam-Ljubljana 1998, 55'

Script & Dir Vuk Ćosić Programming Luka Frelih

• ASCII Music Video
• TTYvideo software, java, VHS, Vuk Ćosić, Amsterdam-Ljubljana 1998, 55'
• Script & Dir Vuk Ćosić
• Programming Luka Frelih
• 6 video clips by the Russian cyberpunk artist Alexei Shoulgin in the moving ASCII, published at a web site as well as on a VinylVideoTM record.

• File Extinguisher
• War
• ASCII Camera
• This is unreal
• ascii history of art for the blind
• ascii history of moving images
• history of art for airports
• net.art per se