Vuk Cosic
Encyclopedia
Vuk Ćosić graduated from Univerzitet u BeograduThe 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 on-line 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. A co-founder of Nettime, Syndicate, 7-11, and Ljubljana
Digital Media Lab. Most notable venues (commissions, personal and group shows, talks) include, among many others, Videotage, Hong Kong
; Media Artlab, Tel Aviv
; Venice
Biennial; MIT Medialab;Walker Center, Minneapolis; Postmasters, NYC; Kunsthalle, Vienna
; LAMoCA, Los Angeles
; ICA, London
; 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.
ASCII thoughts relevant to this work are briefly summarized through few fragments of text.
ASCII history of art for the Blind, ASCII history of the moving images (includes some black and green clips from Deep Throat, Blow Up, Star Trek
), ASCII music videos (features Baby Light My Fire, California Dream, Venus, etc.) ASCII architecture consisted in fully covering the St. Georges Hall, a neo-classical
monument in Liverpool
, with the projection of ascii rendering of the same surface that it's being projected on.
One of his most recent works is the File Extinguisher, an online service that allows you to delete your files with absolute certainty.
Ćosić has put together a retrospective of some of his net.art, including 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."
Script & Dir Vuk Ćosić
Programming Luka Frelih
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
in 1991, emigrating that year to Trieste
Trieste
Trieste is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is situated towards the end of a narrow strip of land lying between the Adriatic Sea and Italy's border with Slovenia, which lies almost immediately south and east of the city...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, and the following year to the newly independent Slovenia
Slovenia
Slovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...
.
Active in politics, literature and art, Ćosić has exhibited, published, and been active on-line since 1994. He is well known for his challenging, ground-breaking work as a pioneer in the field of net.art
Net.art
"net.art" refers to a group of artists who worked in the medium of Internet art from 1994. The main members of this movement are Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, and Heath Bunting...
. 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
Art game
An art game or arthouse game is a video game that is designed in such a way as to emphasize art or whose structure is intended to produce some kind of reaction in its audience. Art games typically go out of their way to have a unique, unconventional look, often standing out for aesthetic beauty or...
), ASCII Camera, ASCII Architecture, Deep ASCII and ASCII History of Moving Images, a history of the cinema converted into text format. A co-founder of Nettime, Syndicate, 7-11, and Ljubljana
Ljubljana
Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia and its largest city. It is the centre of the City Municipality of Ljubljana. It is located in the centre of the country in the Ljubljana Basin, and is a mid-sized city of some 270,000 inhabitants...
Digital Media Lab. Most notable venues (commissions, personal and group shows, talks) include, among many others, Videotage, Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Hong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...
; Media Artlab, Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv , officially Tel Aviv-Yafo , is the second most populous city in Israel, with a population of 404,400 on a land area of . The city is located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline in west-central Israel. It is the largest and most populous city in the metropolitan area of Gush Dan, with...
; Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
Biennial; MIT Medialab;Walker Center, Minneapolis; Postmasters, NYC; Kunsthalle, Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
; LAMoCA, Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
; ICA, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
; Beaubourg, Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
.
One of his most recent works is the File Extinguisher, an online service that allows you to delete your files with absolute certainty.
Art
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. 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.
ASCII history of art for the Blind, ASCII history of the moving images (includes some black and green clips from Deep Throat, Blow Up, Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
), ASCII music videos (features Baby Light My Fire, California Dream, Venus, etc.) ASCII architecture consisted in fully covering the St. Georges Hall, a neo-classical
Neoclassical architecture
Neoclassical architecture was an architectural style produced by the neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century, manifested both in its details as a reaction against the Rococo style of naturalistic ornament, and in its architectural formulas as an outgrowth of some classicizing...
monument in Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
, with the projection of ascii rendering of the same surface that it's being projected on.
One of his most recent works is the File Extinguisher, an online service that allows you to delete your files with absolute certainty.
Ćosić has put together a retrospective of some of his net.art, including 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."
1992
- Ljubljana, Flat Jurij Krpan
- Trieste, Galeria Juliet
- Total Egal, St. Lambrecht (with Antun Maračič & Nenad Dančuo)
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), CopenhagenCopenhagenCopenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
, 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
Videography
- DEEP ASCII
- TTYvideo software, java, VHS, Vuk Ćosić, AmsterdamAmsterdamAmsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
-Ljubljana 1998, 55'
Script & Dir Vuk Ćosić
Programming Luka Frelih
Music video
- 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 RussianRussiansThe Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....
cyberpunk artist Alexei Shoulgin in the moving ASCII, published at a web site as well as on a VinylVideoTM record.
Ćosić's Net.Art
- 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