New media creative subversive Vuk Ćosić refuses to be an employee of his own ideas

When Mitja Doma showed Vuk Ćosić email and Yahoo! at the Soros Foundation back in 1994, Vuk knew that was it. That same day he sat down in front of a PC and wouldn’t budge for the next 18 hours, surfing through the entire Yahoo! site of the time in just a couple of sessions.
He started thinking about art within this new sphere that was constantly expanding. Vuk then met Luka Frelih, the only Slovene hacker who sympathized with the art scene. While creating free websites together with Luka for anyone who wanted them, Vuk met Heath Bunting and other web enthusiasts, critical, articulate people who weren’t hackers but used computers and the Web as both a creative and a subversive medium.
In 1997 Vuk came up with a brilliant idea and created a copy of the homepage of the prestigious exhibition event Documenta; as a result, the event had not one webpage but two. Only some time later did a passionate discussion surrounding copying and file and data sharing arise. By this time Vuk had already decided he didn’t want to be an artist – and an employee of his own ideas, rushing headlong from exhibition to exhibition, always presenting himself with the same or new projects.

– I reject development in art, but am not repulsed by it –

In 1999, two years after the Documenta exhibition, net.artists themselves announced that net.art was dead. In this way, they drew attention to the unappreciative attitude of the art institutions towards the systematic collecting, purchasing and archiving of digital works of art, not least by declaring that the line between art and web art should be eliminated, since it’s all plainly art; on the other hand, they drew attention to the detached development of technology which increasingly pursues corporate logic.
But back as early as 1998, Vuk reinvents ASCII (1). He and Frelih create Instant ASCII Camera. This camera takes and “spits out” photographs in ASCII form. Deep ASCII, Vuk’s re-make of the porn classic Deep Throat, was even screened at film festivals, which means that people watched 50 minutes of a graphic black-and-green film in complete silence. Then came the global ASCII comeback, as webcam ASCII streams to the ASCII opening in the film Matrix. Impressive ASCII projections on architecture represents the other extreme through which Vuk has drawn attention to the technological development which offers a hi-tech scenario of reality and final sublimation for the super-user. This year he’s going to lecture on ASCII art at the GEL (Good Experience Live) Conference, where Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, will also be.

– In the rain, a cockroach will keep looking upward until it drowns, and can only be saved by a lucky coincidence –

Particularized development in the telecommunications industry is based on economic growth, paying little attention to the real usefulness of products. Therefore, a product which is truly useful or helpful to the user or society at large can only be created by lucky coincidence. Vuk, however,  says it is this very same communications industry that gives art its texture; but it might be better if the artistic, creative – or, if you will, the popular sphere – gave texture to the communications.
On average, Vuk’s work is being exhibited once a week in various institutions around the world. Recently, Antonio Pinto, the curator of the MEIAC museum in Badajoz, in the Spanish province of Estremadura, bought 30 works of new media art for the museum’s permanent collection – and Vuk’s old work, Metablink, was among these. This is the first systematic and therefore historically relevant purchase of computer, digital or new media work for a permanent collection; even the largest museums of contemporary art have nothing of the kind.
Vuk is a contemporary artist who enjoys success in his own time, even though he can’t provide bread for his daughter Luna and a bonus for his long-time partner Irena in the form of art. So he’s looking forward to revisiting New York, where the opening of a “real” sales exhibition of digital art will take place in early October at the Wolkowitz Gallery. Even though Vuk doesn’t expect much, he enjoys seeing the bizarre solutions employed to materialize the digital works of art: his work will be realised on hardware, consisting of a modified computer with an on/off switch and a monitor. International art and academic circles are constantly interested in his input, because he’s a terribly intelligent speaker and an even more amusing conversationalist. If you met him, he’d no doubt make you laugh too.

Note: ASCII is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, an encoding table with 128 characters which represent text in computers, communications equipment and other devices that work with text. Before computers with high graphic performance were available, we even had figurative posters comprised of printed ASCII characters.

This text is licensed under Creative Commons Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. A copy of the licence is accessible at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/; or you may address your requests to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
Author: Dunja Kukovec
Photo: Ivian; digi-work: Mina Zabnikar