Vuk Ćosić

Biography

In 1997 the organizers of documenta X planned to take the exhibition’s website offline after the show closed and to distribute it on CD-ROM. Vuk Ćosić copied the whole site and republished it on the server of the Ljubljana Digital Media Lab as “Documenta Done”. He also circulated a mock press release attributing the copying to an “Eastern European hacker”.

He was born on 31 July 1966 in Belgrade, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He is described as a Slovenian artist, and he worked in Slovenia. From 1991 Ćosić took part in exhibitions and projects. He was among the participants in “Basta” in Dubrovnik (1991), showed work in Ljubljana and Trieste (1992), and in 1994 the exhibition “Hollywood” was held at Ljubljana Castle. In 1995, together with Matej Andraž Vogrinčič, he presented the project “Le Coco Fruitwear” in Ljubljana, Rijeka, Dubrovnik, Split, London and Turin. In 1996, with Luka Frelih and the group Strip Core, he made “Velodrome Online” for Electronic Cafe International in Copenhagen. From the mid-1990s he worked online and belonged to the circle of European net artists, theorists and activists around the Nettime mailing list. He is also described as one of the founders of Nettime, Syndicate, 7-11 and the Ljubljana Digital Media Lab.

A story about the term net.art is often repeated: that Ćosić coined it after receiving a garbled email. It originated in a 1997 message by Alexei Shulgin; later it was dismissed as a prank, and the word is attributed instead to Pit Schultz, who used it in 1996 while preparing a Berlin project that included Ćosić. That same year Ćosić held a meeting in Trieste at which the term spread more widely.

From 1996 he wrote software that converts still and moving images and sound into ASCII characters. “ASCII History of Moving Images” (1998) consists of seven short excerpts: the Lumière brothers, “Battleship Potemkin”, “King Kong”, “Star Trek”, “Blowup”, “Psycho” and “Deep Throat”. The clips are rendered as green characters on a black background, as on the screens of early computers. “Deep ASCII” (1998) is an ASCII conversion of the last of these films; Ćosić directed it, with programming by Luka Frelih. In “History of Art for Airports” (1997), works and figures from art history and popular culture are reduced to pictograms resembling airport signage: Cézanne, Duchamp, Warhol, “Star Trek”, King Kong, and also the net artists Jodi, Heath Bunting and Alexei Shulgin. In “History of Art for the Blind”, images converted into ASCII are accompanied by recordings that read out each character. There are also “ASCII Unreal”, “ASCII Camera” and “ASCII Architecture”. He made the six “ASCII Music Videos” (1998) with music by Shulgin and programming by Frelih; they were published online and on a VinylVideo record.

In 1997, with Alenka Pirman and Irena Wölle, he presented in Piran and Turin a mobile etalon of the “Slovene Mediterranean metre”, and in Ljubljana he showed “A Day in the Life of a Net.artist”. In 1998 “History of Art for Airports” appeared in the London magazine Tank. In 1999 he assembled a series of photographs taken from a television screen during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (the project “War”).

His books include “Net.art per me” (Ljubljana, 2001) and “Nacija – kultura” (Ljubljana, 2022; an edition with an Italian translation by Cvijeta Jakšić appeared in 2023). In 2010 his solo exhibition “Book Burning Exhibit”, with a lecture by the artist, was held at the Trubar Literature House in Ljubljana.