Art and the Audience

Vuk Cosic in a net.art artist and prolific ASCII artist, which is using computer software to overlay videos with alphanumerical characters replacing colour pixels. net.art is simply art that is only broadcast over the internet, the web page is it’s context.

net.art came about in the early 90’s with the widespread adoption of internet connected desktop pc’s also the movement to graphically interfaced websites rather then text based sites that happened around 1993 pointed out by critic Rachel Greene.

Deep ASCII

Rather than showing the audience the work, in this case the film Deep Throat, Cosic is reaching deep into the recesses of code that is in the background of all digital transmissions and showing us the raw data. We know film is an illusion and we’re able to quite simply break it down to individual frames. But Video is different in that rather than being an illusion it’s a manipulation dots, and we aren’t able to break it down and understand it, a single still is made up of lines and lines of code indecipherable to all but the codec.

think this work comes out of the frustration of the net.art.ists failed dream that internet would become this all democratising bastion of knowledge and information. And it wasn’t, it was mostly used to look up porn and download pictures of cats. The choice of video then becomes obvious. We see all the work of programming code and encoding and decoding video, and all it’s used for is the smut transmission. The sad and ironic this is, is that a lot of the breakthrough in the way of file compression, video encoding and the like have come out of the supposed to need to broadcast porn over the world wide web.

Tv screen, night one

Tv screen, night one is a collection of video stills that Cosic captured while sitting in front of the television the night of the bombing of Yu during the NATO bombing of Kosovo. It shows at the time the authority of the television over the computer as a resource for gathering information. In some respects this still applies today, I’m more weary of information that has been easily posted online rather than information that has gone through a editing and publishing process.

Again Cosic has put up a layer with his medium between the content and the audience. They don’t see discernable information, they say frames, pixels. The background noise in the vast expanse of the internet.

A history of art for Airports is where Cosic comes out the digital ether and physically displays his works to the audience. However his very clever about the way he does this. Rather than displaying the work in the universal language of binary, he’s displaying it in the universal language of symbols, he is then placing the works in a complicated network like the internet in airports. By demeterialising the works he has turned into symbols, he is saying the history of art is beyond the object, beyond the output of a video screen, rather it’s in the raw code, it’s in the concept.

With all art being about concept as Cosic demonstrates, then the context of the work is imperative, meaning is lost when viewing A History of Art for Airports online, and vice versa with Deep ASCII and WAR (tv screen, night one)

Baumgärtel, Tilman, Net.art 2.0 : Neue Materialien zur Netzkunst, Nürnberg : Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2001

Vuk Cosic http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/

Interview with Vuk Cosic http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2006/02/interview-of-vu.php

net.art wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net.art