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.