[....]Speed bio:

Vuk Cosic was the Slovenian representative to the Venice Biennale in 2001, he's the co-founder of Ljudmila -- a digital media lab for artists in Slovenia and of the ASCII Art Ensemble and of course he's a pioneer in the field of net.art. He gained the notoriety for having copied the DocumentaX website in 1997. After the art event closed, the website was set to shut down. And it did closed, but not before Cosic copied it. And it's still up.

In History Of Art For Airports, Cosic reduced icons of the art into the kind of pictograms found on lavatory doors. Still, the images are instantly recognisable, such as the Venus de Milo, Cezanne's Card Players and Warhol's Campbell's Soup.

Cosic is a Master of ASCII art. He uses ASCII as a filter through which other media are shown: music videos, films, pornos, video games:
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.


ASCII history of the moving images: Deep Throat + Star Trek screenshots

Time for the interview:

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