Vuk Ćosić — ASCII History of Moving Images

1998

Artists: Vuk Ćosić · Year: 1998 · Medium: ASCII-character reinterpretations of canonical films · Substrate: Terminal-style display rendering films as character streams at 24fps · Place: Ljubljana, Slovenia · Institution: Ljudmila Digital Media Lab / independent Vuk Ćosić, a Slovenian artist who had been central to the early net-art scene since its emergence, released ASCII History of Moving Images in 1998. The project is exactly what its title describes: Ćosić took canonical moving-image works — King Kong, Psycho, Deep Throat, Blow-Up — and recreated them, frame by frame, in ASCII character art. The films play in a terminal-style window, characters flickering at 24 frames per second, producing recognizable shot compositions and motion despite the aggressive medium reduction. The project is a rigorous formal exercise in what a medium strips away from a source. Ćosić argued that the ASCII version preserves what is essential — movement, composition, rhythm — while discarding what is incidental — texture, color, grain. The question of whether this is true is the entire content of the work. For some shots, the ASCII version is unmistakably legible; for others, it is impossible to recognize the original source. Where the line falls is the subject. Ćosić is a founding figure of net.art as a movement — he was central to coining the phrase's formalization — and his practice through the 1990s and 2000s helped define what the category meant. He was central to the Ljubljana scene and to the broader Eastern-European net-art cohort that included Alexei Shulgin and others. He continues to work in Slovenia. ASCII History of Moving Images is archived by Rhizome and by various European new-media institutions. Lore Vuk Ćosić had been one of the founding figures of net.art (the term itself emerged from a 1995 email-glitch involving Ćosić) and his ASCII work was specifically a Slovenian-postsocialist response to the Western European net.art mainstream. Ćosić worked from a small apartment in Ljubljana with a Pentium machine he had assembled himself; the ASCII conversion software was Java code he wrote alongside his friend the programmer Luka Frelih. The ASCII films were distributed initially through the small Slovenian net.art mailing list nettime-slo and only entered international circulation when the Walker Art Center acquired Deep ASCII (the ASCII version of Deep Throat) in 2000. Ćosić remains in Ljubljana, still teaches occasionally at the Academy of Fine Arts, and is widely recognized as the elder statesman of the Slovenian digital-art scene. Sources • Ćosić, Vuk — ljudmila.org / vukcosic.org archives • Rhizome Net Art Anthology • Daniels, Dieter (ed.) — Net Pioneers 1.0 (Sternberg Press, 2010)