There are certainly not many people around who have personally witnessed the birth of a new artistic movement. Vuk Ćosić can say he has, without exaggeration. A Serbian-born Slovenian citizen, trained as an archaeologist, began to playfully experiment with the visual and technological possibilities of the early-days’ World Wide Web with a group of friends. At that time, the art world was not yet aware of the important position these technologically-skilled newcomers, full of crazy ideas, would soon hold. Now the „retired net.art pioneer“ and former nomad Ćosić is based in Ljubljana where he works as a director of a webdesign company. However, not much has changed, either in the radicality of his opinions, nor in his airiness.

„I go to conferences. That’s net.art actually. That is an art practice that has to do a lot with the net. You come to the conference. You meet one hundred and a few people from abroad. That’s a net. Art is not only the making of a product, which then can be sold in an art market and praised by an art thinker or mediator. It’s also a performance. When you are having a good time, its pretty much like when you are creative and you are producing something. When you have a good dialogue, when you are stimulated to come up with new argumentation, with new ideas, that is creativity for me, thus art. When it is about this type of meeting, like this nettime meeting was, thats net.art for me. The whole form of this conference can also be defined as a piece of net.art, as a sculpture. A net.art sculpture if you wish.“ 
– Vuk Ćosić in an interview for nettime, 1997

I’m not answering any questions without my lawyer.

[Laugh] Your beginnings were quite long ago, so maybe if you could start with that…

I was born as a very young man.

From our perspective, the beginnings of net.art seem a bit like making fun…

My private nature is pretty much like that, especially on the interface, on the surface.

Fun is not the goal, fun is not so much our objective – it was a principle, it was one of the methods, it was one of the connectors between us people. But when we sat down to do work it was serious work and the ambition was very serious. You can say that the ambition to change the world is not necessarily a joke. Some people do it one way some people the other way. So we were trying just to ask serious questions all the time. How to do different kinds of art; it’s not about making jokes. Irony, which is really the type of humor here, was an easy thing to use, it was a natural, organic part of this environment. Because, you know, there’s this thing about the web – a non-signifying context, as linguists would call it. You walk down the street, you enter a building, and it says ‘meat shop’, it says ‘museum’, and you enter that place with expectations, with luggage. On the web, you click on something and you have no clue what it’s going to be; the context does not bring in any signifiers, you can’t tell. And that, I think, is fundamentally the reservoir of surprises we were trying to exploit. And yes, mostly the effect is fun, but not the ambition.

When you are speaking about changing the world, don’t you think that many people don’t really know about this kind of art? You reach a very small audience.

We are reaching rich, white males living in very precise types of homes, listening to very precise types of music.

But even in this group, not everybody knows that there is something like art on the internet…

I agree. Of course, when you say “change the world”, it’s a tough statement. Uh, we are really influential now with the interface part of our work, say, experiments with interface itself, which has influenced the web-design community a little bit – if you talk to the design community, they really liked some of the blinking and some of the crazy collapsing windows and shit, so we got status there and then they applied it to some of their of their gimmicks and jollyware, especially. The other world where we were influential was our concept of digital cities, and shit like this, in the world of shopping online, or of shopping malls.

But when we talk about the social context of your work – about art being connected to the social, and trying to influence something, isn’t there some gap between work that is only available to a small circle of people? When we are talking about hacktivism and these things, is it really possible to influence people?

When I was a kid studying archeology, when people would ask me about my ideological position I would say that I was a Sumerian oppositionary because at the time that they were inventing the state as a concept, I would have been against it, I would have looked for other ways. But now, after 5,000 years of existence, it is hard to negotiate with that concept. And that negotiation is called anarchism, alright?

Maybe I could find some similarities there with what you’re thinking of. I ask myself “Ok, where can you be influential?” And it is not necessarily the best choice, but I thought that internet as an emerging technology itself, is about to redefine the way we live, somehow, the way we communicate, the way we do business. So, thinking of ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia, I was thinking “Well, I have a better chance, if I deal with the internet, to influence the world.” I don’t necessarily insist that the chance is big, but the chance is bigger than going out and shooting the first policeman or minister. That, for me, was a satisfactory platform to start from. But, of course, our little internet revolution, which has never brought any effect, needed to have a component of naiveté, of utopia, and it did. And at the time, our texts were relatively radical – not brutal, not bad, but that was in ‘94 and ‘95. At that time, the grunge shock was really important; the way that something that was purely musical or artistic got appropriated by industry so rapidly and so definitely and so fatally. For us, at that time, that was a really evil thing. And net art was intentionally interferent and ambiguous in definitions, in names, in everything, Because we were thinking of some sort of strategy about grunge. Like, “How can you strategize about this?” How can you be your own? – do your own shit, actually have your little community – people that understand your work, maybe you’re in the audience that just listens and understands – without becoming mainstream. So now the fight was another one: how to not become big? But of course, again, this is just describing the naiveté.

Because the problem is that if you are big you may influence something – if a pop star like Michael Jackson, says something, for example… but at the same time, then you become part of the mainstream and nobody takes you seriously anymore.

The biggest force in the universe is the conformity of artists. That is something that I have discovered in years of activism. It is simply a fact that even if your starting position is terribly radical, it is a matter of, lets say, two Venice biennials or three at maximum before you get there. [laugh] I mean, if you’re kind of ok and you don’t do terribly bad stuff, and if you are in this so-called avant-garde position – perceived as avant-garde, you don’t actually have to be, really. I guess this is the sad story of progressive art; sooner or later everyone learns [to find] a position in university and in art mainstream if they want to stay in this industry. And it is an industry like any other industry, with rules, with economy, with ecosystem.

How did you join the net.art community?

We just met, you know. I was surfing a lot. In the second half of 1994 my first idea was to surf all of Yahoo. You could do it – and I really did. There was a category called ‘What’s new’ and you could see all the submitted sites that day. Physically, you could surf all of the Web in one day. And then I didn’t find anything that would terribly move me, but slowly I started to find things. First stuff I saw was that of Heath Bunting, which is now classic, and I was moved and touched and whatever, because it was the smartest thing online for me.

That was 1994?

Late 1994, early ‘95. And then totally by chance, through somebody living in Budapest, through Adele Eisenstein, I got to know him – talked to him on the phone and we found out about each other. I didn’t do any stuff myself at the time. And so by June ‘95, I also saw Alexei Shulgin’s stuff, but it was not so important – it was just Web Art Center Moscow. The best thing was the name, really, the name was so good for me because I was looking for this shit, and it was from fucking Moscow, you know! It was like, oops, it’s not that my generation is going to look at Kassel and Venice again like every other generation, let’s look towards there. And of course I thought of myself as “Yeah, look at me, I’m in a Third World country also, Slovenia.”

So you considered yourself an artist at that time?

Yeah, I was doing art-related stuff – I was doing shows, I was doing stuff with literature and land art and something in between. And then came June 1995, when we met in Venice for the foundation of net.time mailing list. You know, you were an activist, you were interested in this thing, you were dynamic, you were talking to people about your desires… and then, they had just invited me to Venice. And that was the first time for me that I sat in the same room with people who knew how to answer my questions, more or less, and they did that by asking even tougher questions. But I felt at home, I felt like “I’m with the right crowd, I want to hang out with these guys, I belong here.” And we were also a bit older already, not in our twenties but thirties at that time, and we all had some experience with art – exhibiting, releasing records, publishing books, stuff like that.

And do you think that net.art became a trendy thing later?

Oh yeah, right away. In ‘97? So a year and a half after this. 1995 was still raw, not much happened. 1996 was kind of hot, and 1997, I believe, was the hottest. We did the most important work that also got immediately recognized, on the same day. Like, the next morning you would read an article in The New York Times about the piece you did in Ljubljana. Come on, is this normal? I’d like to think that it is, but it’s kind of not as well. It was fancy also; my mother was so proud of me. But the evil empire strikes back, right? We got commissions from, at first, the festivals like Ars Electronica and Documenta in Kassel. I was not invited to Kassel but Heath Bunting and Jodi were, of that particular group. And we got, you know, appropriated a little bit. So the grunge alarm bell started ringing. And so a few months later we met up and said, “Ok, this thing is dead, we’re not interested any more,” and we all left after 3 years.

Because of the commissions?

Because of the commissions and because of the way that the whole thing was placed in the grand context of the world of art. And we kind of disliked the fact that we were just some kind of political correctness item in itself; like we have one lesbian, we have one black guy, and also some computer guys doing net.art. Well, now we also do stuff in fancy places like this, but the negotiating positions are totally different than before. But still one other not-nice thing was that many people started doing net art that was really bad and dumb. And also today net art is like a genre, like the western, or video.

[waitress comes, Coca-Cola is ordered]

Coca-Cola is really so good. [radio voice] I want to thank Coca-Cola bottling company for sponsorship of this event.

It is the best drink I’ve ever…

It is hard to think of a more democratizing drink! [pause] I am working with Coca-Cola company now, for instance. From Croatia, because the one in Slovenia is very tiny. So that’s one more achievement – we go over the borders now with my company. The company has 35 people – it’s not easy to make a website now, not if you want to make it a serious website. In the mid-90s, even Coca-Cola couldn’t make a better, bigger website than a single guy in Slovenia. My websites had more traffic than the websites of Coca-Cola or MoMA at that time, because they were cooler. Now I cannot compete with all the fanciness, with Flash, volume, and dynamics. Anyway, that’s just one serious operation. It has a lot to do with seriously understanding PR and marketing options and actually the business strategies of your client. And so I’m reading much more MBA literature now than art literature. I really want to understand business models now.

When you’re talking about net.art, the hype is over, but from our point of view, it has still some potential.

I believe that today the kids should know about net.art not because of our actual web sites and mailing lists, but because it was a successful attempt at keeping your persona alive and doing art in a – let’s say – progressive way in a new environment and new circumstances. And that’s it. The lesson is, stay cool whatever new technology comes about; try to be sharp with your work and don’t compromise too much. And if you want to be a career artist, it will happen, don’t be hysterical about it. It happened to us. I was ambivalent. I’m not sure if I want it or not, but I always go along and I end up in the big museums. I try to keep it midway. I’m not a career artist; I haven’t had a career really. But there’s other artists who do, you know ®TMark, 0100101110101101.org – I call them the Second Echelon. Great people, they are really close friends of mine. They really are career artists. They want to do that when they grow up [laugh], and they go after museums and commissions and they are fighting for unionist stuff like the nature of contracts… They are good.

What are you’re the things you are interested in now, in terms of working with art?

I want to do a video with Madonna [laughs]. No, somebody said this in front of me and was serious, and I was like “Oops!”. I am looking very seriously at mobile stuff, at wireless, at RFID – Radio Frequency ID. You have a magazine, you influence a few people at least. Try to go after Howard Rheingold, have you seen his book Smart Mobs? I warmly recommend it. Like the other book, it is totally banal ‚American journalist’ stuff. But, like the other time, he has something going, like The Virtual Community, this time also I think he has a strong concept in his hands and he is not important anymore. We have a concept now in our hands, we can do shit. The concept of virtual community combined with mobility is really nice because you got unchained from the desktop, literally. And like I said last night, now as a net artist or anything, somebody creating concepts for this new platform, you do not only think of how it looks in the browser and what are your expectations of this guy. There’s one more component; the situations in which this is used or seen. These situations can be really funny, really interesting, really cool and new, not only sitting at the desk. It sounds very radical to me.

It seems like Wi-Fi and locative media hype is becoming fashionable again?

Well, you see, the new media circus already existed before net.art and we only made our own, and maybe net art is simply just that. Now we are those old hippies sitting at the punk party, explaining how things used to be so good. But the kids don’t want to hear that, you know. And I don’t think that the cool kids that want to do wireless stuff want to hear about net art. I mean they do want to hear maybe about jobs, but they don’t want to be badly influenced by it, and for sure the net art community is not going to be the one giving you good wireless. I think that the already ossified, petrified net art community has elements of conservatism and you can see people fighting to get serious positions and collections in museums and places and ministries and publishing houses and publishing projects. And if net art loses this prestigious aura of being the coolest, the latest, the most progressive thing, if suddenly something else becomes more progressive, net.art loses money, people lose careers at universities. You don’t lose it but it starts to stink of a corpse. And if people are not ready to accept this and if net artists will really start to behave conservatively, then we’ll have to wait for new kids, some other people, new names who will give us profoundly disturbing wireless art – because net art was profoundly disturbing for older people. We never made friends with new media people. I can remember only a few friendships I developed with people such as Stelarc, you know, older guys doing very cool shit in the late ‘80s, but those are more like incidents.

So it is like generations following each other.

In the 19th century you would get born and your daddy was doing aquarelle paintings, and then you would slowly start doing aquarelle and you would die after 70 years doing aquarelle paintings and it was still the hot thing in the world. Now this whole thing shifts five times in a season, and every five years you have to reinvent the wheel. And it is very hard on a single artist to stay in focus, to keep the career, and that’s a novelty. And if your profession is to be on the front, to be the carrier of the flag, then you die. At some point you lose honesty and your passion goes away, it goes by ambition, stuff like this happens. And those are dilemmas that senior citizens like me have.

Maybe the last question would be, what happened to your domain www.vuk.org.

Yeah, pharmaceuticals.

No, now there is porn there.

Oh, it changes often. You see I registered that domain in ‘97, and then by ‘99 everybody had a domain and everybody was talking a lot about cyber-squatting and trying to get a sexy domain. And I said, “Wait a minute, this is wrong.” My mother taught me when I was a kid – if you’re in the majority, you’re making a big mistake. So I just let it go. And the fun part is that there are really many links to vuk.org. People give links by default, you know, they don’t think. Totally dumb. For a long time, and even now you can find links from Encyclopedia Britannica and all these fancy places, and also from museums around the world. So for me that was fun, I call this a „visibility project“. I’ve also done an experiment – I didn’t read emails for five months; that was very bad.

All those friendships…

No, the friendships remained but all the business contacts… I lost a group show at PS1 New York and I lost the screening of my ASCII films in Times Square on the biggest screen in the world because of that. These are the two painful details. Otherwise it was a good experiment.

Why did you do it?

Because it was the time that I did the vuk.org dropping – the visibility project. It’s not documented well, ok.

Some guys told us that Asia is the land of the future for artists because they are really hungry for European and especially former Eastern-European art.

That’s not true. I was in Hong Kong in November for two weeks, and at the same time there was a MoMA conference of all Asian curators, and I had a chance to meet them all. It was really fun, and they are the same guys as here and in the US, they follow the same blindness, tunnel vision.

What about the artists?

I met a few, in Hong Kong I met local artists. They were pretty nice people but they speak such bad English it was really hard. Like, it’s not usually impossible to communicate, but…

It’s the common language in Hong Kong.

Yes, but it doesn’t work. I’m not a racist with language, but, you know, when you really don’t understand? You try hard, but it’s not just that the adjective is in the wrong place, it’s not little mistakes – they speak English like they were speaking Chinese… but I didn’t see any great work though. I saw some net.art from 2002, it was blinking squares and stuff like that… I haven’t been to Tokyo, but I want to go to Japan because cell phones are so big there.

 

PIC Archive

The interview was done in 2004.