Q: Did you start off as an artist immediately or was it more media
activism?

Vuk Cosic: If I recall well the first website I did was for a little
festival that I was in, just to see how it works. But the next thing
immediately was a website for a conference I was organizing last year in
Trieste. That was net.art per se. It was about net.art already. I was
fully aware of the possibility of this quest, so to say. I invited some
people I knew from before, you know: Alexei Shulgin, heath bunting, Pit
Schulz…I made a website that was already some type of, how to say it,
not a manifesto, but a practical version of it. It had the same ambition
like a manifesto, but without the declaritive tone. It was a
demonstration of what might be done in my view, back then, a year ago.

I liked it and so did the others. I thought: "hey, I've got nice
friends, they like what I like…" and it was in this way that I met all
these good guys. That's what net.art is all about, you meet good guys.

Q: Net.art per se was one year ago, do you think that manifesto, or
whatever it was, still stands? How would you write it now?

Vuk Cosic: The whole manifesto thing was actually four questions that
are on this one page and that are links to four not really answers, but
suggestions for quests for the answers. I really did not think of it
back then as a manifesto, but somehow it works quite fine.

One question was whether net.specific art is possible. The other
question was (oops, I don't remember well) "does the globality of the
audience automatically mean the universality of the topic," something
like this. Pretty pompous in rhetorics, but still… Then there was
something about distribution and something about content, something
about specific aesthetics and something about the tangible artwork
itself. What happens with the copy and the original. That made a lot of
sense to me back then and today it gained a new quality.

Q: What happened at the meeting?

Vuk Cosic: It was a great meeting. It influenced a lot the structure of
several events that followed. I gathered 7, 8 or 9 people. We were
sitting around for two days eating icecream in Trieste end of May, which
is something you absolutely have to try in life, and our only duty to
the external reality of life was to sit around a table the second day at
the evening and try and say what those talks were all about and then
there was the dinner party.

Actually the talk was based around these few questions. Andreas
Broeckman came with, how do you say this, a sketch for an essay about
net.art. It somehow coincided in time. He had the opportunity to test
his theory. We also had the opportunity to test him. It worked well, it
was a good text. Akke Wagenaar was there, she was defending some funny
19th century positions, but in the meantime baby, she got far this one
year. Then who was there, Alexei Shulgin and Walter van der Cruysen
(desk.nl) and me. The three of us were the Marx Brothers of cyberspace,
we liked that title back then. Then there was Igor Marcovic from Zagreb,
Adele Eisenstein, she used to work in C-3 in Budapest.

It was a conference of people that are involved more or less seriously
in various art and internet institutions or are kind of involved in art
in the internet.

Q: What kind of net.art did you do after net.art per se?

Vuk Cosic: I don't know really how to answer that. I did a lot of
experimentation, right after that conference, with animated gifs. I made
a large collection of them. I like taking things from the web, keeping
them on my disc. You know: view source, copy, paste. I did some
experimental combinations with these gifs. You can blow them up, you can
crash the browser. You like it so much you want to destroy it, that
attitude. Then I developed an attitude where out of twenty things I do I
maybe put one on the server and just like playing with it. It goes in
phases. I am not dedicated like Jodi are. They just do this and only
this. They work every day all day, fill their disc with loads of stuff.
They are really in an artist studio with their machines, while here its
more like an occasional reflex and instinct to react to maybe some
bullshit I see or good stuff I see which I want to underline in a way. I
don't have much to show, but there is some stuff, twenty, thirty little
projects.

Sometimes I react to CNN, sometimes I do just abstraction. I maybe fall
in love with something that happens new in browser revolution. I say:
"Wow, frames! Look at this shit, it's so stupid, it must be good for
something." Then I sit down, I read the manual, I try some borders,
fatness, thickness, whatever.

http://remote.aec.at/history
http://remote.aec.at/life/index.html
(made for the Ars Electronica net.art project Remote-C)

http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/dx/
(gives the whole Documenta site, read an article about this at
http://www.rewired.com)

http://www.ljudmila.org/7-11/
(the website to a recently started mailinglist, a cooperation between
Vuk Cosic, sep97 (the artist formerly known as heath bunting), jodi and
Alexei Shulgin)