Intervista a Vuk Cosic di Michiel van der Haagen

Hello Syndicate,
this is on request the complete interview I made for the Polish Cyber magazine for those of you who could not get hold of the hard copy. As mentioned in the interview, on the CD-rom that accompanies the magazine you can find one digital artwork of Vuk: Documenta X done. Greetings, Michiel van der Haagen.
Vuk Cosic is artist, he is working closely together with Luka Frelih on a Web-server in Slovenia dedicated to art and culture. He is also an active member of a few international networks of artists, curators and critics interested in the Net and art and everything in between. I want to ask him a few questions to find out about the situation of Art and Internet from the front-line.

Michiel: Let's start with a bit of history. What did you do before you went on-line. When did you first get into contact with Internet? Did you immediately know that this was for you?
Vuk: My personal prehistory is in archaeology. I am basically an archaeologist that have always been into text based arts, and also into a bit of conceptual work. This means that ever since my first steps as an artist there was a question of media constraints. After a while I began working in such a way that I first have an idea and only later decide/discover which media it is going to come through. This approach lead me to creating haiku poetry, land art works and almost everything in between.
At the same time my early pre occupations in art life were focused on the system that a society builds around art, and this took me out of the gallery and out of the book.
Internet happened to be an interesting proposition in both areas: as a means of expression, and as a tool for social involvement. My first contact with the monster was in late 1994, and it took me few months to make it my main pre occupation. I was finishing some physical art projects, and have made a complete career change in march '95.
Michiel: Summer last year I visited you in Ljubljana. You work in a really nice environment with some good computers, a server and a permanent Internet connection. Together with Luka you were working very hard on the Ljudmila Web-site. When I look at it now I see that it has grown pretty big, lots of cool things there, from underground commix to cultural text by some of the most interesting writers of this time. In many ways this Site is ahead of similar sites in Western European countries. Is Ljubljana such a Cyber city?
Vuk: By the time you came, Ljudmila was already a serious player. It all started in autumn '94 when at our local Soros Foundation
[1] a group of artists and thinkers got together with few bbs hackers. This lead to the creation of a debate group with cyberspace and theory on their agenda, so it was only a matter of time when good work would appear. Somehow, Luka and I had most enthusiasm, and that is how the actual production started. It is important to say that all Ljudmila activities are supported by Soros Foundation, and that means all infrastructure and budget.
[1] Soros is a very rich man who spends a lot of money on promotion of science and culture in eastern European countries. (in Poland Batory Foundation)
In terms of contents, there was a myriad of obvious things to do, such as shoveling as much catalogues and NGO [2] publicity to the server,
[2] NGO = Non Governmental Organisation
but it is in the level of concept that we had one major lucky moment. I am talking about my attendence at the first Nettime [3] conference in Venice in June 1995.
[3] Nettime is also a mailing list about art and art theory
This moment turned out to be really crucial, because it is there that it became clear to me that Ljubljana is not at the end of the world, and that we can absolutely seriously contribute in creation of such concepts as net.theory or net.critique. Few very important friendships were sealed there, and when you look back at that conference, there were Heath Bunting, Geert Lovink, Pit Schultz, Paul Garrin, Diana McCarty, Kathy Rae Huffman, David D'Heily, [4] which is a great little group, isn't it? With these contacts, and with a nettime influence Ljudmila actualy got a real start. Ý [4] All these people are now very well known in their own field: net-artists net-critiques or curators
Today we have about 120 projects on our server, mostly from the domain of arts and culture with lots of NGO's that logicaly came to us since we are part of Soros Network. The majority of these projects was done in our studio(s), and we are also hosting few art related virtual servers with lives of their own.
Unfortunately I can not honestly confirm that Ljubljana is specially cyber, even if it is possible to remember many events and projects that took place here. In my opinion, local art scene is not fully aware of the possibilities this medium is offering.
Michiel: You made pages in cooperation with Slovenian artists. Did you have to go after the artists, explaining them about Internet or did they come looking for you?
Vuk: We have done web sites in different models of cooperation. Some guys just came and asked whether we could work together, and this was (and still is) the coolest way, but we have also done some programs for artists.
For instance the "Neue Slovenische Kunst" people, which is a much wider version of Laibach, just came to us one day, and said they are in a project in Tokio and need a web site. That was nice.
On the other hand I have started the "Internet Portfolio" program with our Soros Center for Contemporary Arts. It is centered around the artists that are brought to meet internet medium and technology through designing their own catalogues. Of course my vicious plan was to make them think in this new way, so some of the artists projects are actually net based creative achievements, not transferable into other media. In that way they almost comply to some older deffinitions of net.art, but I do not really perceive them as such. So far we did twelve projects, and the idea is to do many more by the end of '98.
Michiel: You are based in Ljubljana but you are in contact with many people all over the world through the Internet. You are regularly visiting conferences and festivals about new electronic media or you organize them yourself. Are you an example of somebody living half in a virtual community or would you describe it differently. And how important is Ljubljana for you? Could you do what you do anywhere in the world?
Vuk: Ljubljana is altogether a cool place to be. It is a calm little town where everybody knows everybody else, and with a decent airport from which there are flights to everywhere.
In a year I make it to about ten conferences maybe, and am now a bit selective about where I go. Anyway, I guess you can say that my life is bordering with virtual community kind of dynamics. Most of my daily interactions are done through e.mail, while the making of web sites, mine or with other people, take 90% of my state of awakeness. Very little happen outside that internet life... yes, in that sense I am definitively a bit odd.
Michiel: You are working on a publication "Classics of Net.art". What is so special about Net-art?
Vuk: That site is part of a bigger project called "Official History of Net.art" that was started on occasion of Ars Electronica festival. I have noticed that there's (finally) a lot of movement around the net.art movement, in the sense that theoreticians, journalists, gallerists, managers and critics have started to include our work in their panoramas of contemporary art. Since their motivation is very very different than mine, I have decided to make a bit of a joke - and am creating some sort of a toolbox for these people. One of the ways to play with the historisation of your work is to create a moque history paralel to your actual work, but my procedure was to make history a center piece of my work, at least for a while.
About net.art I can tell you that it is still luckily undefined, and that it would be very nice if it would stay that way for some more time.
On one hand you can start contemplating it as some kind of very logical continuation of the history of avantguard movements and thought, but then you are having problems when you need illustration for your thesis. The other option - the one I prefere - is to look around you and see what exists before making a theory. Well, while this story sounds simple and logical, things are actualy not well. The academic context is producing net.art theory which is then included in the textbooks, and only then we are looking for illustrations. Some artists decide to comply with these theories as if they were orders. This gave us so many false interactivity attempts and a whole sea of insulting mystification's that I feel real bad about calling my endeavors art.
Michiel: You participate in international Web-projects with other Web-artists or you initiate them yourself. Can you describe a favorite project of the past years so our readers get an impression.
Vuk: One of the truly good aspects of creative usage of Internet is the possibility to get into collaborative, sometime even real-time, collaborations. Certainly the best known one is the 're-fresh' ring.
In autumn of 1996 there was a big art show in St. Petersburg, and one of it's curators Irina Akutaganova who was at the DEAF [5] asked Andreas
[5] DEAF = Duch Electronic Art Festival
Broeckmann, Alexei Shoulgin and myself whether we had an idea for some online work. We went to our hotel room, and I think it was actually Alexei that came up with the idea. Then we decided to invite some people that make part of this very cool Syndicate [6] community, to do the work together.
[6] Syndicate community : A group of artists / curators initially from eastern Europe but now from everywhere that keeps each other informed through a mailing list and meets at festivals / conferences.
The project is based on a simple idea: as you have noticed while surfing, sometimes a html document automatically shifts to another document even if you didn't click anything. In those old days (autumn 1996) it could only be done with the refresh meta tag. Alexei's idea was that he put this tag to his document on his server, and the tag would point to a document on my server. My document would point you back. This ping pong was not too exciting aesthetically, but it worked, and we knew it is great. We have immediately invented some rules concerning file size, and have organized an IRC session during the opening of that St. Petersburg biennale where all invited artists kept in touch and added their little pages to the refresh ring. After about 6 hours of constant talk, we had a ring with about 25 pages that was working and was not looking bad at all. Two days later most of us met in Budapest for the MetaForum III conference, and the floppy with the log of the IRC session and the 'snapshot' of the whole ring was glued to the cover of the third Nettime book.
Michiel: A few years ago you could hear artists working with the computer say Ýthat digital art is for eternity because it can be perfectly copied and does not slowly fall to pieces like all physical objects inevitably do. Nobody says that any more even if it's true. You can not be sure that people in the future will make these copies from time to time. They would also have to build simulations of the equipment we use now to see these digital artworks. You started this job of conservation already now for Net-art.Ý Can you tell us about your activities, is it necessary?
Vuk: While this hardware related observation is true for various manifestations of "computer art" that are based on standalone machines, it can be said that with internet it is not so because of the open platform element in it's design.
The element of disappearance that I am interested in is coming from the interface evolution, or upgrade. If you go to my first site "Net.art per se", and follow the links you will see old facades of Yahoo, CNN and Altavista that are no longer anywhere on the web. I am noticing that we are exposed to "compressed nostalgia", and that is the emotion very characteristic for our contemporary online life where you have real feeling of nostalgia about something that was around until last week.
The conservation is an interesting way to say you like or dislike something and I don't believe that clinical objectivism ever existed in this field.
That is one good way to look at my Documenta thing.
Michiel: Yes, the Documenta X Web Site. You send a message over the world which started like this: "Eastern European Hacker Steals Documenta X Web Site A Slovenian hacker Vuk Cosic, who calls himself a 'net.artist', is identified as the person behind the major international art theft that is creating waves of shock among surfers on the net, as well as in the art circles. What this young man did to create such a confusion is that he has created a complete copy of a web site of Documenta X, a major international art show held every five years in German village of Kassel. His gesture, announced only hours before the closing of the official web site of Documenta X, has by now not been denounced officialy as an infringement of material copyright, but it is surely suspicious when the "author" speaks of "net critique through positive engagement". You consider the Documenta Site at Ljudmila your personal art work. Explain please.
Vuk: You see, my basic intention with the dX gesture, was to experiment in detourning (from Detournement) the ready-made [6] strategy, of course
[6] A ready-made is an object that becomes art because an artist declares it art (for example the toilet of Duchamps)
not in order to comment on ready made but to make a comment about the art system. So, while the project was a reaction to what we call 'fencing' of the Internet, it also contained this authorship problem.
I am not having any ethical dilemmas about this, because some of the featured authors have helped me, and have even sent slightly improved versions of their work for "my version" of dX. Also, what I see as an important 'added value' is that there's few dozens of links to documenta that are taking you to my server. Most of these links are not even saying it is a mirror and I find this interesting.
Of course there are people in this world that understand the project. Recently the dX project was awarded by the american Fine Art Forum for the "most notable art happening of the year", and I count this interview and the CD Rom as an important recognition too.
One more thing, the URL is now optimized so it is: <http://www.vuk.org/dx/> http://www.vuk.org/dx/
Michiel: Now you allow us to make a copy of your art-work on our CD-rom. It is still your art work if it is on the CD-rom?
Vuk: Well, I consider the actual web site as only a part of my project, while the CD Rom is surely contributing in it's size and reach. (not to say that we are now creating a Deep Europe conspiracy between Slovenia and Poland against West European art system... ha ha) I consider the CD Rom and the dX site as equal parts of my documenta X project. Other parts are Keiko's text and all those links throughout the world. I know that this project is not going to change the art system, but I hope it is asking (again) an important question loudly enough.
Michiel: You talk about net critique through positive engagement.Ý I suppose it means that you don't completely agree with the way things are developing on Internet. What's the worst problem?
Vuk: In my opinion the Internet offers two strategies of social critique - one is the amplifier and the other is the utopian one.
As we know, in the real world we have developed an art system that is based on existence of mediators [7], and the net.art system is supposed
[7] mediators: People and institutions between the artist and the public.
to be actively criticizing it. The same link exists between actual economy and net.economy. You question net.art system and with this you talk of the actual art system. By using the net.art system critique, you use the hype around the net to amplify the reach of your thoughts about the 'real' art system.
On the other hand, the utopian level of social critique is what we see as a basis of various Virtual Community projects like De Digitale Stadt in Amsterdam or Internazionale Stadt in Berlin.Although these projects happen to be ethically very important for me an many individuals around the globe, they have failed to become a model for creating an online community that would in any serious way affect the so called real community. What is paradoxical, they practically became a model for some existing shoppingÝ malls that they were so anxious to criticize.
What is important is the opportunity that our generation is having to openly express possible opposition to the way the world is organized. Both strategies that I described are invitation to action.
Michiel: Once I read an American magazine about doing business on the net. One article was about maintaining a mailing list and it went like this: "Don't do it. It looks nice at the start but It costs you a lot of time and and you will have nothing in return. If it is successful and more and more people join, it will only cost you more time and it will ruin your life." You started your own mailing list called 7-11 (a reference to an important date in recent history). I suppose you know what you are doing and you seem happy with it so far. So what's so great about it?
Vuk: I call 7-11 a collaborative meta net.art project. It was initiated in Ars Electronica by Heath Bunting, Jodi, Alexei Shoulgin and myself with the idea to somehow come out of the creative block in the Nettime list. We needed a forum that will be a context and not an audience, as Heath once said.
Everybody at the list can be a moderator and send moderator mail to all subscribers by using a web interface, and there's a way for all to authomatically change the sig file [8] at the list.
[8] sig file = the signature file at the end of a mail message, the automated ending of the email with some ascii drawing or a quote. At nettime it is that info on subscription, for instance.
The list have very quickly expanded to about 100 users, and the contents ranges between new net.art announcements and elementary dialogue, but actually there's a lot of positive spam around it.
Keiko Suzuki is not only a moderator of 7-11 but also a big net.art persona, as you have possibly through her recent interview pubblished in several online forums such as Rhizome, Nettime and 7-11. Her charisma is deffinitively a big contribution to our list.
At one moment one subscriber started a terrible spam avalanche and by anonimous moderator action someone has unsubscribed everybody from the list. That felt very nice.
Michiel: Thank you very much for this interview.

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