Vuk Cosic - Hotlist - Net-Art Pioneer and his recommended Web sites - Brief Article - Bibliography - Column

ArtForum, March, 2002

Net-art pioneer Vuk Cosic lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and represented his country at last summer's Venice Biennale. A monograph on his ASCII works, Contemporary ASCII, was published in 1999 by Galerija Kapelica.

Suggesting Web Links is a little like recommending books: You don't do it for just anyone. When guests come to my home in Slovenia I always offer them something to eat and drink, and sometimes a place to stay for the night. If they're people I really like, I show them my cherished books, and then we have a nice little chat.

But by offering up the following websites here, I'm escorting you directly Into the library--no drinks, food, or lodging. (That's the good news about life in the virtual community--it's practical and efficient. The bad news is, it's practical and efficient.) Consider this a quick-and-dirty guide to the sites I've been visiting quite a bit these days; if you're looking for a grand unifying theory behind them, good luck!

Mumbleboy

www.mumbleboy.com/mumbleboy

My daughter Luna is fourteen months old, and, as a first child, she is the hapless victim of every sort of pedagogical experimentation imaginable. One of my favorite parenting tricks is to show her Flash cartoons from Mumbleboy. I think they're excellent, especially now that I've discovered a use for them. Luna prefers this stuff to the Cartoon Network.

Internet Archive's Wayback Machine

www.archiveo.org

I once gained a certain notoriety in Net-art circles by copying the Documenta X site just before it was taken offline and packaged on CD-ROM for museum shops. At the time such "Piracy" was quite a fancy feat, though the site's author didn't seem too impressed. The Wayback Machine does something similar, but on a much more ambitious level: It's an archive over one hundred terabytes in size containing almost the entire Web in its many evolutionary stages; you search it by entering a URL and selecting the date you'd like to go back to. As a trained archaeologist I can tell you that it's highly useful for observing and studying the stratigraphy of interfaces. Check out the special collection of "Web Pioneers"--glimpses of Yahoo!, Amazon, etc. in their infancy that are guaranteed to make you nostalgic for 1996. How's that for "conserving new media"?

Internet Sex Photos

www.whitelead.com/Jrh/ISps

There's something sweetly deranged about these pictures by Jon Haddock. Like much art (and unlike most pornography) Haddock's work achieves greatness through what it doesn't reveal. Don't be afraid to peek.

GPS Drawing

www.gpsdrawlng.com

Remember those artists in the '70s--like Hamish Fulton and Richard Long--for whom walking was a medium? Well, British artists Jeremy Wood and Hugh Pryor have taken that method a step further. They travel around by car, train, plane, and boat, recording their movements with a Global Positioning System device, and their itineraries--when viewed aerially on the map--create line drawings. They've "drawn" an elephant in Brighton, a butterfly in Nottingham, and they even spelled out GALLERY in Shoreham-by-the-sea. In my younger days I said something to the effect that all art was a substitute for the Internet. Voila! an artistic practice with bona fide predecessors that becomes real Gesamtkunstwerke when expressed on the Web.

Netzwissenschaft

www.netzwissenschaft.de/kuenst.htm

While searching for links to my old vuk.org domain, which I let go as part of an invisibility project (it was then bought by a casino), I found this list, created by Dr. Reinhold Grether. With some seven thousand links covering Net artists, researchers, and publicists, it might be the most comprehensive website of what Grether calls "Net knowledge"-- and possibly the worst nightmare of a link list to navigate. If you're watching the Net, Dr. Grether is watching you. The site itself may not be pretty, but its ambition alone makes it a great art project.

Visit www.artforum.com for links to Hotlist websites.