The internet was once imagined as a space of freedom, collaboration, and artistic experimentation. Long before social media, platforms, and algorithmic feeds, artists working online believed the web could become an alternative infrastructure: outside institutions, markets, and established systems of distribution. Vuk Ćosić was there when these ideas emerged. As one of the pioneers of net.art in the 1990s, he helped shape one of the movements that defined artistic practice on the early internet.
The early net.art artists believed they did not need curators, institutions, or galleries. They built their own infrastructures through mailing lists such as nettime and saw themselves as outsiders, if not “refugees from the art system,” as Ćosić puts it. “We knew we didn’t need to talk to people like you,” he jokes, referring to curators. Three decades later, he will be part of the Digital Masterpieces booth at Zero10 by Art Basel in June 2026, presenting his early ASCII works, among the very first works he produced in the late 1990s.
Vuk Ćosić looks back at the promises that once surrounded the internet and their afterlives. In conversation with Anika Meier for SLEEK, he speaks about nettime, browser art, artistic resistance, and the institutionalization of internet culture. He also reflects on the moment the community he believed in became, in his words, “an audience and a springboard for careers.” Looking at today’s debates around AI and crypto, he sees echoes of the promises that once surrounded the early internet. “We believed in some of the utopias because we wanted them to happen,” he says. “But we were also among the first to criticize them.”
Anika Meier One second, I need to start recording our conversation.
Vuk Ćosić We can use Gemini to write an abstract and just publish it without even reading it. But I’m old school. I put words in sentences in a particular order on purpose. If you’re a surgeon and ask AI about carpentry, you won’t necessarily be able to judge the quality of what you get. If you’re not from that field and think common sense is enough, it won’t take you very far.
AM I wanted to speak with you because you are old school. You’ve seen it all happen over the past 30 years: art in the browser, post-internet art, art after social media, and so on. Even in 2026, people still debate whether what artists do on the internet is art.
VC For me, it is a non-digital phenomenon. It’s pure psychology. It is like when ’60s hippies or Yippies questioned punk. People tend to believe not only that their generation was right, but also that only in their time did the struggle against patriarchy or capitalism have the right aroma. Everything else is seen as less passionate, less motivated, less poetic, in short, wrong.
In this sense, everything compares beautifully to pop music. All of us contribute for a couple of seasons or, if you are the Beatles, you get a seven-year run, which is insanely long. But then you fall out of relevance unless you remain influential in some strange way.
That is why post-internet art people have difficulties with NFT art. Us net artists, we were reduced to browser artists. These guys are reduced to wallet artists. That is the symmetry of insults, if you want.
AM We’re not making progress in conversations about art?
VC It is a constant fallacy. But still, certain works survive the test of time, especially those by originators, people who did things for the first time and somehow retained value.
Brian Eno once said about the Velvet Underground that they were a band that sold 1,000 records, but everybody who bought a record started a band. That is the kind of effect we should look at. Mass media is not the conveyor of that type of influence. It can play a part. Time is the key here. This is why I feel good about myself, because even now people ask me about shit from 30 years ago.
AM Why do you think you have survived? Your name is always mentioned when it comes to the history of net.art, next to, for example, Olia Lialina and JODI.
VC I’m sure part of it is the standard psychopathic, narcissistic desire in the artist himself. You make yourself available for exhibitions, for example.
But in my case, at least in our first generation of net.art, there is also the simple statistical fact that whoever came to look at what could be done online had to see my work, and JODI, and Heath Bunting. We were working at the same time within a broader group of theorists, critics, journalists, and activists. They referred to our work in every text. There was a bit of automatism, a bit of spamming. That accounts for our ’90s notoriety.
Why did it survive? Maybe because of attitudes. I notice that not many ambitious, even opportunistic, colleagues remained influential over time. I keep repeating the same stupid joke that I’m Jimi Hendrix who failed to overdose. I apologize. I hope to be at least a little bit cool to people who are younger than my daughter. Why do people still listen to the Sex Pistols or the Pixies?
AM Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones…
VC Part of it is skill, and each of these people pushed the level of that skill. Part of it was also the context and their typically irreverent behavior within that context.
Even the Beatles, who wanted to be pop celebrities, never, as a band, if I understand this properly, wanted to be revolutionaries. They were not the Velvet Underground. Still, they became that. They were perceived as revolutionary, and I think that helps.
AM Back in the ’90s, on the internet, which utopias did you believe in? And what did you want to achieve?
VC I remember very vividly when a group of early internet people met in June 1995 in Venice during the opening of the Biennale to establish the mailing list called nettime. We had a three-day conference, just a bunch of weird people around the table, and some fantastic people as well.
I remember Pit Schultz had an agenda for the meeting, and the very first topic was the Wired magazine fetish and how this friend of his from England, Richard Barbrook, had written a text called The Californian Ideology. He couldn’t come to the meeting, but we read the text there and discussed how we needed to establish an attitude toward the kind of utopia being brought to us by the vendors of hardware and software. Among those promises were things like interactive multimedia, color electronic art, and so on. There were a few of us in the room who had artistic ambitions, Heath Bunting and myself, for example. There was also Paul Garrin. He was already a very strong presence online at the time. He had worked with Nam June Paik before, a New York guy.
We were translating this dialogue into our field in real time and trying to imagine what kind of attitude would be the opposite of the hype. This became an instant component of pre-net.art, if you want. If you see any feature of a technology, hardware, software, infrastructure, or protocol becoming mainstream, your job is to turn around 180 degrees, run as fast as you can, and burn the fucking manual. BTFM. Not read the fucking manual. By accepting the framework given by engineers or salesmen, you practically subordinate yourself and become a testimonial for their shit. This was the ethos.
Some people claim adaptability equals IQ. For us, the slogan would have been: adaptability is stupid. Do not adapt to technology in that sense. There were all the other promises. The internet is going to save humanity, just like now with AI. The internet is going to cure cancer. The internet is going to get everybody fired. None of that really happened that way. Yet somehow all those promises ended up glued to our foreheads.
Relatively frequently, we had to answer the question: how come the internet was once a space of freedom and now it is a space of fear? Well, it wasn’t the artists who invented surveillance marketing or marketing as a business model for the internet. Trust me, I would remember. We believed in some of the utopias in the sense that we wanted them to happen, but we were also among the first to criticize them.
AM Your utopia as artists was that you did not need to rely on institutions and curators.
VC This is by now part of the vernacular. We knew we didn’t need to talk to people like you. Educated people, terrible. The ones I keep mentioning, JODI, Heath Bunting, Alexei Shulgin, and I, we were all outsiders, if not refugees from the art system, as we called it.
We all had our brushes with galleries, publishers, and so on. We all had pre-net.art histories in confrontational art practices. Heath was doing street-art work. Dirk of JODI was deconstructing video and making everything explode. Alexei was doing photography in ways that escaped the camera. I was working with expanded media and literature outside publishers and bookbinders.
We were anti-establishment or progressive. Choose your expression. We were all attracted to the same countercultural behaviors and topics.
AM When we spoke for the first time, you said that in the morning you thought you didn’t need curators and institutions, and by the afternoon you realized that you needed them.
VC That is very, very much true, of course. When you are this hyped-up person with a Molotov in one hand and a spray can in the other, writing graffiti, you are completely self-sufficient and feel that you have to explode your work. But our practice was already often collective, at least in the sense that you would only show your work to a few fellow artists and expect, and receive, genuinely useful feedback.
I like to compare this romantically to the Bateau-Lavoir in Paris, where the early Cubists worked. Those three painters, two immigrants and one local, were constantly exchanging ideas.
It took a minute, but we understood that you need an apparatus to polish your work, to understand yourself and your practice, but also for the other part, which is distribution. The fact that there are wires does not mean your work reaches people. But we were on the same mailing lists as curators and theorists at the time. We were lucky. We had our own Apollinaire as well. People around us were already writing about us in the first week after we started working. It was a community of practice.
AM Art practices on the internet moved from the browser to social media. How have you experienced these changes, and do they feel very different from what you did in the 1990s?
VC You can be a revolutionary and believe in somewhat utopian ideals more than once, but it’s very hard. In my personal case, it was only in the 1990s, until 2001 at most, that I still harbored an idealistic desire, if not expectation, to see an international group of artists developing discourse, aesthetics, and ways of collaborating.
On our mailing list, we noticed that some colleagues were first giving their posts to proofreaders and only then posting them to the list. For us, this was treasonous. We understood that it had stopped being a community and had become an audience and a springboard for careers. People started getting jobs off our labor, and we didn’t like it.
I didn’t commit social suicide, but I stopped traveling. I stopped going to conferences, festivals, exhibitions. I only sent some works. I am an egomaniac. I still want that. But I lost the eagerness to participate and to have little stars in my eyes again and again and again, especially because the dialogue is a bit repetitive. And the rhetoric is completely repetitive, just as ours most probably was to people older than us.
I keep repeating: we were the Sex Pistols, and then came the Duran Durans of this world. They were all pretty. They worked well with galleries and museums. But they were still musicians. And now you have these kids who come from board meetings where managers put them together. It’s the boy-band era. I know the comparison doesn’t quite work, but that’s how I emotionally perceive it.
AM What are your thoughts when you hear a new generation of artists saying, “We’re going to democratize the art world. We don’t need gatekeepers. We don’t need institutions”?
VC That rhetoric was abused by network speculation, especially by NFT people. The rhetoric of liberation, zero gatekeepers, or disintermediation was captured by the crypto crowd because they have a use for an active, participating audience of creators. NFT artists are slightly trapped by that rhetoric. It’s not their text. It’s the text of the Bitcoin people, or blockchain people in general.
It’s a little sad because I literally recognize sentences from our manifestos or posts written in the middle of the night, and I see them again today, as if we were speaking about the same utopian possibilities. I don’t buy it.
But if there are kids out there who believe in it, and they generate work while believing in it and trying to make it happen, then it may be good. Maybe it’s like a useful psychosis.
AM You’re going to be part of Zero 10 by Art Basel as part of the Digital Masterpieces booth, curated by Georg Bak. How do you feel that one of your artworks now carries the label digital masterpiece?
VC Like I said before, Jimi Hendrix who failed to overdose. I’m keeping two or three separate careers inside art, and one of them is this one, where I keep being continuously asked to play the hits from the first album so I can do stadiums. That is nice for the ego. Here and there, it’s kind of nice also for the wallet, but it’s really not a big story.
The best thing that can happen to you as an artist is to die, and everything else is peanuts in terms of money. I like to think that this is somehow a compliment, that when you get included in such things. But whenever such things happen, I make an effort to also, at the same time or almost at the same time, do something really evil, anarchist, or otherwise very bad and, let’s say, contrarian to that world. So now I’m doing talks. This is my way of balancing out the selling out.
You asked me if I’m coming to Basel, and my very quick answer was, no fucking way, because it’s very bad for artists to see art fairs. You don’t want to see how the sausage is made. As an artist, you receive compliments if you are any good and people relate to your shit, but it is very important to be careful about who is complimenting you and in what context. It is different to be part of a historic selection at Manifesta, for instance.
But the best thing is when a colleague, an artist whom you appreciate, comes up to you completely unsolicited and tells you about a piece of yours that was important at some moment in their life. That means you’ve made it.
AM You are also part of the Digital Masterpieces booth because of your involvement in the history of net.art.
VC In 1996, actually on the 21st of May, which makes it exactly 30 years ago today, I organized a meeting in Trieste, Italy, called net.art per se, and it was officially the birthplace. But that’s just a legend. I invited everybody from Europe who used the word net.art, and there were seven of us. Pit Schultz couldn’t make it. Heath Bunting couldn’t make it. Alexei Shulgin came, and Walter van der Cruijsen from Holland, DESK.nl, and a few more people.
We ate ice cream and walked around town for two days, and on the second day we had a public panel. We told the audience what we thought the word net.art meant.
AM What happened in Ljubljana in 1997?
VC It was the only nettime conference I organized, and I was way too… That was much more serious, but it wasn’t of this, let’s say, influence or status.
The first net.art exhibition was done by Pit Schultz in 1996 in Berlin. He’s the one who came up with the word net.art.
AM You are credited with having coined the term net.art.
VC We happened to like practical humor, pranks, and hoaxes, so in a sense it rhymed with our attitude. That was a hoax piece by Alexei Shulgin on our mailing list, nettime, and he invented a story that I had received an email that was totally garbled, and inside it I saw some stuff that looked useful.
Pit Schultz suggested this name, and we loved it because it made dot art like dot doc, you know, like a file extension, like a Word file. And we said, “Oh, this is cute,” and we liked it, and we accepted, let’s say, the label.
So when he did the show in 1996, Net Art was the title of the exhibition at a place called Bunker in Berlin. The exhibition itself was interesting because he asked all four of us to send him, I think, ten or twelve screenshots of our work in a browserThen he made plastic slides and put them into a carousel slide projector running at high speed, so all you could see was a flashing sequence of browsers, just to underline the impossibility and futility of showing net.art outside the internet.
AM What did you say back then, and what would you say the word net.art means today?
VC Well, in order to kick-start that dialogue, I wrote four questions.
The first one was: Is internet-specific art possible? That was our quest. We were asking ourselves this logical, typical question that appears with every media technology. There’s always a bunch of kids around who ask that question. And after some time, a medium-specific art form emerges.
Our answer was net.art as we knew it, in a context where internet culture didn’t exist and needed to be invented. So the reception of our art was a mystery. net.art was very similar to street art in the sense of a non-signifying context. And we actually liked it. Like with street art, it wasn’t only about accessibility. Here I’m thinking more of the fact that there was no sign on the building saying, “This is art.”
When you enter, you come with cultural luggage and expectations. In order to recognize, let’s call it the artness of a piece of net.art, you needed to have a somewhat similar sensibility to the net artist himself. At least we believed this. There were no useful link lists or curated link farms of net.art that everybody could see everywhere. So I was surprised every time.
Then there was the question of what we do with the materiality or immateriality of the piece, implicitly asking ourselves what it does to market value. But we never went deeply into that question at the meeting in 1996. Then there was the question of the local and the global. If we are now participating in a global marketplace of ideas, I hate that expression, and if we are all working in one context, what happens to my art that is maybe in Slovenian or somehow marked by the fact that it was done in Slovenia, Germany, or France? Does that stop being important, or does it become even more important because we are now all in the same gallery all the time?
And the fourth thing was this issue of distribution. Again, this was about the market. What do we do with the fact that, unlike our older colleagues from the camcorder revolution, who had seized the means of production, to quote that German fellow with a beard, they were stuck with those videos that, again, were in plastic boxes and behaved like books, so you couldn’t distribute video easily.
AM You mentioned pranks and hoaxes. I would add provocation to this list.
VC It’s just the most common thing in art. The luggage we brought in when we started asking ourselves what a possible medium-specific art form could be…
If Don Quixote was the first novel and we appreciate it as such, we still find biblical tropes. We still find human relations that we already knew, described there. So it’s more the formal aspect of the novel that was new, not necessarily the entirety of its content or the artist’s attitude. But it does help that the artist had an attitude toward the society of his time.
Political satire, hoaxes, pranks, and all kinds of provocations were implicit in our mindset, not in the claim that net.art should be like that. That was the overture for us to implicitly realize that critical media art is what we were striving for. And that is the difference between the majority of early net.art and later digital art, which is not questioning its surroundings in that way, critically or even confrontationally. Not even looking at the surroundings. The awareness of context is the difference here, I believe. And the idea of continuously questioning that context, and not just adapting to it.
AM You miss that this generation is not critical enough?
VC With a caveat, with a footnote, that this is a typical thing for a 60-year-old guy to say about younger people. Every nanosecond, I’m aware that I’m now that old fart who comes to your punk party with a Pink Floyd record and explains to you, “No, but you really had to hear the second solo if you were there.”
I’m not in the business of correcting younger people. I’m almost certainly wrong because the only arbiters are those young people. So I observe with eagerness, and while I still have the capacity to be surprised and fascinated, I know I’m alive.
I’m allergic to mannerisms. I’m allergic to younger people who simply try to figure out the recipe for success and then copy, and end up copying your shit and all that. That is a problem. But hey, that’s also part of the circus.
AM What is art on the internet for you?
VC Every item that makes you question art is already valuable. I’m not talking about money. Artistic relevance is, sometimes, in the quest for artistic relevance itself. We are all in the business of creating meaning. We are all in the business of spreading the virus of freedom.
These are all clichés that we repeat very often, and this is what that looks like when, for instance, SHL0MS does Inferior Image.
AM SHL0MS turned a Monet Water Lilies painting into a viral performance artwork by posting it on X as AI-generated and asking viewers to explain why it was inferior to a “real” Monet.
VC I wanted to ask SHL0MS about this: was Monet chosen because it rhymes with money? But that is beside the point. The French, when they say money in English, say Monet, and that, to me, sounds like money. When that happens, if you get these kinds of reactions, and especially at such volume, that means that, to quote your interview, the one-liner worked.
There is this plant, aloe vera. You see it on billboards in every town around the world. It has the capacity to push other chemicals directly through your skin into your body. In that sense, the strength of projects such as Inferior Image is aloe vera because they pass through your defenses and make you go, however deep you are capable of going, into the question of what art is. Art is the questioning of what art is. Whether it is online or offline is almost irrelevant. The context, of course, adds a lot to it. It is the dominant communication protocol of today. It is explosive.
It is logical that it is happening online simply because we don’t react to anything analog anymore. Remind me of a non-digital scandal inside or outside the art world. I don’t recall one easily, not since the 1990s.
AM Which piece of yours is in the Digital Masterpieces booth at Zero10 by Art Basel?
VC The very first Deep Throat conversion, the fifteen-minute-long one, plus the five short ASCII videos, all in the 4+2 series. They were chosen because they were the very first things I had done. This was in late 1998 at the Ljubljana Digital Media Lab with my best buddy, Luka Frelih, who is still very much alive and great.
The story goes like this: in late summer or early autumn of 1998, we met in Banff, Canada, a place where artists go to die because it is too beautiful. National park, trees, lakes, swimming pools, food. It was for a conference called Curating and Conserving New Media, which was very important. There were many people from major institutions and a few of us crazy net.art mafia people: Alexei, Heath, and myself. JODI did not want to come.
We looked at that conference, and Heath Bunting had the idea to use it for an impromptu press conference where we declared the death of net.art. Heath was already annoyed by the positive reception and applause we were all getting everywhere, myself included, and Alexei as well. We did not like that world. documenta X was already behind us. Everything was moving too fast. We were like the Backstreet Boys.
We had already started looking in different directions. I asked myself what computer graphics would be without vectors or raster images. ASCII was already a well-established part of hacker folklore. I liked the pirate component to it, and it was ugly and useless, so only a mother could love it, as we say. I decided to go down that rabbit hole and stage all applications of ASCII computer graphics. The first move was video. I made Deep Throat. I chose pornography not because I am a pornographer, but because of the clean shots. Pornography is mostly anatomy and gymnastics, with many close-ups. You do not have a shot of fifty people in a forest that would become impossible to discern in ASCII conversion.
I needed close-ups, and this is why I chose that film. I came from Banff to Toronto and then New York, and I remember looking everywhere for a VHS copy of that film. It took me days, and I still have a membership card from a club in New York where I got the tape.
Then I made ASCII music videos, an ASCII camera, and other works, but they did not really exist as a field yet. This was before The Matrix. It was just me, a lonesome guy in Slovenia, and some friends who liked ASCII. There was a show in London later, one of those digital history exhibitions, and someone in The Guardian wrote that my ASCII videos had influenced The Matrix. I never found any evidence for that, but I like repeating the fake story. It is a true story with a fake claim because I am waiting for somebody to dispute it in style.
There was ASCII architecture, Sumerian cuneiform ASCII, a flipbook, many things, because I wanted to immerse myself in ASCII, and I did. I also made an Unreal layer. You may know Konrad Becker from Vienna. Public Netbase was the name of that place in the MuseumsQuartier. He commissioned an Unreal layer in 1999, and I designed a Cyrillic ASCII Unreal layer. These works are more abstract, and they are not suitable for art fairs. This is why this became a masterpiece and the others did not.
The work I am proudest of, and which survived the test of time, is the documenta theft from 1997, when I stole the documenta website and put it on my own server. That was the ultimate sand-in-the-motor-of-capitalism gesture by a grumpy revolutionary artist. I think it was meaningful work.
AM The early net.art artists haven’t been supporters of tech capitalism.
VC No, no way. Tech capitalists are the bloodsuckers of our generation. This is really horrible. We call it techno-fascism. We’re not mincing words. It’s quite horrendous. These people are now the overlords, buying themselves presidents. Like in history, with all technological shifts, from the Bronze Age to Rome, if you want, to the Iron Age, the bearers of new technology become either kings or slaves. That is the cliché. These guys are now becoming kings. Let’s see how long that lasts.
I spent the last two days with students at the Accademia di Brera in Milan discussing exactly this. Not techno-fascism as a concept, but face to face: these people who are key protagonists of this movement. What are they reading? What are they believing? What kind of genesis can we extrapolate from what they have said so far? Where do they obviously agree? How do they view the rest of the planet? This is why the workshop was called Artists, Arm Yourself.
It’s TESCREAL. It’s an acronym coined by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres to describe what they see as the ideological platform behind parts of Silicon Valley. To cut it short, so you don’t have to read a forty-page paper, it is basically eugenics. And I think it’s scary. Those people hid themselves very well in the 1990s and early aughts as soft Democrats. But now the biggest investor in political action committees in America is Andreessen Horowitz. The guy who made Netscape.
For my generation, when you say Netscape, it is supposed to be this positive, glorious thing. Now it’s like Krupp, the German industrial giant associated with war production and militarism. Or what about the guy who made the uniforms? Hugo Boss, whose company produced uniforms for the Nazi regime. You know, names that changed meaning.
AM What’s your advice for artists these days? A few days ago, I heard Hito Steyerl speak at re:publica in Berlin about friction. She basically said to the audience, “Start building and build your own stacks.” But practical examples and advice were missing.
VC Know your tools. Know your context as well. BTFM! (Burn the Fucking Manual!) Open your eyes and don’t fall for the bullshit. If you accept the existence of the economy and geopolitics, and you cannot not accept them, then at least articulate your attitude toward them.
When it comes to artistic practice, we are the ones with this unique capability to create something out of nothing. Again, sorry for the cliché, but our job is not only to adapt to expectations. Our job is to invent new spaces of freedom. And this time, your freedom is going to be defined by all these vectors that are critically threatening your existence.
I showed my students a clip from Blade Runner, a few seconds of air taxis flying between buildings in the rain at night, with giant screens everywhere. Then I showed recent drone footage from Gaza. And I said: maybe this is the future that is actually happening because this one is real footage and the other one is from a film. Maybe we should keep both of these images in our heads and act accordingly.
Yesterday I was having coffee with a fantastic AI programmer, a colleague and collaborator. We are not paranoid, conspiracy-minded preppers, but we both immediately said: if anything happens, if something blows up somewhere, the first thing you do is throw away your phone and switch off everything with a battery, a relay, or anything that has ever been online. Simply because of everything we know about surveillance and the way military infrastructures have seeped into technology. Sorry for the dark tone, but as an artist, I think it is important to be aware that technology has all these facets and repercussions. To me, it feels like something to react to.
My current work is on the home front. I work analog. I make one-off artist books and design body bags. This is morbid. I can still talk to a curator and say, “Okay, that goes into the other bucket of ego, the hits from the first album; let’s do something in the gallery.”
But when I have the opportunity, I insist on this life art. If you did an exhibition of artists from Ukraine now, or Gaza, do you think it would be jumping squares and triangles like screensavers?