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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Net.artist Vuk Cosic at London’s ICA. For a small group of artists in the mid-90s, gaining access to the internet was like the emergence of performance and video art in the 60s. Seemingly overnight, a new medium became available to artists to give form to their ideas.Although net.art stemmed from electronic art and the new media of the time, it has grown as quickly as the internet itself. There are virtual galleries dedicated to only showing online projects and, increasingly, group shows are including internet-specific projects and commissions. Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic was an instrumental force in the development of net.art. Along with his contemporaries - Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina and Heath Bunting - Cosic used the internet as both tool and subject. It offered a medium for critiquing, making and showing art. Net.art offered a democratic art - available to anyone with access to the internet. Cosic recalls, “I saw the net as the opportunity to emigrate from the realities I didn't agree with. One of them was the art world. This emotion was common among our loose group and we've insisted on some tough sort of independence.  History of Art For Airports (Warhol left and Cezanne far right) and File Extinguisher. “The work was meant to purely live online - as long as we've been interested in art - but naturally we were into changing the world in general. As for displaying our work in galleries, the thing is that we made art that has its own context. In a gallery, that art is out of context.” Sidestepping the traditional method of making and showing art gave Cosic and his counterparts a radical edge, and many of their works have earned cult status. For his first solo show in the UK, Cosic has put together a retrospective of some of his net.art, including images from History Of Art For Airports(1997). Similar in style to Julian Opie’s portraits, Cosic borrowed both iconic and lesser-known images, reducing them to resemble the kind of pictograms found on lavatory doors. The sources of many of the images are instantly recognisable, such as Cezanne’s Card Players and Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup. The show also includes a new work, File Extinguisher, which Cosic describes as “a project that fixes the web by providing the surfer with a totally free file deleting service. All you need to do is upload your file and we'll delete it for you, completely.” As if commenting on the contradictory usefulness/uselessness of the internet, the File Extinguisher – while it may delete files - is little more then a portal in which to view Cosic’s back catalogue. Packaged in a user-friendly way, Cosic invites the viewer to interact with his work and therefore the internet itself.
Gemma De Cruz
XL L M Slovenia: Vuk Cosic is at the ICA, London, until 02 October 05.
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related info
 useful linkswww.file-extinguisher.com history of art for airports www.rhizome.org adaweb.walkerart.org
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