Deep ASCII

Vuk Ćosić is widely recognised as one of the founding pioneers of net.art, the last avant-guard movement of the twentieth century. Long lost and inaccessible, his cult classic of net.art from 1998 is viewed as one of the influences on the famous Matrix aesthetics. The historic conversion of the full-length Deep Throat was the very first ASCII movie in the art world, commissioned for the exhibition in the Stedelijk and immediately recognised as a zeitgeist cornerstone of the nineties digital art. One of the most frequently reproduced images of the era.

The artist - trained as an archaeologist - has embarked on the quest for a speculative history of computer graphics as if there were no vector or raster solutions. This conceptual journey of discovery combined the tenets of early critical media art (specifically net.art) and the sensitivities of media archaeology. Further motive was an attempt to escape the perceived standardization diktat by the big tech. The first artistic projects that derived from this approach include ASCII videos, ASCII music videos, ASCII Camera, ASCII Architecture, ASCII for the blind, ASCII Unreal game (all in 1998 and 1999) and Deep ASCII, a novel (artists book), Very Deep ASCII (cuneiform tablets) plus a number of graphic prints and smaller projects.

The work offers the ASCII conversion of the full length of Deep Throat (1972) which is typically considered the birthplace of the contemporary porn industry. The fascination with the hacker folklore was intensely important during the so-called Heroic period of net.art. The hacker's own ASCII graphics were still wild and unexplored, and this piece represents the first incarnation of moving ASCII images in the world of arts and outside the programmer's laboratories.