Document:Q11119

"A seminal figure in the history of New Media art, Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic is widely acknowledged as having coined the term "net.art" in 1995. As New Media artist Alexei Shulgin points out, Cosic's phrase is a Duchampian readymade: Cosic saw the words "net" and "art" conjoined by a dot in a jumbled email message and started using the term to describe Internet-based art.” (Tribe/Jana)
“Vuk Cosic, born in Belgrade in 1966, has shown consistent interest in historical narrative (he worked as an archaeologist before becoming an artist) and variable ways to make ideas material (such as teaching, art and writing), but it was the reduced amount of time between publication and feedback that eventually led him to create internet-based art. Cosic, who had taught archaeology and been active with cultural initiatives through the Soros Foundation in Slovenia and Serbia, also had experience as an activist: ‘My background includes several years in the ranks of what we called the Dissident movement. Most of my actions were part of the very general oppositional activism. Some of those were artistic, some journalistic and some were agitation. I felt very deeply an imperative to create a parallel system of values that would counter the dominant discourse in Yugoslavia. The language that I used at the time was thus heavy on “us” vs “them” both in social and artistic thinking. I believe that actually there is a bridge between that and what later became net.art.’" (Greene)