The Art of ASCII

Born in 1966 in Blegrade, Vuk Ćosić was best known as one of the earliest pioneers of net art, or "internet art," which is digital mediums of art made primarily through the internet, rather than the traditionally being display in a museum much like classical works of art.

 Ćosić's most notable works of art mostly involved using software to convert regular images into full ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), that consists of simple characters such as zeros, exclamation points, percentages, commas, periods, ect. They act as the "pixels" of the image in order to successfully mimic the depth, shadows, and texture of the original image. Ćosić often tried to recreate scenes from multiple sources of popular visual media, including ASCII History of Moving Images which is a scene taken from Alfred Hitchcock's film, Psycho, as well as a fully animated scene from The Birds.

ASCII History of Moving Images

The Birds

Ćosić's emphasis on remaking entire scenes in ASCII indicates his interest into what gives art a "historical" aesthetic, as taken from his quote in Mark Tribe and Reena Jana's book New Media Art: “My works and experiments with moving ASCII... [are] carefully directed at their full uselessness from the viewpoint of everyday high tech and all its consequences. I try look into the past and continue the upgrading of some marginalized or forgotten technology.”

Another of Ćosić's related works; ASCII History of Art for the Blind was a specialized webpage that would read out each ASCII character verbally through an recording.