Vuk Ćosić (b. 1966) is a pioneer of net.art, an internet-based art movement whose first decade is often dated from 1995 to 2005. Trained as an archaeologist, he has described his approach to digital media as methodologically archaeological, treating computer files the way he once treated excavated material. In 1996 he built his own software to convert still and moving images into ASCII text.
He used that software to make ASCII History of Moving Images, ASCII versions of film clips including Psycho and Deep Throat. The term net.art itself came from a software glitch: a corrupted file left Ćosić staring at a wall of unreadable ASCII characters in which the words “Net.Art” happened to appear, and he adopted the phrase. He was also the first to speak of net.art's early years as its “Heroic period”, a term later used to describe the movement's first decade, from 1995 to 2005.
