A revisit of Vuk Ćosić’s 1998 net.art piece, History of Art for the Blind, History for the Blind updates the original website’s source code to address current preoccupations. A series of ASCII illustrations populate the website, based on real, famous images depicting a political moment in recent history. Like its 1998 counterpart, History for the Blind accompanies each illustration with an audio file that reads out the letters and characters that compose the ASCII image. The title of the piece employs a widely used metaphor that crudely equates blindness with lacking in political direction, and creatively misuses text-to-speech software to translate political images into stuttering Dadaesque nonsense.
Vuk Ćosić is a net.art pioneer and a co-founder of the nettime and Syndicate mailing lists as well as the Ljubljana Digital Media Lab. He is known for creating still and moving image artworks with ASCII code, using a custom-made software he developed in 1996.