
NEXT EVENT
26. 3. - 23. 4. 2025
Vuk Ćosić: Stop! Border.
Time ago, Borges took Lewis Carroll's idea and wrote a short but powerful story about an empire in which cartographers were so advanced that they drew a map on a scale of one to one, i.e., the size of the whole territory. In just a few sentences, the author suggests that this doomed the empire and that only its remains and fragments of the map are visible today.
This story has become an essential metaphor for semiologists, cartographers, and philosophers of science, reflecting on the nation-state in the information society.
The recent update of the technical standard for PDF files has allowed for a theoretical maximum document size of more than 300x300 kilometers. The exhibition at the Carinarnica will premiere a one-to-one scale map of Slovenia, 160 kilometers high and 250 kilometers wide. This makes Slovenia the first country in the world to have achieved such a cartographic feat.
The 1:1 map of Slovenia focuses only on the national border. This highlights the implicit paradox of uselessness and offers different readings to different audiences.
At the Carinarnica, travelers can download the map onto their portable devices as they enter the country.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vuk Ćosić is a classic of Internet art, canonized globally as one of the central protagonists of net.art, the last avant-garde of the twentieth century. He co-founded the Ljubljana-based Ljudmila Digital Media Lab and the international networks Nettime and Syndicate.
Through poetic archaeology of media, he creates projects, exhibitions, video works, books, and monuments investigating the relationship between the genesis of media technologies and art and the consequences of this relationship in society. His training as an archaeologist and his avant-garde ethos allows him to work simultaneously in a long time arc and in the fast concepts typical of critical media art.
He exhibits with remarkable frequency in leading galleries and museums, lectures at dozens of art academies and universities worldwide, and has had his work featured in hundreds of books, anthologies, encyclopedias, and museum collections.
His work is part of the curriculum of many universities and is the subject of academic articles and dissertations.