COSE studies one of the most fragile and ephemeral sets of art forms to date: internet art. While such programmed digital artworks might have been created by artists embracing their quick passing, for many this is happening unintentionally to their oeuvre due to the harsh environment in which it is placed. Because of hardware and software obsolescence, and changes in access or services, these highly networked art pieces ‘break’. As they often reside in spots of the internet where most people won’t go looking, they often vanish before they are even detected by cultural institutions. COSE wants to make a difference and is dedicated especially to retrieving, analysing, documenting, and publishing internet art that can be hidden, withdrawn, or unrecognised in many ways. One objective is to conduct a survey to broaden the base of what forms of expression are known to the art world, to art historians, media scholars, conservators, curators, and all interested in consciously keeping at least part of our digital cultural heritage alive or in good memory. Part of the retrieved works become COSE’s case studies. With a variety of methods from forensics (software-assisted analyses), computer science (code reading), sociology (interviews), humanities (close reading, hermeneutics), and the arts (depiction of complex connections) we ‘x-ray’ the artworks to understand better how they are built, ways of how they can be compared beyond the monitor output, and how they are situated in the World Wide Web. Nobody has ever ‘seen’ that. This is why COSE’s interdisciplinary team evaluates existing software visualisation tools and elaborates its means to qualitatively analyse, depict and model these features from a predominantly humanistic point of view. Unearthing and visualising this sophisticated construct in its ecosystem will help add further appreciation to these art forms. COSE offers a novel view of the Internet through the lens of these artworks that reclaim the right to productively diversify Internet access and usage. This way it is also possible to shed light on the remarkable dynamics and changes happening in the Internet over time and discuss the repercussions for the artists.
