Douglas Davis
1933–2014
The World’s First Collaborative Sentence— commissioned in 1994 by the Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, New York, for InterActions, a survey exhibition of work by the artist Douglas Davis—is a “classic” of Internet art. Allowing users to contribute to a never-ending online sentence, it presciently anticipated today’s blog environments and the ongoing posts on social media platforms. By early 2000 there already were more than 200,000 contributions, in dozens of languages. Any subject may be addressed, but no contribution can end with a period, as the Sentence is infinitely expanding. Due to changes over the years in the online environment and Internet browsers, however, several aspects of the work became nonfunctional. In 2012 the Whitney Museum undertook a preservation effort, creating a historic version of the Sentence that leaves the code mainly untouched but reconstructs embedded links that had been broken, as well as a new live version that restores the work’s functionality and allows visitors to contribute to the piece.
The pioneering online project is a natural extension of explorations that Davis—also a writer and video and performance artist—had been making in participatory media art over the decades. For Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany, in 1977, he organized a live satellite telecast of artists’ work, sent to more than twenty-five countries. In addition to his own performance, it included works by Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, and Joseph Beuys. Davis’s contribution, The Last Nine Minutes, played with the idea of “breaking through” the confines of the screen and directly communicating with the audience.
Introduction
Douglas Matthew Davis, Jr. (April 11, 1933 – January 16, 2014) was an American artist, critic, teacher, and writer for among other publications Newsweek.
Wikidata identifier
Q5301405
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 8, 2025.
Introduction
Maintained parallel careers as an art critic for Newsweek and as a fine artist, working with video and the Internet as interactive mediums. Also the author of several books including Artculture: Essays on the Post-Modern.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, critic, digital artist, video artist
ULAN identifier
500116219
Names
Douglas Davis, Douglas M. Davis, Douglas Matthew Davis, Jr. Douglas Matthew Davis
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 8, 2025.
