{"data":{"id":"4486","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":4486,"topgoose_id":2334,"tms_id":4486,"display_name":"Douglas Davis","sort_name":"Davis Douglas","display_date":"1933–2014","birth_date":"1933","death_date":"2014","biography":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/10237\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe World’s First Collaborative Sentence\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e— 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 \u003cem\u003eSentence\u003c/em\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003eSentence\u0026nbsp;\u003c/em\u003ethat 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.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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 \u003ca href=\"/artists/986\"\u003eNam June Paik\u003c/a\u003e, Charlotte Moorman, and \u003ca href=\"/artists/14418\"\u003eJoseph Beuys\u003c/a\u003e. Davis’s contribution, \u003cem\u003eThe Last Nine Minutes\u003c/em\u003e, played with\nthe idea of “breaking through” the confines\nof the screen and directly communicating\nwith the audience.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500116219","wikidata_id":"Q5301405","created_at":"2017-08-30T17:19:12.000-04:00","updated_at":"2025-08-19T05:33:21.416-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/4486/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/4486/exhibitions"}}}}