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Brief History of The World's First Collaborative Sentence
It began in December 1994, when the Lehman College Art
Gallery and
its director, Susan Hoeltzel, commissioned The World's First
Collaborative Sentence as part of "InterActions," a
survey of
Douglas Davis' early work (1967-81) in a variety of media, from
drawing, printmaking, and photography to performance,
videotapes,
and live satellite television broadcasting. Using a server
provided
by the City University of New York (CUNY)and working
closely
with professor Robert Schneider in the department of mathematics
at Lehman CollegeDavis documented the exhibition on the
web
and created an entirely new work linked to the exhibition's
theme.
Unveiled
on December 7, 1994, the site was linked to a live
performance in
the Lehman College Art Gallery. Artist Nathalie Novarina,
participating
in the performance via phone from Geneva, supplied the
Sentence's
maiden image and its first words. In collaboration with Gary
Welz,
Davis designed the formal interactive structure of the
Sentence.
In
January
1995, Barbara and the late Eugene M. Schwartz purchased both the
concept of the Sentence and the site itself. As a symbol
of ownership, the Schwartzes received a disk that recorded
the first
days of the site, including the earliest contributions. The
Schwartzes'
generosity allowed further work to be done on the design of the
Sentence as well as a revision of the introductory
homepage
that adds information about the meaning and intention of the
work.
Professor Schneider has maintained the Sentence on the
web
for almost six years, breaking up the enormous volume of
contributions
into separate "chapters" (there are now twenty-one). Susan
Hoeltzel,
moreover, has actively encouraged the evolution of the
Sentence
at every step. The work was included in several interactive
installationsat
the Kwangju Biennale in Korea in 1995, at the School of
Visual Arts'
"Digital Salon" exhibition later that year (which toured
internationally),
and in 1999 at the Zentrum f*r Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM)
in Karlsruhe, Germany (as part of the exhibition
"net.condition")all
of which attracted thousands of online contributions.
In 1995,
Mrs. Schwartz donated the Sentence to the Whitney Museum
of American Art. Davis commemorated the Whitney's acquisition of
the Sentence by designing, with Vincent M. Spina, a
logo--W-M
Music--which now lives among the year 2000 contributions to the
Sentence itself. W-M stands for "Wrap Music," a series of
audio files that includes conceptual songmaking and historic
sounds
sent to the Sentence in its earliest days.
From its
inception, the Sentence has received a torrent of words,
sounds, and images, contributors having learned about the
site by
word-of-mouth, web-based references, or press attention. The
appeal
of the Sentence is that it gives the world a space in which
to speak
its collective and its individual mind.
As of
early
2000, the estimated number of actual contributions neared
200,000
and incorporated dozens of languages. The only "rule" of the
Sentence
is that no one is allowed to type a period at the end of
their contributions.
Though ingenious users have occasionally found ways to break
this
rule, the vast majority have abided by it with great passion,
criticizing
those who discover ways to type a period at the end of a
grammatically
completed thought. The Sentence may well go on
forever, or
at least until a superior force or the limitations of web
technology
calls a halt to it.
As
the skills
of users have increased, the Sentence has grown to
incorporate
far more than words. In addition to texts, there are now
photographs,
video, sounds, graphics, and links to thousands of other
websites,
contributed by people of all ages and cultures. Among the
contributions
are musings, rants, lyrical poems, political and spiritual
tracts,
fragments of thought, and philosophical speculation, as well as
occasional vulgarities. They address such concerns as art,
literature,
sexuality, religion, the nature of play, the meaning of the
"sentence"
itself, and the vaster subjects of life and death.
Douglas
Davis is grateful to all those who are writing and designing the
Sentence and regards them as fully equal
collaborators. He
also thanks the original sponsors of the Sentence at the Lehman
College Art Gallery, the students of Lehman college, and Barbara
and the late Eugene M. Schwartz.
"The Sentence has no end. Sometimes I think it had no
beginning.
Now I salute its authors, which means all of us. You have made a
wild, precious, awful, delicious, lovable, tragic, vulgar,
fearsome,
divine thing."
--Douglas Davis, April 4, 2000
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In 1995, the Whitney Museum acquired its first work of Internet art, Douglas Davis' The World's First Collaborative Sentence. Commissioned by the Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, New York, in conjunction with "Interactions," its 1994 survey exhibition of the artist's work, Sentence is an ongoing textual and graphic performance on the World Wide Web that is maintained on the Lehman website but owned by the Whitney Museum. The work was generously donated to the Whitney by Barbara Schwartz in honor of Eugene M. Schwartz, her late husband, who together had purchased the concept and a signed disk with recordings of the first days of the Sentence.
Visitors to the site may add their own contributions to the Sentence--there are more than 200,000 to date, separated into twenty-one "chapters," in dozens of languages and with a remarkable range of images and graphics. Any subject may be addressed, but no contribution can end with a period, as the Sentence is infinitely expanding.
The World's First Collaborative Sentence is a classic work of Internet art. With its collaborative, polyvocal, multilingual, and boundless nature, the sentence has become a microcosm of the Internet itself. As a decidedly low-tech "multi-user environment" that allows for combinations of textual, visual, and aural components, it is a collective space which, in its broad array of voices and topics, achieves fluent transitions between the prosaic and the sublime.
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