Douglas Davis

Douglas Davis (*1933, Washington, D.C.-2024, New York City) was a performance and media artist and art critic.
As an art theorist and critic specializing in architecture, photography and video, he published numerous articles in renowned magazines such as Art in America, Artforum, Village Voice and Newsweek (1969-1988). He was also the author of numerous publications.


With his performances, Davis pursued the goal of breaking out of the passive spectator role and using new technologies as tools for an interactive, globally networked art practice. He wanted to replace the one-way communication of traditional media with personal, participatory interactions and thus create a direct connection between artist and audience.
 

His participation in documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977 was one of the most decisive moments in his artistic career. As part of the first live satellite broadcast on German television, Davis presented his work The Last Nine Minutes, which was broadcast live from Caracas, Venezuela, alongside performances by Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys.
In addition to numerous video-based works, Davis was one of the first artists to use the internet as an artistic platform. 

An outstanding example of this is The World's First Collaborative Sentence (1994), an ongoing, interactive online performance in text and image. The project was commissioned by the Lehman College Art Gallery (Bronx, N.Y.) and the City University of New York. Visitors were able to add their own contributions to a never-ending set by early 2000 there were over 200,000 contributions, divided into 21 chapters, in numerous languages and supplemented by a wide variety of images and graphics.

The Douglas Davis Archive has been located at the ZKM | Karlsruhe since 2024. It comprises around 10 linear meters of archive documents (in a non-editable state) as well as video and audio tapes. Numerous documents, typescripts and manuscripts, correspondence, sketches, photographs and ephemera available in the estate provide a comprehensive insight into Davis' artistic and theoretical production.