Douglas Davis

American Video Artist and Digital Artist, born in 1933.

"As an artist, theorist, critic, teacher, and writer, Douglas Davis has played an active role in contemporary art since the 1960s. A pioneer of video in the 1970s, his "live" satellite performance/video pieces are seminal exercises in the use of interactive technology as a medium for art and communications." (Electronic Arts Intermix)

Timeline of projects:

1971: Electronic Hokkadim, interactive broadcast performance from the atrium of the Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C.
1972: Talk-Out!, three-hour interactive telethon co-sponsored by the Everson Museum and WCNY-PBS.
1976: Seven Thoughts, the Houston Astrodome, live global satellite message to the world.
Two Cities, Flesh, a Text, and the Devil, simultaneous performances/cablecasts co-sponsored by the Long Beach, Calif. Art Museum and Artist's CATV Television in San Francisco.
1977: In The Last Nine Minutes for the first live international satellite telecast by artists, transmitted from Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany.
1977: Four Places Two Figures One Ghost, in which two performances were created simultaneously for telecast and for the Whitney Museum.
1980: Davis participates in the Artists' Use of Telecommunications Conference.
1981: Double Entendre - live satellite performance linking the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
1986: Ménage à trois - live satellite and radio performance that linked the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Venice Biennale.
1994: The World's First Collaborative Sentence - Internet project.
1997: Metabody - Internet project
1997 - 2000: Terrible Beauty - interactive global theater

"Earlier the same month [October 1976], Douglas Davis had presented a live, two-way cablecast between Anthology Film Archives and Manhattan Cable TV. The piece, Reading Brecht in 3/4 Time, also employed Citizens-Band radio, the computer BBS of its day. In April 1976, Davis’s performance of Three Silent and Secret Acts live from The Kitchen and Manhattan Cable TV, had been facilitated by Manhattan Cable’s installation of a direct link to their transmission facility from The Kitchen’s exhibition space at 484 Broome Street. Davis followed these projects with a live, multi-point cablecast from the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1977. Four Places Two Figures One Ghost was the first live performance telecast from a New York City museum.

Each of Davis’s projects attempted to use TV as a private medium, one usually viewed in personal space, and all shared a belief in the potential of television as an interactive medium. Thus, the live performance of Reading Brecht, in which Davis read “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,” Bertolt Brecht’s 1932 treatise on radio as a genuine two-way communications medium, became the inaugural event of Cable Soho. This consortium of artists and arts organizations in lower Manhattan was formed to find interactive uses for the public access channels then available in New York City." (Source: Leanne Mella, 1994, link)

Resources:

http://www.eai.org/eai/artist.jsp?artistID=271 - Electronic Arts Intermix
http://www.afsnitp.dk/udefra/1/dd/home.html - Who is Douglas Davis?
http://web.archive.org/web/20050819062428/www.douglasdavis.net/index2.html
http://www.douglasdavis.blogspot.com/ "this is my first blog on this blogspot website but this is by no means, my very first blog. I am the world's first blogger before the word "blogging" was even invented."

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