project : The World’s First Collaborative Sentence

The World’s First Collaborative Sentence

description

The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, created by Douglas Davis for a survey exhibition of his work in 1994 and donated to the Whitney in 1995, is a is an ongoing textual and graphic online “performance” which has become a “classic” of Internet art. Allowing users to contribute to a never-ending sentence, it anticipated today’s blog environments and ongoing posts. In early 2012 the Whitney Museum undertook a preservation effort which resulted in two versions of the Sentence : a restored historic one and a live one.

Visitors to the Sentence may add their own contributions to the webpages—there were more than 200,000 by early 2000, 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.