Douglas Davis

Artist, critic, teacher and writer, he was one of the precursors of new media art. In the beginning he experimented with performance and video within the framework of Fluxus and conceptual art. Later he focused his experimentation on the artistic use of radio and television broadcasts, generating a dialogue with the viewer in front of the monitor with live performances. The goal was to break unilateral communication practices with personified interactions. His play The Last Nine Minutes was broadcast live on satellite, Douglas looks at the viewers and presses his hands against the screen. It is a participatory piece in which he addresses the time-space distance between him and the audience; This work was presented at Medialab Madrid. His exploration of interactivity continued in the 80s and 90s, creating some of the first pieces on the world wide web. The world's first collaborative sentence is one of his pieces that initiates net art. In 1997, he launched Terrible Beauty, an evolving global piece of multimedia theatre.