douglas davis (http://www.sfd.com/douglasdavis) has often been
considered to be a pioneer of video art, but he is much more. To him as
an artist the production of video tapes was secondary to the act of
communication that most of his works and projects were about. Since "TV
Hokkadim" from 1969 his work constantly involved interaction and
communication with as large an audience as possible. So it doesn't come
as a big surprise that he was among the first how used the internet as
an artistic tool, and was the first art work who created and sold an art
work on the WorldWideWeb. In the following interview he talks about the
art pieces that he created with Video, on TV and with communication
satellites, but more importantly with the participation with others.

+ + +

Tilman Baumgaertel: You are normally refered to as a video artist, but a
lot of your projects involved telecommunication rather than the
production of video tapes. Can you explain this bent in your works?

Douglas Davis: I was never never a pure videotape artist or pure video
artist. I always lusted to push images, ideas, and sounds through the so-
called media category walls. Almost never have I made anything in one
medium always. I gleefully combine video or webvideo or websites with
drawing, photography, printmaking, objects, theaters, everything. I am
dedicated to destroying media. The message is the medium, or so I
argued with McLuhan's daughter, whom I dated briefly in the 70's. She
agreed.

The other myth about me is that my work is dedicated to "communication."
I don't believe in communication! I believe in the great adventure of
TRYING to communicate, particularly across vast stretches of time,
language, space, geography, and gender. It is thrilling to try. It
almost never succeeds, except for a brief instant or two.

You are absolutely correct that most of my work in video is dedicated to
this adventure, not to being a videotape on a monitor in an art gallery.
That is no fun. It's much more fun to speak out to the entire distant
world, or to try. That is what motivated my satellite performance "Seven
Thoughts," performed in the Astrodome in 1976.

Baumgaertel: You started out as a critic before you did your first
performances in the late Sixties. Can you talk a little about the
development from writing about art to the creation of art?

Davis: Another myth. The writing and the art are one performance. I have
been writing and drawing since I was a small boy. Nobody told me they
contradicted each other until I began publishing and exhibiting a lot.
Then the world explained that I couldn't do both and remain pure. Well,
impurity is more interesting.

Baumgaertel: You said about your performances that the idea was to "de-
mass" the mass media. Can you explain this statement?

Davis: Well, the "Austrian Tapes" and the "Florence Tapes" were not only
tapes but interactive performances. In the first I ask you to touch my
hands on the screen with your hands, chests, backs, etc, and to think
about whether we are really touching. In the second I ask you to
completely disrobe with me and put your feet up on the screen against my
feet and decide "Who is up, who is down?"

Whenever I do any performance in a gallery or theater I try also to
involve the listening or watching audience on radio or catv or the web
by asking them questions and inviting their responses–in "Double
Entendre", which linked the Whitney and Centre Pompidou in 1981, I asked
the outside audience to phone in advice for me when I had to decide
whether to fly across the ocean to save my love affair. I also often
speak to the live audience in front of me in the gallery or theater and
ask them to advise me. In the very last performance of "Terrible Beauty"
(http://here.is/TERRIBLEBEAUTY), the global narrative now evolving on
the net, the audience is going to take over completely: I will be bound,
gagged, and helpless. They will wrap up all the plot lines themselves.

Sometimes I sit down beside the viewer. Last fall in a performance of
my internet piece "Terrible Beauty" in San Francisco I sprayed the
audience with computer scents and asked them to spray me back: we then
sniffed each other- anything to get you to act, not just sit there.

Most of my prints and drawings and photos coax you to move or touch
them. When you take these actions - not just spectate - you not only de-
massify the contact between us. You understand you are the key agent
here, not me. It is your perception that defines the work. I don't
believe in a mass anything, not even a mass crowd, where lots of people
are swept along by force and don't agree with what is happening.

Baumgaertel: In the early Seventies there was a number of video groups
in the US, that were trying to make their own TV rather than just video
tapes, such as the Videofreex. Were you involved with these groups?

Davis: In the beginning I worked with something called The New Group in
Washington, D.C., dedicated to performances,events, and interactive
media, in the late 60's. When I moved to New York I often worked in
informal ad hoc alliances with artists like Paik, Campus, Viola, and
many others. I knew the Video Freex and Raindance and collaborated with
them in informal ways. The group phenomenon tended to disappear when
the 80's descended.

Baumgaertel: Tell me about "Seven thoughts", the piece you did at the
Huston Astrodome in 1976…

Davis: I was obsessed with using satellites. It was the great unknown
and therefore exotic. I wanted to use it to broadcast very avantgarde,
conceptual video, precisely what no one expected or desired. At that
time, no artist had gotten his or her hands on any satellite. We
thought we'd be lucky to convince a TV network to allow a "live"
performance or show a few minutes of video art. I decided this was
tame, not worth all the time and boot-licking required to achieve it. I
decided to try to get the satellite for myself, even in a tiny way.
This seemed the radical step.

I found support from the Contemporary Arts Museum in Huston, directed by
James Hariths, who had established the the first video department at the
Everson Museum in Syracuse, when he hired David Ross as its curator. We
decided to rent time on the ComSat satellite for an uncompromising
performance. It was the first time that any private citizen did this,
apparently. That was a wonder to me: our tax dollars created the
satellite system, why don't we use it?

The moment I started to think about Houston, I thought of the Astrodome,
at that time the largest roof stadium in the world, but more
importantly, it was circular. I kept thinking about the link between the
satellite and the dome. Eventually we managed to get the permission to
use the Astrodome on the evening of December 29, 1976, when it was
empty, unused, and cheap to rent (not that either the CAM or i had a
dime to spare: if Giuseppe Panza, the collector from Milan, hadn't given
us the cash - in exchange for a piece - Seven Thoughts would never have
been uttered).

Baumgaertel: Was there any audience?

Davis: There was nobody in the Astrodome - except for the people
involved in the performance. But people could have picked up the signal
anywhere in the world with their receivers. TV and radio stations
anywhere could have retrieved our signal and broadcast it. The Seven
Thoughts were free thoughts. We sent a telegram to all Comsat receiving
nodes everywhere. I offered seven very personal thoughts to the citizens
of the world. Stressing the privacy of the transmission mattered. I
wasn't offering a mass or imperialistic message. I wanted one to one
contact…with you…wherever you were.

It all began at 9:30 pm–we could only afford to rent that huge place,
its lights, its scoreboard for thirty minutes. At about 9:28, just when
I had to begin, a groundkeeper called out to me, holding a phone on the
sideline, where the teams sit on the bench.. He yelled: "Bombay, India,
is calling! You have to tell them what the seven thoughts are before
they'll let them be heard on the radio by everyone." But I had no time
to spare: "Tell them it's a good will message for the new year", I said,
and ran out on the field, to begin exactly at 9:30, in the nick of time.

That's when the silent performance began, viewed from cameras above,
suspended from the dome's ceiling, I walked in circles carrying the
small black box containing the seven thoughts. about 20 minutes later, I
reached the middle of the Astrodome, where a microphone was lowered over
my head from the camera platform, which descended steadily downward.
Between 9:40 and 9:50 I spoke up through the roof of the stadium to the
orbiting satellite down to the ears of the world. Ten minutes of direct
transmission was our budgetary limit. Well, I loved that density and
compression. Then, when I finished talking, I locked the little black
box where the thoughts remain to this day, in Milan.

Baumgaertel: Do you know if the thoughts were broadcast in India?

Davis: No.

Baumgaertel: What were the seven thoughts?

Davis: Once they were free. Now they were secret. Not even Panza knows–
he agreed to keep them locked forever.

Baumgaertel: The performance you did for the opening of the documenta in
1977 also involved satellites…

Davis: It was called "The last nine minutes", produced by Hessischer
Rundfunk, and broadcast around the world to many nations, even in the
Soviet Union. It must have been the largest audience that any art event
ever had, up to that date.

There were three performances. The first one was by Nam June Paik and
Charlotte Moorman. Than Joseph Beuys came on, and gave a very beautiful,
totally anarchist message to the world–despite persistent threats to
censor him. Words seemed more of a threat than Paik's images or my
silent performance.

My piece was "The Last 9 Minutes," because I had the last 9 minutes for
my performance. Once again I circle: you see me going around the
perimeter of your TV screen, trying to find you, speak to you, touch
you. My recorded voice says twice, once in English, once in German,
while a Spanish text rolls over the screen: "Wherever you are in this
room, I will find you in nine minutes. I will search all the angles,
all the spaces in this room, in your room. Hold up your hands to the
screen, let me hear the ticking of your clock. I will find you. We will
destroy this barrier between us in nine minutes."

It concluded with a count-down, from "10" to "1", called in spanish from
Caracas by a performer there, across the atlantic. I also asked
everybody watching to crash through the TV monitor on "1". By some
miracle, the two of us hit the screen exactly on point,, then the screen
went black. On the next day in Kassel a woman came up to me in the
supermarket and said: "I saw you last night on TV. Now you must come
home with me and repair my broken screen." Well, she got the point
didn't she?

Baumgaertel: Another satellite piece you did is called "Double
Entendre", that was performed in New York and Paris in 1981. What was it
about?

Davis: That was the next satellite piece after documenta. It was a link
between me at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Centre Pompidou.
There was a woman in Paris and I was in New York. We engage in a
conversation that turns into flirtation and seduction. I am speaking
only in english, and she is speaking only in french, but we are saying
the same things to each other, doubling the language. Often the lines
played with a new text by Roland Barthes, Discours Amoreux (A Lover's
Discourse). It was the beginning of his break from the myopia of
Structuralism and I loved it and him. He died not longer after I met
him, in 1977, a pivotal year in my life, obviously. It was also filled
with comic ecstasy, as is the piece, I hope.

This was a video piece that had to depend for most of its 30 minutes on
audio, primarily because of the budget but naturally I loved the
doubling of the media. When you don't have a lot of money, you become
very clever. We could afford only five minutes of satellite video, the
rest had to be audio. So during the performance you just heard these
people speaking. The words were on the screen, but you didn't see the
speakers until the last five minutes.

At the end of the performance I say: "I can't stand the seperation
anymore, I am coming across the Atlantic Ocean right now." That related
Barthes text, where he talks about both love and language being a kind
of leap. So I plead with her to stay where she is and run out of the
Whitney theater. Next you finally see on the video running down Park
Avenue. She soliloquizes with the audience, asking them if she should
leave or if she should stay. Finally she decides to run away. So she
races down to the Plaza in front of Centre Pompidou, and I land live in
front of her, right there! We chase around, and I finally embrace her.
"Double Entendre" ends with our embrace, far away, in the twilight -
it's evening in Paris, afternoon in New York. As we stand there, merging
into the darkness, two voices speak simultaneously, in French and
English, speculating on the double meaning of what just occured live.

Baumgaertel: So that means that you were in Paris all the time?

Davis: No. It means the Double is everywhere, as intended in the title.
He was a really incredible double, he looked and walk exactly like me. I
went to Paris, and rehearsed with him. All the critics who saw the work
were convinced the landing and running action had been taped, but it was
absolutely live.

Baumgaertel: In your bio you also mention a number of performances you
did with Komar & Melamid in the 70's, when they were still living in
Moscow. Wasn't it difficult, to get in touch with dissident artists
behind the "Iron Curtain" in that time?

Davis: That came from going to Russia in Middle of the 70ies during the
cold war. I arrived there the week Breshnev signed the SALT I treaty,
which meant that for the first time in decades it was OK for an American
to be in Russia. I was allowed to go to the Rodchenko studio. The last
time an American was there was Alfred Barr in 1955.

I also met some of the young russian dissident artists, and was most
impressed by the works of Ilya Kabakov and conceptual artists Vitaly
Komar & Alexander Melamid, who I see a lot now, because they live in New
York. But in those times, we expected to meet each other again. It was
like a miracle that I was there at all. So we decided to create a
transatlantic art work together, using the only mediums that was allowed
to us at that time: the telephone and a photocamera.

I spoke no russian, they spoke no english, but there were friends on
both sides to help us. I had this idea that if I painted a line on my
wall and they painted one on their wall, we would take photographs, and
hold up questions about the meaning of the line, and exchange them by
mail, so in each city the work would exist, spliced down the middle. I
took my first picture at midnight on Dec 31. 1975, and they took their
picture at 8 AM on January 1. 1976–the same instant.

There weren't any collaborations like that going on at that time, so it
enlisted a lot of interest of the secret services like the KGB and the
CIA. Vitali's and Alexander's idea was to be very open, because if we
tried to hide anything, they'd think we meant real political trouble.

So we talked very openly about the telephone, and I was able to get
material from them that I published in "Domus" Magazine, which went to
every russian library, so the work - we called it "Questions Moscow New
York" - got very well known. The KGB asked questions, but they never
stopped it. The CIA didnt ask any quesions, but they didn't call a halt,
either.

We had four pictures in mind at first: One at New Years Eve, one on May
1, one on the 4th of July, and one on November 25th, the anniversary of
the October Revolution. In the last picture they are wearing over-
coats, like they are getting ready to leave, and the next thing I know
they successfully imigrated to Israel!

So the fifth picture was taken in Tel-Aviv and New York, and for the
last picture, or what we thought was the last picture, my finally got to
New York, and we did a picture in my gallery, Ronald Feldman, called
"The End of the Line", where we tear the line down off the wall.

15 years pass, it's Perestroika, and in 1991 I go to Moscow. We decided
to do one more picture, where everything is reversed: I am on Red
Square, and they are in Rockefeller Center. It's a beautiful color-
mural.

Baumgaertel: But you never worked together in a situation where you were
physically in the same room?

Davis: Only once, in the sixth picture in 1978. In 1991, I am holding
the line, it's going down from my hands on Red Square, and they are kind
of grabbing the line at Rockefeller Center. We will probably do another
one in 2000. It depends on one of us going to some exotic place. Like
the moon, or Jupiter. (laughs)

Baumgaertel: Your "World's Longest Sentences"
(http://math240.lehman.cuny.edu/art/) was one of the first art works for
the internet, if not the first at all. How did you get the idea to do
something online? And what was your experience with this piece?

Davis: All miracles. A tiny art gallery in the Bronx, the poorest
legislative district in the U.S., got a server in 1994, a very rare
event then. The director, Susan Hoeltzel, asked me if I wanted to create
a new work linked to the title of my exhibiton then installed there,
entitled "InterActions (1967-1981)", which was about my early work. She
also planned to put the whole show up there.

Immediately I thought of the keyboard, the means of interaction allowed
by the Web but not by video or flat art. the big difference between
broadcast TV and the Web is the keyboard: that people can say anything
with it, they have full expressive capacitiy. This means a more intense
and personal link could occur between me and the audience - and why not
get the whole world together to write a sentence?

Baumgaertel: Were you aware of any other artist using the internet as a
medium at that time?

Davis: This was in 1994. The use of the home computer of getting online
was pretty heavy after 1994 in the US. Al Gore even made it an issue in
the presendential campaign in 1992. But nobody was using it to make art.
The museums were all online. You could go to the Web and see the
collection of the National Museum in Canberra or something, but no new
art for the internet.

When we began to plan it, my colleagues Robert Schneider and Gary Welz
confirmed that we could devise a program that would keep you from typing
a period. This means that the moment you address the "Sentence" you
understand you are a part of an ongoing statement that will never end.
My experience with you and the world on this piece is a unending
adventure. Every day, every month, every year it changes. The
contributions now are much more graphically sophisticated than before.
The Sentence is hot pink now, pulsing with Java, video, audio, color,
everything. In the beginning it was black and white but rich with soul
and personality.

All the original passion is still there - but designed so well that you
miss what the world is really saying. What matters about the "Sentence"
is the content above all. In 2000 the Whitney - which now owns the
"Sentence" - and Printed Matter will combine with me to "print out" the
work for the first time, to create "The World's First Collaborative
Book."

Baumgaertel: Do you think that the internet has accomplished what you
were aiming at with your performances? To de-mass the mass-media?

Davis: Yes. It is the ultimate means of getting really intense response,
and hearing from people. With works like "The world's longest Sentence",
it is a way of getting people actively involved in the creation of
something. I am still absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of people who
come onto it and what they do. Then again: Down with mediums! Down with
the Web! Up with…you!

Baumgaertel: But how "interactive" is it to add to a sentence that
nobody will ever read?

Davis: But people do read the sentence. When we make a book out of it,
more people will read it. If you spend a lot of time adding to the
sentence, you can be sure that you tell lots of friends about it. If you
read the sentence you get a sense of the interaction that is going on
between people. There are different subjects and themes that persist:
the linguistic nature of this thing (is it a real sentence?),
loneliness, words as lifelines, time, space, love, lust, art, poetry,
politics.

There is also a certain amount of personal revelation going on. it's
certainly much deeper than the usual shit that goes on on chat lines.
People reveal things about themselves, about watching their parents die
or horrible break ups of relationships or problems with the police.
There is a lot of heavy stuff going on. Then there is also a lot of
humour, gaming, word play and things like that.

Baumgaertel: But technically, all people do is filling out a form that
somebody else devised…

Davis: That's your read on it, but it's not everybody else's, thank god.
I could say the reverse. The reason why the sentence is an interactive
marvel is that there are no rules, except…you can't type a period.
They put up images, they link to their sites, they shout, sing, bitch,
praise the world. The success is basically due to it's highly deceptive
simplicity. Deceptive because the result is a very rich thing, not a
gimmick at all. So many people come to it, often again and again,
because they know they can speak freely here, and be heard.

Baumgaertel: I understand you sold the piece?

Davis: The collectors' name was Eugene M. Shwartz. He was a great
collector of contemporary art in New York, he had a avantgarde edge. He
called me, and asked: "What is this about? When I told him, he said I
want to buy it."

Baumgaertel: Did it occur to you before that the piece could be sold?

Davis: No. It is still hard to sell video, you know. Video has become
collectable, but still at very low prices. If you compare it to
impressionism: the impressionists started to earn good money way before
we did. Manet got some big medal from the king of France twenty years
after his first exhibition. So actually we are still more avantgarde
than the impressionists (laughs).

It seemed too early for me to sell web art, but I hadn't counted on
Gene. The piece went up in September 1995; he bought it in January 1995.
There wasn't a lot of stuff up at that point. If you look on page 4 of
the sentence, you can read that he is buying it, because he typed in his
intention. The Sentence stayed on the Server of Lehman College, but his
widow gave his collection of my work to the Whitney. It was a daring
commitment for a traditional museum, surely fired by the director at the
time, David Ross, who was in fact the first video curator, at the
Everson in the 70's, because they must maintain it like a painting,
except that it can go on changing, growing,expanding for eternity.

Baumgaertel: I guess the same thing can be said about your project
"MetaBody" (http://www.ps1.org/body/), where people contribute pictures
of the human body instead of parts of a sentence…

Davis: "MetaBody" is also in the collection of a private collector. He
is not worried about it, but "MetaBody" is enormously fun to look at and
also very sexy. When we put up "MetaBody" we couldn't take any file
larger the 100 K. There are some technical strains, but I have a great
computer now, so I was finally able to download the whole thing myself.

Baumgaertel: Is the idea to move your own body online? Is that the
logical consequence of what you were doing as an artist?

Davis: Yes, certainly, and my body is already up there, naked and
unashamed, along with yours, on "Metabody". I also obviously lust after
linking to the Other over long distances. The further away, the happier
I am. As long as we can collapse the gap between us and touch. I am very
interested in quantumteleportation these days. The theory of
teleportation has been proven: you can read the results on the IBM
website. it is possible to move matter instantly from one end of the
universe to the other–a form of quick-faxing the body. The only draw-
back right now is… the master copy destroys itself. So if you go, your
body evaporates in the send mode. I'd love to do that… (laughs)

Baumgaertel: That might be your last piece…

Davis: Yes. Then again, it might be a series. I might be able to come
back. I guess I like not really knowing what's going to happen. All
these things, that I did and still want to do, have open-ended
consequences. The second obsession is the Other, the other person. All
these media are just different ways to do massage these needs. They are
just different ways to go - to go far away, to another space and time
and culture and make some kind of one-to-one-connection.

Baumgaertel: So were would you like to get teleported to?

Davis: Oh, that wouldn't matter. I just want to GO! (laughs)

[The german version of this interview is available at:
http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/sa/8116/1.html]