DDPARTY
2001

Davis Douglas

Wednesday, 28 November 2001, 18:00

Douglas Davis - the pioneering new media artist, theorist and critic, who has been visiting Russia since 1974. In his book "Art and the Future" (1973) he wrote eloquently about the soviet avant-garde at a time when the Cold War was still hot. His Red Diary, published by the Village Voice in 1988-90, introduced American readers to the possibility that Perestroika meant a profound change - at a time when most American journalists and politicians were skeptical.

Among the first video artists to focus on long-distance live satellite broadcasting (with Paik and Beuys created the first live global performance art telecast at Documenta in 1977), he also uploaded the first interactive website, "The World's First Collaborative Sentence", now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

At the moment he is perfecting the use of the web as a theatrical presence in live performance art in a work entitled "Terrible Beauty". This year in Denmark he began to create an evolving website that unveils the beauty of the digital body and strikes a blow against censorship: http://moralpornography.com which can also be accessed as http://go.to/innocenceDOTCOM. It was in turn inspired by a brilliant manifesto authored by Angela Carter in 1978, an early feminist author and polemicist.

Now in collaboration with Bard college in the USA, Nina Zaretskaya and the TV Gallery in Moscow, Smolny college in St. Petersburg and others he is beginning an "East-West" dialogue on the meaning of the virtual culture and its application in the virtual museum. We invite you not only to socialize and drink vodka, but to hear a brief 10-minute description of this project by both mr. Davis and dr.Zaretskaya, after which we will gladly take questions and offer suggestions how you can join us in the greatest adventure of the 21st century.

The site has been created with the assistance of the "Open Society Institute" (Soros Foundation). Russia