Joshua Davis (born June 13, 1971) is an American

designer A designer is a person who plans the form or structure of something before it is made, by preparing drawings or plans. In practice, anyone who creates tangible or intangible objects, products, processes, laws, games, graphics, services, or exp ...

, technologist, author, and visual artist in

new media New media describes communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for ...

. He is best known as the creator of praystation.com, winner of the

Prix Ars Electronica The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the best known and longest running yearly prizes in the field of electronic and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music. It has been awarded since 1987 by Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria) ...

2001 Golden Nica for "Net Vision / Net Excellence”. He was an early adopter of open-source software, offering the source code of the praystation.com composition and animation developments to the public. Davis had a role in designing the visualization of IBM's Watson, the intelligent computer program capable of answering questions, for the quiz show

Jeopardy ''Jeopardy!'' is an American game show created by Merv Griffin. The show is a quiz competition that reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given genera ...

. His work has been inducted into the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, National Design Triennial 2006 “Design Life Now”, and he has spoken at the

TED TED may refer to: Economics and finance * TED spread between U.S. Treasuries and Eurodollar Education * ''Türk Eğitim Derneği'', the Turkish Education Association ** TED Ankara College Foundation Schools, Turkey ** Transvaal Education Depa ...

and 99U conferences about his career in algorithmic image making and open-source software.

Career

Since 1995, Joshua Davis has made a career as an image maker using programming. He writes his own code to produce interactions with users and generate visual compositions according to rule-based, randomized processes. Davis was an early web designer. He was introduced to the internet by a design student friend at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he studied illustration and art history. After a year of working on illustration by day and programming at night, Davis ran out of cash and was offered a job writing HTML for Pratt's web site. He dropped out of Pratt in his junior year to work in the new field of design technology.

Selected works

Praystation

His website, Praystation.com, which he would use to exhibit new design work and experiments, was one of the first to offer

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

Flash files. The second year of Praystation.com was compiled into a

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both comput ...

called ''PrayStation Hardrive'', which included source files, photos and miscellaneous items that Joshua Davis worked on during that time, distributed in limited quantities by

IdN magazine IDN can refer to: * Internationalized domain names * Institut Industriel du Nord, the former name of École Centrale de Lille * Indonesia, the ISO ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization. ISO or ...

. The disc included a 32-page booklet and was packaged in a plastic casing modeled after the

PlayStation 2 The PlayStation 2 (PS2) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on 4 March 2000, in North America on 26 October 2000, in Europe on 24 November 2000, and in Australia on 3 ...

Dreamless

Dreamless.org was the site of a popular

Internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

, hosted by Joshua Davis from 1999 to 2001. Its minimal design, understated

Web presence A web presence is a location on the World Wide Web where a person, business, or some other entity is represented (see also web property and point of presence). Examples of a web presence for a person could be a personal website, a blog, a profil ...

and hidden registration page all added to its intrigue, and for a while it was a gathering place for many graphic and web designers and programmers. "

Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in raster ...

Battles" were a popular activity among forum members, leading into the

internet phenomenon An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme ( ), is an idea, behavior, style, or image that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. What is considered a meme may vary across different communities on the Internet ...

now referred to as

Photoshop tennis A Photoshop contest, or sometimes Photoshop battle (often abbreviated to PS Battle), is an online game, in which a website or user of an Internet forum will post a starting image — usually a photograph — and ask others to manipulate the imag ...

. The community of Dreamless traveled past the boundaries of the Internet — impromptu local meetings ("riots", as Davis called them) were arranged for Dreamless users to meet face-to-face and exchange ideas.

Threadless Threadless (stylized as threadless) is an online community of artists and an e-commerce website based in Chicago, Illinois, founded in 2000 by Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart. Threadless designs are created by and chosen by an online community. E ...

founders

Jake Nickell Jake may refer to: Name * Jake (given name), including a list of persons and fictional characters with the name * Katrin Jäke (born c. 1975), German swimmer * Jake (gamer), American ''Overwatch'' player and coach Animals * Jake (rescue dog), a s ...

and

Jacob DeHart Jacob (; ; ar, يَعْقُوب, Yaʿqūb; gr, Ἰακώβ, Iakṓb), later given the name Israel, is regarded as a patriarch of the Israelites and is an important figure in Abrahamic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Ja ...

met while active in the Dreamless community, and started Threadless after Jake won a T-shirt design competition run by Dreamless. One notorious forum on Dreamless was "08 - Meaningless and Shallow", a topical free-for-all which led to numerous

flame war Flaming or roasting is the act of posting insults, often including profanity or other offensive language, on the internet. This term should not be confused with the term trolling, which is the act of someone going online, or in person, and causing ...

s, post floods and user-led XSS

vandalism Vandalism is the action involving deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property. The term includes property damage, such as graffiti and defacement directed towards any property without permission of the owner. The term f ...

. After several "meltdowns" and member disputes, Davis closed Dreamless in July 2001. The link was reused to host Davis's

Minecraft ''Minecraft'' is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being ...

server. While private at the time of its creation, it is now open to everyone. The server was used mainly by the

Deadmau5 Joel Thomas Zimmerman (born January 5, 1981), known professionally as Deadmau5 (stylized as deadmau5; pronounced "dead-mouse"), is a Canadian electronic music producer and DJ. He mainly produces progressive house music, though he also produces ...

mau5ville Minecraft community.

Books

* *

Multimedia

Websites

Once Upon A Forest

PrayStation.com
- Year 2, version 4 archive
Hype Framework
- A collaborative project with

Branden Hall Branden may refer to: * Branden (given name) * Branden (surname) Branden is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Barbara Branden (1929–2013), Canadian writer, editor and lecturer * Mikael Branden (born 1959), former Swedish ba ...

Awards and accolades

Joshua Davis was the winner of the 2001

Golden Nica in the category “Net Excellence” and has exhibited his works at the

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is ...

(London), the

Ars Electronica Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which houses the Museum of the Future, in the ...

(Austria), the

Design Museum The Design Museum in Kensington, London exhibits product, industrial, graphic, fashion, and architectural design. In 2018, the museum won the European Museum of the Year Award. The museum operates as a registered charity, and all funds generat ...

(London), le

Centre Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou ( en, National Georges Pompidou Centre of Art and Culture), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area of ...

(France), the

Institute of Contemporary Arts The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch, the ICA c ...

(London), PS.1 MoMA (New York), among others. In December 2006, his work was included in the Smithsonian’s

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum housed within the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New York City, along the Upper East Side's Museum Mile (New York City), Museum Mile. It is one of 19 museums that fall under the ...

’s "National Design Triennial: Design Life Now" exhibit.