''The World's First Collaborative Sentence'' is a work of

internet art upright=1.3, "Simple Net Art Diagram", a 1997 work by Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden Internet art (also known as net art) is a form of new media art distributed via the Internet. This form of art circumvents the traditional dominance of the phys ...

by Douglas Davis begun in 1994. It is held by the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

, and one version of it remains live to the present day.

History

Douglas Davis began the "sentence without a period" in 1994 at the art gallery at

Lehman College Lehman College is a public college in the Bronx borough of New York City. Founded in 1931 as the Bronx campus of Hunter College, the school became an independent college within CUNY in September 1967. The college is named after Herbert H. Lehma ...

, inviting people to contribute "words, photographs, video, graphics, WWW links, and sound via the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

, the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

, regular mail, and personal visits." It was acquired by the

in 1995 but became plagued by technical problems such as file loss,

link rot Link rot (also called link death, link breaking, or reference rot) is the phenomenon of hyperlinks tending over time to cease to point to their originally targeted file, web page, or server due to that resource being relocated to a new address ...

, and formatting issues. By the year 2000, the sentence had received nearly 200,000 contributions.

Preservation

In 2012, the Whitney decided to resurrect the work but found that it was completely unusable due to out-of-date code and links. Restoring the work generated a debate among conservators as to whether the links and code should be updated or left in their original state as a testament to the ephemeral nature of the web. The Whitney ultimately decided to duplicate the work and display two versions. The historical version, which is now locked to new contributions, was left frozen in time with broken and old links redirected through the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...

to the 90's version of sites when possible. The updated, "live" version, allows people to continue to contribute to the sentence, and the Whitney has opened some aspects of its maintenance to outside users.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:World's First Collaborative Sentence Internet art Whitney Museum of American Art Computer-related introductions in 1994 Lehman College