Douglas Davis

Suite 212 is Paik's "personal New York sketchbook," an electronic collage that presents multiple perspectives of New York's media landscape as a fragmented tour of the city. Paik critiques the selling of New York by multinational corporations and the city's role as the master of the media and information industries; Collaborators Yalkut, Davis and Kubota contribute their own vibrant and punchy segments.

In his video »The Austrian Tapes«, Douglas Davis examines the medium of television. It was realized for a video symposium and the exhibition »Art as Living Ritual« curated by Horst Gerhard Haberl at the P.O.O.L Gallery in Graz.

Douglas Davis presents his interpretations of The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and Napoleon in the triptych style of the finale of the Abel Gance version of the latter.

Suite 212 is Paik's "personal New York sketchbook," an electronic collage that presents multiple perspectives of New York's media landscape as a fragmented tour of the city. Paik critiques the selling of New York by multinational corporations and the city's role as the master of the media and information industries; Collaborators Yalkut, Davis and Kubota contribute their own vibrant and punchy segments.

Short movie by Douglas Davis.

In Street Sentences from 1972, Davis invites passersby to spontaneously give a personal statement to the camera. The result is a collage of political, poetic, and personal messages that generate a diverse and remarkable portrait of the time.

Structurally, Three Silent & Secret Acts corresponds extensively to the work that followed, Reading Brecht in 3/4 Time: the performance takes place at different times and at several locations, and is broadcast live on cable television. For the television broadcast, different sources (both recorded material and live), places, and times are woven together. The event was staged to mark the introduction of cable television in SoHo and was made possible financially by Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M. Schwartz. For Davis and many other artists of his generation, cable television represented a way out of the centralized structures of commercial and public television, where viewer involvement was not intended.

This performance, presented for German TV's first live satellite transmission marking the opening of the Documenta VI in Kassel on 24 June 1977, is a continuation of Douglas Davis' works on telecommunication. His exhortations of the viewers to establish contact with him via the TV screen are made all the more pointed by the physical distance between two continents.

Perhaps no artist and fellow media theorist worked so fastidiously in the vein of McLuhan as Douglas Davis, albeit directly contrary to what he described as McLuhan’s “apocalyptic” message when he proclaimed, “The medium is not the message. You and I, in all our obstinate, unpredictable glory and complexity, are the message. The ultimate power lies on this, the other side of the TV screen, in the eye and mind of the viewer who can increasingly become the actor.” This performative broadcast – which also functions somewhat as a mini-retrospective of other classic Davis pieces – features Davis’s self-described “investigation into a kind of denial of the physical reality of the medium…[putting] the control over the medium…back into the hands of the human imagination.” Likewise, it directly contradicts VIDEODROME’s association of television and sexuality with pain and control. Whether it does so effectively is up to the viewer…

In his video »The Austrian Tapes«, Douglas Davis examines the medium of television. It was realized for a video symposium and the exhibition »Art as Living Ritual« curated by Horst Gerhard Haberl at the P.O.O.L Gallery in Graz.