Longest Collaborative Sentence, Remixed
11 · 11 · 2025
Inconsolata by Raph Levien
With thanks to the staff of the Whitney Museum of American Art for permission to work with Douglas Davis’ The World’s Longest Collaborative Sentence (1994–2012).
Longest Collaborative Sentence, Remixed uses Douglas Davis’ collaborative piece to explore the friction between authorship and censorship.
Davis’ sentence, which is open, anonymous, and unmoderated, offers an early and revealing example of freedom of expression in a digital space. The build up of anonymous voices reveals the fine line between free speech and hate speech, and questions where responsibility lies when collective authorship is left unchecked.
This website showcases the original sentence as a continuously autoscrolling text. Flagged language is blurred, and the blur is the only place colour appears. Each blurred word takes its own shift of the gradient.
Censorship decisions were informed by close reading of the sentence, accounting not only for explicit language but also for subtler forms of aggression. Some choice words and microaggressions could have gone unnoticed, which is the nature of the internet. If there are any glaring instances of this, reach out to: marywildesign@gmail.com.