Douglas Davis began the "sentence without a period" in 1994 at the art gallery at Lehman College, inviting people to contribute "words, photographs, video, graphics, WWW links, and sound via the Internet, the World Wide Web, email, regular mail, and personal visits.
"[1] It was acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1995 but became plagued by technical problems such as file loss, link rot, and formatting issues.
[2] In 2012, the Whitney decided to resurrect the work but found that it was completely unusable due to out-of-date code and links.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 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.