Douglas Davis
«Double Entendre: Two Sites Two Times Two Sides»

[Double Entendre] was a link between me at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. There was a woman in Paris and I was in New York. We engage in a conversation that turns into flirtation and seduction. I am speaking only in English, and she is speaking only in French, but we are saying the same things to each other, doubling the language. Often the lines came out of a then-new text by Roland Barthes, the «Lover's Discourse». […]
«Double Entendre» was a video piece that had to depend for most of its 30 minutes on audio, primarily because we didn’t have the budget for the transmission of moving images. So for most of the performance you just heard these people speaking. The words were on the screen, but you didn't see the speakers until the last five minutes.
At the end of the performance I say: «I can't stand the seperation anymore. I am coming across the Atlantic right now.» That related to Barthes’s text. In it, he talks about both love and language being a kind of leap. So I plead with her to stay where she is and run out of the Whitney Museum. Next you see me on the video, finally moving, running down Park Avenue. She speaks with the audience, asking them if she should leave or if she should stay. In the end, she decides to run away. So she races down to the Plaza in front of the Centre Pompidou, and I land, live, right in front of her! We chase each other around, and I finally embrace her. «Double Entendre» ends with our embrace, far away, in the twilight - it's evening in Paris, afternoon in New York. As we stand there, merging into the darkness, two voices speak simultaneously, in French and English, speculating on the double meaning of what just occured live.
So that means that you were in Paris all the time?
Davis: No. It means the double is everywhere, as intended in the title. He was a really incredible double, he looked and walked exactly like me. I went to Paris and rehearsed with him. All the critics who saw the work on video were convinced that the landing and running action had been taped, but it was absolutely live.
(source: Douglas Davis, in: Tilman Baumgärtel: [net.art] New Materials towards Net art, Nürnberg 2001, pp. 57f.)