EVENT: ESSENTIAL ENGAGEMENT: THE WORKS OF JOSEPH DELAPPE EXHIBIT OPENING AND ARTIST TALK (OCTOBER 23 2025, STANFORD)
Essential Engagement: The Works of Joseph DeLappe
Vernissage: Thursday, 23 October 2025, 4–6pm PT
Hohbach Hall, Room 122, Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University, 557 Escondido Mall, Stanford, California
Retrospective exhibition + artist talk by Joseph DeLappe, followed by a conversation with Joel Slayton (CADRE Lab founding director), moderated by Henry Lowood (Harold C. Hohbach Curator, Stanford)
Free and open to the public (registration required)
Hohbach Hall, Room 122
Cecil H. Green Library
Stanford University
557 Escondido Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
On 23 October 2025, Stanford University Libraries will open Essential Engagement: The Works of Joseph DeLappe, a retrospective dedicated to one of the most influential figures in Game Art. The exhibition takes place in the Silicon Valley Archives space at Hohbach Hall, Cecil H. Green Library, and will be inaugurated with an artist talk by DeLappe, followed by a conversation with Joel Slayton, founding director of the CADRE Lab at San José State University.
Active since the early 1980s, DeLappe has consistently used games as critical tools for political reflection and artistic intervention. His pioneering online performances—most notably Dead-in-Iraq (2006–2011), where he entered the American military shooter America’s Army to type the names of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq—remain landmarks in the history of Game Art. Similarly, works such as Quake/Friends (2002), Taliban Hands (2003), and the sculptural project Cardboard Gandhi (2008) demonstrate his ability to transform play environments and avatars into platforms for dissent, tactical media, and collective memory.
The retrospective at Stanford foregrounds these interventions in the broader context of Silicon Valley’s technological culture. As the first graduate of the CADRE Lab—arguably the earliest academic programme dedicated to computation and the arts—DeLappe’s trajectory exemplifies how experimental media practices in the Bay Area anticipated global debates about games, war, surveillance, and activism. The inclusion of Joel Slayton in the opening conversation situates DeLappe’s practice within this lineage, while also underlining CADRE’s formative role in shaping the field of digital and game-based art.
Beyond his interventions in online environments, DeLappe has worked with electromechanical installations, robotics, and large-scale sculptures, always attentive to the politics of technology in a post-9/11 world. His projects have been exhibited internationally—from Eyebeam in New York to Guangdong Museum of Art in China, from Transitio MX in Mexico City to the Southern Utah Museum of Art—while also circulating widely in critical discourse, from Art in America to The Guardian.
Currently Professor of Games and Tactical Media at Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland, DeLappe continues to question how digital technologies shape political subjectivities and collective memory. Essential Engagement brings this work into dialogue with the Silicon Valley Archives, the most comprehensive repository of materials documenting the history of the region’s technological culture, foregrounding how Game Art is inseparable from the infrastructures of computation that define our present.
The opening event on 23 October will conclude with a guided tour of the exhibition. Admission is free and open to the public, with registration requested.