Game Art: Joseph Delappe's "Screen Shot" (2011)
Where Where Exhibition Space, Beijing, China July 9th through July 29th LINK
"Joseph DeLappe: Screen Shot
Screen Shot represents Joseph DeLappe’s ongoing work to engage “First Person Shooter” (FPS) computer games as arenas for creative, political, and hacktivistic performative interventions. The artist’s fallen avatar, as recorded during his interventionist project “dead-in-iraq”, taking place within the U.S. Defense Department funded America’s Army recruiting game, is realized here as finely rendered graphite drawings. The hands of a Taliban fighter, as depicted in the controversial Medal of Honor shooter game, lay on the gallery floor - made real via a complex process of 3D data extraction and physical construction. Through these works the 24/7 global phenomena of virtually simulated contemporary warfare as “play” has been reified as images and objects of conscience.
Joseph DeLappe is considered a pioneer of online gaming performance art. Projects range from, performing via text messaging, as the poet Allen Ginsberg Howl: Star Trek Elite Force Voyager Online (2001) to reenacting an entire situational comedy in Quake/Friends (2003) to walking 240 miles on a specially converted treadmill to control his Mahatma Gandhi avatar in Second Life in 2008. In 2006 he commenced to enter the online, US Army recruiting game, "America's Army", in order to manually type the name, age, service branch and date of death of each service person who has died to date in the War in Iraq." (Gordon Laurin)
Link: Joseph Delappe
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti