Mapping
the spaces in
between:
The material/
virtual interface
in Joseph
DeLappe’s work
Natasha Chuk
171
Mapping the spaces in between
Joseph DeLappe is an American digital media artist with
many seemingly contradictory allegiances. For him, there
is no hierarchy between digital and analogue creative
practices: he favours neither. Rather, utilising the physical
properties of exhibition spaces, computer devices, material
sculpture, and his own body, DeLappe explores the net­
worked environments of social media, video games and
other web-based platforms, such as Second Life,1 through
performance interventions, as he addresses social and
political issues in large-scale physical and virtual ways. His
projects engage both the transience of virtuality through
emerging technologies and the relative permanence of
material objects. The results are provocative, spirited, and
demonstrative of how combining analogue and digital
creative practices can yield compelling results. In his
influential essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Repro­
ducibility,2 Walter Benjamin identified the spielraum, or
playspace, as a unique margin afforded by advanced
technologies that allows creators to experiment with form,
perception, and ultimately, experience. This concept is the
basis of an examination of a selection of DeLappe’s work
and creative approaches to consider their aesthetic, formal
character, and outcomes with respect to how various tech­
nologies are used in combination for play, or experimen­
tation, as part of the creative process.
DeLappe’s artistic oeuvre spans many categories and
many of his projects are ongoing and provisional, taking
shape in stages, with new elements added as the works
change. His website organises his projects by the following
categories: sculpture/installation, interventions/actions,
game art/performance, draw/paint, and imaging, yet these
labels seem to be applied for convenience and do not
173
Natasha Chuk
describe the intricacy or creative process of each project.
Upon closer inspection, his creative process, which is
focused on experimenting with combining analogue and
digital processes in unique ways to test their outcomes, is
consistent among his projects. Of his creative approach,
DeLappe explains: ‘I think all of my work has a strong
foot in my awareness of art history, both in terms of
performance and sculpture, and whatever it is I’m
working on I actually really like to bring, in a way, kind
of old, analogue technologies or ways of interacting with
digital systems into my pieces’.3 This approach is evident in
many of his works, putting into practice some of the ideas
Benjamin observed in 1936.
Benjamin’s analysis of advanced technology is a
suitable model for understanding the relationship between
different media and the roles of the artist and audience in
DeLappe’s work. He wrote of ‘second technology’, which at
the time included primarily film and photography, as having
results that are ‘wholly provisional (it operates by means of
experiments and endlessly varied test procedures), and
ultimately lies “in play.”’4 MGandhi’s March in Second Life
(2008) [fig. 1], for example, began with a 26-day digital
march across the 3D virtual world of Second Life in a
recreation of Mahatma Gandhi’s (1869–1948) real-world
Salt March protest in 1930.5 The ongoing exchange
between virtual and material forms was crucial to this
project, including: the synthetic virtual environment of
Second Life, daily text-based blog entries by DeLappe,
exhibitions in New York City, and numerous screenshots of
virtual interactions, which were posted to DeLappe’s blog
and the photo-sharing website Flickr. The project was then
expanded to include printed 3D sculptures of DeLappe’s
174
fig. 1
Natasha Chuk
avatar, which were exhibited in physical space. DeLappe’s
description of the project highlights its complexity:
At the centre of MGandhi’s March in Second Life—a
project that was dependent on but not limited to the virtual
reality (VR) of Second Life—is the implementation of real
life (RL) materiality and physical labour. DeLappe
positioned himself virtually and physically at the centre of
this project by combining a physical commitment alongside
a virtual one, walking synchronously in RL with his avatar
in VR. This calls to mind Christiane Paul’s view of the
significance of the material objects tethered to digital art.
She writes, ‘While immateriality and dematerialization are
important aspects of new media art, it would be highly
Mapping the spaces in between
problematic to ignore the art’s material components and the
hardware that makes it possible’.7 DeLappe’s work required
the physical space of the gallery, where his physical
treadmill-based performance took place, and the material
interface necessary to interact in Second Life. VR design
allows virtual interactions by end users through limited
physical movements: swiping fingers across a touchscreen,
clicking a mouse, or typing on a keyboard. Users can
investigate the virtual world without addressing its
dependence on material components, including the
computer hardware. DeLappe, however, understands the
human-computer relationship differently: neither human
nor computer is entirely at the service of the other and the
material components of his projects serve to reinforce the
significance of materiality amid virtual creations. In this way,
his work follows Tiziana Terranova’s ideas around linking
materialities in networked environments. She writes, ‘The
informational dimension of communication is not just about
the successful delivery of a coded signal but also about
contact and tactility, about architecture and design implying
a dynamic modulation of material and social energies’.8
DeLappe recognises the possibilities and limits of different
media, methods, and outputs, making necessary their
crossover to carry out a project of this magnitude.
Moreover, his work emphasises the significance of
technological experimentation, managing the labour of
trials and rectifying the frequency of errors that ultimately
determine how and through what means the project will
take form.
In this sense, the multifarious labels applied to
DeLappe’s work demonstrate the ambiguity of a single
category, which is unfit to fully encompass the character of
176
177
Over the course of 26 days, from March 12 to April 6,
2008, using a treadmill customised for cyberspace,
I re-enacted Mahatma Gandhi’s famous 1930 Salt
March. The original 240-mile walk was made in
protest of the British salt tax; my update of this
seminal protest march took place at Eyebeam Art
and Technology, NYC and in Second Life, the
Internet-based virtual world. For this performance, I
walked the entire 240 miles of the original march in
real life and online in Second Life. My steps on the
treadmill controlled the forward movement of my
avatar, MGandhi Chakrabarti, enabling the live and
virtual re-enactment of the march. Post re-enactment,
I created a number of artefacts including 3D rapid
prototyped printed sculptures and three monumental
17’ tall cardboard sculptures of my avatar on
Second Life.6
Natasha Chuk
his work. This follows the logic of the meaning behind
the era of the post-medium condition. In an analysis using
film as an example, Rosalind Krauss writes about the
complications regarding how to accurately describe the
work, stating ‘the medium or support for film being neither
the celluloid strip of the images, nor the camera that filmed
them, nor the projector that brings them to life in motion,
nor the beam of light that relays them to the screen, nor that
screen itself, but all of these taken together, including the
audience’s position caught between the source of the light
behind it and the image projected before its eyes’.9 DeLappe
advances this idea by interweaving disparate analogue and
digital components without giving them hierarchical
assignments, resisting identification within vague
taxonomies and instead creating work as the sum of many
parts, including virtual participation with other avatars in
Second Life. In MGandhi’s March in Second Life he
establishes a collaborative human-computer exchange that
also calls to mind the first line of American film theorist Bill
Nichols’ essay The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic
Systems (1988), his answer to Benjamin’s essay. Nichols
writes that the ‘computer is more than an object: it is also an
icon and a metaphor that suggests new ways of thinking
about ourselves and our environment, new ways of
constructing images of what it means to be human and to
live in a humanoid world’.10 With this in mind, DeLappe’s
computer is not his replacement, rather, the machine is a
co-facilitator of creation and action. This is expressed in the
way he describes his decision to physically walk the 242-mile
distance of the Salt March: ‘By virtually walking as Gandhi
in Second Life and also committing to physically walking the
240 miles on a treadmill, I am furthering my efforts to
Mapping the spaces in between
investigate online game spaces as sites for interventionist,
non-violent, creative action’.11
By this sentiment, in order to advance his investigation
of virtual environments, DeLappe was also compelled to
physically commit himself to this exploration. As he values
the interactive engagement of the body as a whole with the
networked environment, he draws on a vital element of
contemporary interactive art practices, where individuals
engage with art objects through their sensory capabilities.
Media historian Erkki Huhtamo writes, ‘the idea of
interactive art is intimately linked with touching,’12 requiring
physical activation by a user. DeLappe raises the level of
interaction and contact in RL by adding the activity of
walking to clicking, swiping and typing actions, as he
connects his physical environment and movements to his
avatar and its virtual realities. Unlike other computer-based
motion sensing technologies, especially in video game
consoles—the Nintendo Wii detects movements in three
dimensions, and Kinect for Xbox360 functions through
human gestures and spoken commands—DeLappe’s
design began with a banal physical object, a self-propelled
treadmill. However, he customised it to become, as he
describes, ‘basically a reed switch activated by magnets on
the flywheel, hacked into a keyboard where I have closed the
circuit on the forward arrow key—essentially fooling the
keyboard as if one were continuously pressing the forward
key’.13 By his design, his physical movements on the
treadmill sidestepped the keyboard-based interface normally
used to navigate Second Life. This choice directly invokes
Huhtamo’s idea of an interactive artwork that ‘challenges
us to compare art with a whole range of other human
activities—from work to play—where physical contact
178
179
Natasha Chuk
is expected’. Physical contact is expected here for interac­
tive purposes, and further, it is the artwork: DeLappe’s
physical march on the treadmill mimics his virtual march
in Second Life, making the physical act essential to its
corresponding virtual act. Though tethered, there is a
defined split between physical and virtual space: the
former is more closely associated with work while the latter
engages play. Yet, as the artwork demonstrates, even those
boundaries are not clearly defined. This is due in part to a
general increased interest in or utility of gamification,
the employment of, as Patrick Jagoda describes, ‘game
mechanics in traditionally nongame activities’.14 MGandhi’s
March in Second Life is perhaps first a historical reenactment, but it also invokes Gandhi’s leadership as a
political activist in the fictional, largely playful expanse of
Second Life. The physical march in RL shows DeLappe’s
commitment to achieving a sense of accuracy in his reenactment and the virtual correlate in Second Life allows for
amusement and diversion in VR. Stephen Wilson reminds
us, ‘Historically, the arts have spanned both the material
and the representational—working with images at the same
time as they celebrated the substantiality and sensuality of
real things’.15 Viewed in this way, this project demonstrates
a balance between work (physical labour) and play (virtual
exploration), as well as constructs meaning through
material and virtual matter.
Where others might allow the use of advanced
technologies to encourage shortcuts, interpreting waiting as
a weakness or a setback in the creative process, DeLappe
discourages the use of these technologies on the basis of
their time saving capabilities. The attitude that technologies
can or should benefit users who aim to remove trivial tasks
Mapping the spaces in between
from their process was anticipated and promoted by some
early computer scientists like J.C.R. Licklider, who favoured
the emerging man-computer symbiosis. He wrote, ‘In some
instances, particularly in large computer-generated
information and control systems, the human operators are
responsible mainly for functions that it proved infeasible to
automate’. He went on to say these are not symbiotic, rather
‘‘semi-automatic’ systems’ that began as ‘fully automatic
but fell short of the goal’.16 This observation recognized an
imbalance between the symbiotic relationship between
humans and computers, and favouritism toward relinquish­
ing to computers what humans could not do automatically.
Through MGandhi’s March in Second Life, DeLappe
created a system that rests somewhere between the
conveniences technologies afford and the durational,
material creative practices of performance art. Unlike
virtual movement via avatar, physical movement requires
nourishment and rest to succeed in doing, but in subjecting
his body to this recreation, DeLappe facilitates an entangled
journey through real and virtual space. This follows what
Warren Sacks observes with respect to art that challenges
the use of technologies by default by returning the material
body to the work, ‘The central artistic, aesthetic focus on
the body is in sharp contrast with the scientific and
engineering pragmatics that dematerialized the body over
the course of the invention and development of contemp­
orary information technologies’.17 As such, DeLappe’s
human-computer design materialises Benjamin’s concept of
‘second technology’, the kind that inadvertently distances
humans from nature, yet is also situated ‘in play’. Benjamin
described this combination, explaining that: ‘seriousness
and play, rigour and license, are mingled in every work of
180
181
Natasha Chuk
art, though in very different proportions’, such that through
advanced, or ‘second’ technologies, an artist produces ‘an
interplay between nature and humanity’.18 In other words,
second technologies have an inherent distancing effect
between humans and nature, and DeLappe tempers this
inevitability by balancing the input of nature and the human
body with computational instruction and interaction. This
design advances the possibility of locating worthwhile
affinities between humans and computers, using the latter
as a tool for human exploration and creativity, particularly
with respect to perception and sensorial experience.
The convergence of physical and virtual movement is a
consistent vehicle for DeLappe to explore the relationship
between physical and virtual spaces, but it also speaks to the
way he relates to computers, favouring the potential for his
subjective investigation of game spaces, through the
conflation of physical and virtual movement and ultimately
creative expression. Building on human-computer
collaboration and self-expression, DeLappe created SelfPortrait as Monster Truck (2011) [fig. 2], a short video
he made in Second Life. His avatar, Joseph Grommet, is
composed entirely of the pixelated, repeated image of a
monster truck. This representational choice is significant
not for its accuracy as a self-portrait, rather as a work that
questions the necessity of the human figure by reinforcing
the limits of representation in a digital medium that is
equipped to produce photorealistic outcomes. Paul writes,
‘Avatars as a new form of self-representation have been
fertile ground for artistic experimentation’.19 The absurdity
of the visual comparison between a human being—or any
animal—and a cluster of monster trucks subverts the
expectations of what Second Life is capable of achieving and
Mapping the spaces in between
questions the conventions of self-portraiture and avatar
creation. It also addresses the relationship between avatar
construction, imagination, and their real world effects.
Using Second Life as part of a study on avatar creation,
D. Fox Harrell and S. Veeragoudar Harrell discovered three
prominent creative stances toward avatar construction:
Everyday vs. Extraordinary graphical appearance; Mirror
(1st person) vs. Character (3rd person); and Instrumental/
Playful. Self-Portrait as Monster Truck seems to follow the
third creative approach, which encompasses a range of
possibilities, including ‘engaging in imaginative identity
play’.20 In this work, DeLappe not only exercises representa­
tional freedom of the digital self-portrait but also the unique
affordances of the mechanics of Second Life, which allow
the ability to virtually play-act as a machine and defy real
world laws of gravity by flying through the virtual sky.
182
183
fig. 2
This creative approach again invokes Benjamin’s
ideas of play with respect to technology. In Miriam Bratu
Hansen’s analysis of several of his essays, she observes that
Benjamin first recognized an important ‘shift in focus from
Natasha Chuk
the toy as object (Spielzeug) to playing (Spielen) as an
activity’ and developed the idea of ‘playing—whether the
child uses toys or improvises games with found objects,
materials, and environments’ to emphasise ‘the child’s
penchant for creative mimicry, for pretending to be
somebody or something else’.21 According to Benjamin,
these child impulses extend into adulthood, where second
technologies serve to provide the margin through which
creative experiments take place. As Bratu Hansen points
out, he wrote, ‘What is lost in the withering of semblance,
or decay of the aura, in works of art is matched by a huge
gain in room-for-play (spielraum)’.22 According to
Benjamin, what DeLappe loses in terms of aura–the selfportrait’s ties to his handmade workmanship and its
uniqueness–he gains in a playful margin for experimenta­
tion and creative expression. Self-Portrait as Monster Truck
seems to build on this concept, working toward room-forplay by disrupting the pre-programmed strictures that
favour the form and actions of avatars, and thereby moving
away from representational likeness. DeLappe’s description
alone of ‘multiple copies of a monster truck walking through
the sky’ highlights the playfulness, almost ridiculousness,
behind this creation and draws attention to the spielraum,
or playspace, of VR to give form to DeLappe’s creative
whims and experiments. Moreover, by calling this work
a self-portrait, he again demonstrates an alliance between
the self and digital form. This calls to mind an observation
made by Michael Burden and Sean Gouglas in their analysis
and potential of the algorithmic experience of video games
in particular. They write, ‘The increasingly algorithmic
nature of everyday functions and interactions creates an
opportunity for self-reflexive videogames to be especially
184
fig. 3
Natasha Chuk
relevant as an artistic medium’.23 While Second Life is not
strictly a video game, it shares video game mechanics and
technical functions.
The connection between virtual and physical
interactions and materialities is a theme that motivates most
of DeLappe’s works, particularly the installation/actions
dead-in-iraq (2006–2011) [fig. 3]. dead-in-iraq is a sitespecific work, named after the user identity that DeLappe
selected for his interventionist participation in America’s
Army, a multiplayer, tactical first-person shooter video
game developed as a recruitment tool by the United States
Army. The game is freely available and is designed to offer
players an experience as a virtual solider training for
America’s Army. DeLappe’s intervention in the game
commenced in March of 2006, so as ‘to roughly coincide
with the third anniversary of the start’ of the U.S. military’s
involvement in Iraq,24 and was ongoing for five years until
the US officially withdrew their remaining troops in Iraq. He
participated in the game as a virtual protester, dropped his
virtual weapons and, through the text communication
enabling system in the game, recited the names, details (age,
service branch, and rank) and dates of death of American
soldiers killed in combat or friendly fire as part of the longterm U.S. military campaign in Iraq that began in 2003.
Standing in protest within the game’s virtual battlefield, he
continued his recitation until his avatar was killed. Because
of the unique features of this video game’s mechanics,
which allow for activity beyond the expiration of a character
during gameplay, he continued his intervention: ‘After
death, I hover over my dead avatar’s body and continue
to type. Upon being re-incarnated in the next round, I
continue the cycle’.25 As Paul notes, ‘Virtual worlds offer a
Mapping the spaces in between
performative environment for realizing what is not possible
or at least difficult to achieve in the physical world’.26
In dead-in-iraq, DeLappe uses America’s Army as
his chosen site to specifically address a gaming audience
embroiled in army training. In this sense, DeLappe’s body
and the physical world—with all of its social and political
concerns—are analogue media that collaborate with digital
media—the computer that hosts and connects to the
virtual, social environment of America’s Army—to
engage a peaceful anti-war demonstration and memorial
to those who perished in the conflict. He fused virtual
performance—his delivery unerring in its tone and
persistence, as he ignored initial hostility from confused
players—and political protest. This suggests the potential
for online gaming spaces to serve as unique public spheres,
or forums, through which political protest and engagement
can take place. As with many political protests, DeLappe’s
was met with resistance. The so-called magic circle of
gameplay was disrupted by his unaggressive but incessant
recitation, prompting gamers to question his actions. One
asked ‘dead-in-iraq’, ‘What’s your point?’ Without breaking
character, DeLappe disregarded questions and taunts from
this and other players, and continued without responding.
This raises questions about the political veracity of this work
as well as the relationship between contemporary art,
society, and political issues. DeLappe addressed these issues
in a separate interview, noting the questions that come to
his mind as he approaches works like these, such as: ‘How
does art function in our society? Are we a separate kind of
realm or are there ways of actually connecting on some
basic, real level with the world?’27 These connections appear
to be forged by DeLappe’s awareness of the operational
186
187
Natasha Chuk
character of second technologies and the benefits of their
experimental combinations with other creative approaches,
namely ways of bridging the gap between real world actions
and virtual settings. After some initial discomfort and verbal
retaliation, in each performance of dead-in-iraq, the
America’s Army participants continued gameplay despite
DeLappe’s persistence. Over the course of the project, he
added 4484 names to the dead-in-iraq memorial, which
were commemorated both fleetingly, as he announced them
during gameplay to a select audience, and through a twentyminute video documentation created at the end of the
project (viewable on DeLappe’s website and YouTube).28
dead-in-iraq invokes Benjamin’s concept of the
spielraum both figuratively and literally: the dynamics of
a virtual social environment provided a stage for DeLappe’s
recitation through the disruption of gameplay, and thus
game space. Normally, dying by gunshot in the virtual realm
of video games signals a setback in achieving the goals
outlined in the game. Players have the option to return
to the game, fully restored, for another chance to advance
in the game, but DeLappe saw the opportunity to exploit
a loophole in America’s Army, which allowed for avatar
action beyond character death. He continued his perform­
ance in his character’s post-death state, which inevitably
alluded to the dead soldiers to whom he referred and
figuratively joined in this virtual demonstration. Given the
final outcome of the project—a completed memorial—the
project appears to have been less focused on proposing
peaceful alternatives for war and was more focused on
creating and performing within the in-game playspace.
This suggests that a valuable part of this project was using
America’s Army as the stage for this performance to not
Mapping the spaces in between
only address DeLappe’s intended audience but also to
construct this memorial in this particular virtual site. As
Alexander Galloway writes, ‘One of the central theoretical
issues in video gaming is how and in what way one can make
connections between the gaming world and the real world,
both from the inside outward in the form of affective action,
and from the outside inward in the form of realistic
modeling’.29 In this sense, DeLappe temporarily occupied
America’s Army to use it as a relevant backdrop for his
memorial, as the game represents a connection between
virtual gaming and real world military training.
188
189
fig. 4
DeLappe’s series of drone projects—Cowardly Drones
(2013) [fig. 4], The Drone Project (2014), and The 1,000
Drones—A Participatory Memorial—address a different
issue related to combat and military action, primarily
through the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, of
the U.S. military. Drones are controlled by ground operators
through teleoperation or, more technically, waypoint-based
routing, which refers to a configuration of invisible points
used for navigation. Unpiloted, they move and carry out
Natasha Chuk
tasks autonomously, having been programmed to sense,
capture images, and dynamically respond to their environ­
ments in various ways. They have sparked controversy for a
number of reasons. They have been known to errantly fall
from the sky in various parts of the United States, causing
millions of dollars of damage and a general sense of
unease.30 Though their capabilities and purpose range
dramatically, they are prone to system failures and mistakes
and, in these events, the centrality of their control, and thus
accountability for their errors, are unclear, making them
difficult to monitor and sometimes understand. Renata
Lemos Morais writes, ‘In drone technologies there is a
double-logic of inaccessibility: at the same time in which
drones are blurring the distinction between public and
private space, between geographical boundaries of overseas
warfare and domestic surveillance, they are also making
accountability harder due to the very nature of drone
operations, which are mostly covert’.31 DeLappe’s drone
projects are a response to these negative reports and
observations, especially with respect to the recent dramatic
increase in drone use by the U.S. military. Peter Asaro
writes, ‘Since 2001, the number of unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs) in the US military grew from 70 to 7000’.32 This
significant increase in drone use has resulted in an uncertain
number of civilian casualties. Asaro continues,
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates the
total number of people killed by the 344 drone strikes
so far in Pakistan as between 2562 and 3325, with as
many as 881 of these being confirmed civilian deaths
(Bureau of Investigative Journalism 2012). Casualties
from drones strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan have not
190
Mapping the spaces in between
been tracked or analyzed by journalists, nor does the
military release their own estimates, but it is likely to
be significantly higher given the greater number of
missions flown in those war zones.33
Directed at the U.S. military, one journalist describes the
use of drones as by, ‘power-damaged people’ who ‘have
been granted the chance to fulfill one of humankind’s
abiding fantasies: to vaporise their enemies, as if with a
curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance’.34
The term ‘cowardly drone’ has consequently emerged as a
popular colloquialism. The identifier ‘cowardly’ refers to the
severed connection between command and action, and the
relative anonymity with which missives are deployed. Noting
these rebukes, DeLappe’s projects address different aspects
of the use of drones and their outcomes, including the
memorialisation of innocent victims of the drones’ targets.
The series began with Cowardly Drones, a digital image
online intervention. For this project, DeLappe collected
images of U.S. military drones that are presently in use and
digitally vandalised them with the word COWARDLY,
placed prominently across the body of the drone, and
reposted them online with the intention of propagating his
political stance against them upon their discovery by those
who search for them via popular web browsers. The publicly
available digital images became the canvas for political
protest; digital posters that capitalise on the ridiculing label
attributed to drones and their operators. The goal behind
this project is to contribute to or altogether replace existing
images of U.S. military drones online in the hope that the
public might become more aware of their failures and
negative outcomes. The Drone Project (2014) and The 1,000
191
Natasha Chuk
Drones—A Participatory Memorial more elaborately
demonstrate DeLappe’s negative opinion of military drone
use and establish a connection between analogue and digital
creative practices.
Both of these projects are sculptures/installations
that create binaries between the unmanned, immaterial
forces of drones versus physical, highly subjective group
participation, and digital technology versus the individual
material object. The Drone Project was created as part of an
artist residency at the Center for Creativity and the Arts at
Fresno State University in California. With the help of 3D
modelling software and over 100 students, interns and
volunteers, DeLappe created a ‘full-to-scale sculptural
reproduction of a MQ1 Predator drone’ that memorialises,
through handwritten application across the body of the
drone (in English and Urdu), ‘the names of 334 civilian
drone casualties from Pakistan’. The condition and
arrangement of the drone sculpture were constructed to
look as though it had made a crash landing, underscoring
the unpredictability of pre-programmed autonomy and the
frequency with which drones are known to unexpectedly
fail. This project bears similarities to dead-in-iraq as the
residency culminated in a performance event at the instal­
lation site in which the names of the victims were read
aloud. Moreover, by creating the project through sizable
collaborative effort, DeLappe engages the physical material
input of participants with the immaterial, abstract event of
the drone failure. Similarly, The 1,000 Drones—A Partici­
patory Memorial builds on the group participatory model
used in The Drone Project by opening the work to the
potential for a larger community-driven contribution.
DeLappe used 1000 scale paper replicas of the General
Mapping the spaces in between
Atomics MQ-1 Predator drone and invited participants to
write the name of a civilian drone casualty on the craft’s
wing. The paper drones were threaded and exhibited in
cascading chains that hang from the ceiling. DeLappe’s
description of the project offers his motivation and creative
approach:
192
193
The project is an adaptation of the 1,000 Cranes or
‘Senbazuru’ tradition from Japan. This tradition holds
that anyone who folds one thousand cranes will be
granted a wish. Since World War II the tradition has
been associated with the atomic attacks upon
Nagasaki and Hiroshima - the folding of the cranes
has become a wish for peace. Through the act of
participating in this work of creative remembrance,
the intention is for we, as Americans, to recognize
and remember those innocents killed in our ongoing
Global War on Terror.35
The names included in the project were pulled from lists
of drone casualties that took place in Pakistan and Yemen.
DeLappe also notes that the list of ‘names of civilian drone
casualties from [American] wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
does not exist—these victims are noted in this work as
“unknown”’.36 As in his dead-in-iraq and The Drone Project,
this detail stresses the importance of naming the victims, if
only through the recognition of their anonymous depar­
tures. The paper drones act as material representations of
the victims’ absence, becoming the objects through which
they are memorialised and formally connected to the
unpiloted object that killed them. Compared to some of
DeLappe’s other projects, especially MGandhi’s March in
Natasha Chuk
Second Life, The 1,000 Drones—A Participatory Memorial
favours the physical, relational, and material aspects of
artistic creation, downplaying second technologies as if to
allude, in some ways, to similarities between them and the
drones themselves. This signals recognition on DeLappe’s
part of the ways that digital and analogue creative processes
can be used in various combinations and manipulated to
engage the most relevant aspects of each to fulfill the needs
of his projects, which encapsulate the spectrum of material
and virtual possibilities, particularly through experimenta­
tion. With this in mind, his ability to organise and mobilise
users of networked digital media, such as video games, and
combine virtual and real world actions, would benefit from
more developed gamification, or directed play, to affect real
world change. Recently, numerous efforts have been made
to encourage social change via video game platforms. One
way is through establishing a new genre of video games
known as ‘newsgames’, a digital game that accompanies a
written text to provide further understanding by way of
model and virtual experience. Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari,
and Bobby Schweizer describe it as, ‘synthesizing the
principles of the print spread into an experience rather than
a description’.37 Bogost’s flash-based newsgame Cutthroat
Capitalism, for example, accompanied a print story of the
same name in an online issue of Wired magazine in 2009.38
Other games have emerged, which are designed to place
players in the role of someone who is directly affected by
a certain problem. Referencing the game Darfur is Dying
(2006), created by the U.S.-based design studio Take
Action Games39, Bogost writes, ‘If a game about the
Sudanese genocide is meant to foster empathy for terrible
real-world situations in which the players fortunate enough
Mapping the spaces in between
to play videogames might intervene, then those games
would do well to invite us to step into the smaller, more
uncomfortable shoes of the downtrodden rather than
the larger, well-heeled shoes of the powerful’.40 The hope
and enthusiasm surrounding games that are designed to
educate and inform with the goal of affecting real world
change, often referred to as ‘social issues games’, also are
espoused by game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal,
whose research focuses on the problem-solving benefits
of play and the goal-driven, collaborative settings of video
games’.41 This perspective recognizes some of the unique
features inherent in most video games. Similarly, in an
analysis of popular commercial video games, Shawna
Kelly and Bonnie Nardi argue, ‘Because games encourage
players to be both creative and strategic in coming up with
solutions to problems, they are useful tools for proactively
thinking about the future and making sense of complex
system models’.42
By combining virtual and real world engagements
through his projects, DeLappe seems to recognize the
potential of using existing games and virtual worlds as
readymade sites for intervention, creative action, and to
raise awareness about real world issues. As an artist, he
guides participants through a combination of visual art,
performance, intervention, and installation to make his
ideas accessible on multifarious levels. Paul notes digital
art’s ‘connections to previous art movements, among them
Dada, Fluxus, and conceptual art,’ which ‘focus on concept,
event, and audience participation, as opposed to unified
material objects’.43 As his works demonstrate, DeLappe
operates with and within the creative space between
transient exchanges—via performance and networked
194
195
Natasha Chuk
interactions—and more durable objects—like material
sculptures and installations—to address social and political
issues. The works that balance physical and virtual elements
potentially engage a larger audience and thus affect greater
real world change. Moreover, they maximise the spielraum,
or playspace, of media technologies and encourage
audiences to thoughtfully consider both the relationship
between facets of ‘work’ and ‘play’ in created objects and
emphasize the relationship between art and society.
Mapping the spaces in between
Figures
1 Joseph DeLappe, The Salt Satyagraha Online: Gandhi's March to
Dandi in Second Life, 2008. Screen shot of performance reenactment
in Second Life.
2 Joseph DeLappe, Self-Portrait as Monster Truck, 2011. Screen shot
of looped video.
3 Joseph DeLappe, dead-in-iraq, 2006–2011. Screen shot of gamebased performance intervention.
4 Joseph DeLappe, Predator Drone—‘Cowardly’ from Cowardly Drones,
2013. Digital image.
196
197
Notes
1 Launched in 2003, Second Life is a 3D virtual online environment in
which users, known as residents, can join for free. See http://
secondlife.com/whatis/.
2 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical
Reproducibility’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3
1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott, eds. Howard Eiland and
Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002),
101–133.
3 Joseph DeLappe, interview by James Chimpton for Steve Lambert and
Jeff Crouse, Neighborhood Public Radio, 91.9 FM, August 2008,
accessed 20 October 2014, see http://visitsteve.com/made/
inside-the-artists-studio-with-james-chimpton-absml/.
4 Benjamin, 107.
5 On March 20, 1930, Mahatma Gandhi, a preeminent Indian
independent movement leader against British rule, led a group from
Sabermanti, arriving on April 5, 1930 to the coastal town of Dandi,
approximately 240 miles away, in what came to be known as the Salt
March. He and tens of thousands of followers made salt from
seawater in peaceful protest against a British tax on salt, which
imposed an expense on an Indian staple that was otherwise available
in abundance and for free. Many joined Gandhi’s lead and made or
found salt deposits, which led to approximately 60,000 arrests,
including Gandhi’s.
6 Joseph DeLappe, ‘The Salt Satyagraha Online: Gandhi’s March to
Dandi in Second Life’, Joseph DeLappe, accessed 13 August 2014,
http://www.delappe.net/game-art/mgandhis-march-to-dandi-in
-second-life/.
Natasha Chuk
7 Christiane Paul, ‘The Myth of Immateriality: Presenting and
Preserving New Media’, in Media Art Histories, ed. Oliver Grau
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 252.
8 Tiziana Terranova, Networked Culture: Politics for the Information
Age (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2004), 8.
9 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the
Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 25.
10 Bill Nichols, ‘The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems’,
in The New Media Reader, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick
Montfort (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 22.
11 Joseph DeLappe, ‘Sunday, March 16th start point…’, Reenactment:
The Salt Satyagraha Online, 16 March 2008, accessed 25 October
2014, https://saltmarchsecondlife.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/
sunday-march-16th-start-point/.
12 Erkki Huhtamo. ‘Twin—Touch—Test—Redux: Media Archaeological
Approach to Art, Interactivity, and Tactility’, in Media Art Histories,
ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 71.
13 Joseph DeLappe, ‘Starting location March 20, 2008…’,
Reenactment: The Salt Satyagraha Online, 20 March 2008,
accessed 20 October 2014, http://saltmarchsecondlife.wordpress.
com/2008/03/20/starting-location-march-20-2008/.
14 Patrick Jagoda, ‘Gamification and Other Forms of Play’, boundary 2
40, no. 2 (2013): 113–144, 10.1215/01903659-2151821.
15 Stephen Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and
Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 24.
16 J.C.R. Licklider, ‘Man-Computer Symbiosis’, in The New Media
Reader, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2003), 75.
17 Warren Sack, ‘Aesthetics of Information Visualization’, in Context
Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts, eds. Margot
Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, and Victoria Vesna (Bristol and Chicago:
Intellect, 2011), 139.
18 Benjamin 107.
19 Christiane Paul, Digital Art, second ed. (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2008), 239.
20 D. Fox Harrell and S. Veeragoudar Harrell, ‘Imagination,
Computation, and Self-Expression: Situated Character and Avatar
Mediated Identity’, Leonardo Electronic Almanac DAC 09: After
Media: Embodiment and Context 17, no. 2 (2012): 75.
21 Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with
Cinema’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies 13, no. 1 (2004): 5.
198
Mapping the spaces in between
22Ibid.,10.
23 Michael Burden and Sean Gouglas, ‘The Algorithmic Experience:
Portal as Art’, Game Studies: The International Journal of
Computer Game Research no. 12, issue 2 (2012): 1604–7982.
24 Joseph DeLappe, ‘dead-in-iraq’, Joseph DeLappe, accessed 14
August 2014, http://www.delappe.net/project/dead-in-iraq/.
25 Joseph DeLappe, ‘dead-in-iraq’, Joseph DeLappe, accessed 14
August 2014, http://www.delappe.net/project/dead-in-iraq/.
26 Christiane Paul, Digital Art, second ed. (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2008), 244.
27 Joseph DeLappe, interview by James Chimpton for Steve Lambert and
Jeff Crouse, Neighborhood Public Radio, 91.9 FM, August 2008, see
http://visitsteve.com/made/
inside-the-artists-studio-with-james-chimpton-absml/.
28 See http://www.delappe.net/project/dead-in-iraq/.
29 Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 71.
30 See Jordan Crandall, ‘Ontologies of a Wayward Drone’, Theory
Beyond the Codes, 2 November 2007, accessed 20 October 2014,
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=693, and Arthur Kroker
and Marilouise Kroker, ‘Night Sky Drones’, Theory Beyond the Codes,
23 September 2014, accessed 20 October 2014, http://www.ctheory.
net/articles.aspx?id=732.
31 Renata Lemos Morais, ‘Sky High, Skin Deep: Dark Technologies of
Mediation’, Theory Beyond the Codes, 15 September 2004, accessed
20 October 2014, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=731.
32 Peter Asaro, ‘The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing:
New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators’, Social Semiotics 23,
no. 2 (2013): 196–224, esp. 196.
33 Ibid., 197.
34 George Monbiot, ‘With its deadly drones, the US is fighting a
coward’s war’, TheGuardian.com, last modified Monday 30 January
2012, accessed 20 October 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2012/jan/30/deadly-drones-us-cowards-war.
35 Joseph DeLappe, ‘1000 Drones—A Participatory Memorial’, Joseph
DeLappe, accessed 13 August 2014, http://www.delappe.net/
sculptureinstallation/the-1000-drones---a-participatory-memorial/.
36 See project description, http://www.delappe.net/
sculptureinstallation/the-1000-drones---a-participatory-memorial/.
37 Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer, Newsgames:
Journalism at Play (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 2.
199
Natasha Chuk
38 See Scott Carney, ‘Cutthroat Capitalism’, Wired Magazine, October
2009 and flash-based game, accessed 20 October 2014, http://
archive.
wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-07/ff_somali_pirates.
39 See Take Action Games, ‘Darfur is Dying’, accessed 20 October 2014,
http://takeactiongames.com/TAG/DARFUR.html.
40 Ian Bogost, How to Do Things with Videogames (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 19.
41 See Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better
and How They Can Change the World (New York: The Penguin Press,
2011).
42 Shawna Kelly and Bonnie Nardi, ‘Playing with Sustainability: Using
Video Games to Simulate Futures of Scarcity’, First Monday 19, no.
5 (2014), accessed 2 October 2014, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/
index.php/fm/article/view/5259/3877.
43 Christiane Paul, Digital Art, second ed. (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2008), 11.
200