[ISEA2011] Panel: Joseph De­Lappe – Con­science, Mem­ory and Protest: Ves­tiges of the For­ever War

Panel Statement

Panel:  If You See Something Say Something: Art, War, Surveillance and the Sustainability of Urgency in the Post 9/11 Era

In March of 2006, to roughly co­in­cide with the 3rd an­niver­sary of the start of the Iraq con­flict, I first en­tered 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 Iraq. dead-in-iraq is es­sen­tially a fleet­ing, per­for­ma­tive memo­r­ial to those mil­i­tary per­son­nel who have been killed in this on­go­ing con­flict. My ac­tions are at the same time an in­ter­ven­tion­ist ges­ture to protest against the war in Iraq. This work marked the overt politi­ciza­tion of my cre­ative prac­tice. I went on to cre­ate an on­line data­base of memo­r­ial con­cepts and pro­jects en­ti­tled iraqimemorial.?org. This on­go­ing pro­ject in­vites artists, ar­chi­tects and other cre­ative in­di­vid­u­als to up­load memo­r­ial con­cepts ded­i­cated to the many un­told thou­sands of civil­ian ca­su­al­ties from the Iraq in­va­sion. Through these works and oth­ers, I seek to de­velop and im­ple­ment strate­gies for uti­liz­ing the In­ter­net as the lo­ca­tion for in­ter­ven­tion­ist acts of con­sience, mem­ory and protest. I will dis­cuss the pro­gres­sion of these works and on­go­ing ef­forts to con­tinue to en­gage is­sues sur­round­ing pol­i­tics, war and ter­ror, in­clud­ing my par­tic­i­pa­tion in the fake New York Times End of the War edi­tion, my ef­forts to place Hosni Mubarak up for sale on eBay and on­go­ing works to reify the us and them of rep­re­sen­ta­tions of war through con­tem­po­rary first per­son shooter video games. iraqimemorial.org

  • Joseph De­Lappe is a Pro­fes­sor of the De­part­ment of Art at the Uni­ver­sity of Nevada (USA) where he di­rects the Dig­i­tal Media pro­gram. Work­ing with elec­tronic and new media since 1983, his work in on­line gam­ing per­for­mance and electro­mechan­i­cal in­stal­la­tion have been shown through­out the United States and abroad – in­clud­ing ex­hi­bi­tions and per­for­mances in Aus­tralia, the United King­dom, China, Ger­many, Spain, Bel­gium, the Nether­lands and Canada. In 2006 he began the pro­ject dead-in-iraq, to type con­sec­u­tively, all names of Amer­ica’s mil­i­tary ca­su­al­ties from the war in Iraq into the Amer­ica’s Army first per­son shooter on­line re­cruit­ing game. He also di­rects the iraqimemorial.org pro­ject, an on­go­ing web based ex­hi­bi­tion and open call for pro­posed memo­ri­als to the many thou­sand of civil­ian ca­su­al­ties from the war in Iraq.  He has lec­tured through­out the world re­gard­ing his work, in­clud­ing most re­cently at the Mu­seum of Mod­ern Art in New York City. He has been in­ter­viewed on CNN, NPR, CBC, the Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion and on The Rachel Mad­dow Show on Air Amer­ica Radio. His works have been fea­tured in the New York Times, The Aus­tralian Morn­ing Her­ald, Artweek, Art in Amer­i­can and in the 2010 book from Rout­ledge en­ti­tled Joy­stick Sol­diers: The Pol­i­tics of Play in Mil­i­tary Video Game.