Quick Facts
Biography
Joseph DeLappe (born 1963) is a UK-based American Artist best known for his art intervention pieces that explore contemporary issues in politics through new media installations and interactive gaming performances.
Early life and education
A native of San Francisco, California, Joseph DeLappe graduated from Sacred Heart High School and went on to receive his Associate in Arts from City College of San Francisco followed by a Bachelor's in Graphic Design from San Jose State University as well as an MA Computers in Art & Design and a Master of Fine Arts in Pictorial Arts from the CADRE Laboratory for New Media.
Work
Joseph DeLappe has always worked in new media through which he expresses a distaste for power politics, stating that when he got engaged in political art it defined his purpose. DeLappe's 2006 intervention, Dead-in-Iraq, used an on-line game, America's Army, created by the US Defense department as a recruitment tool to memorialize the name and date of death for every US service member who died in Iraq, observing that America's Army was nothing but a sanitized metaphor to entice young people to enlist.
In 2008, DeLappe merged on-line gaming, performance art and sculpture in a reenactment of Mahatma Gandhi's 1930 Salt March at Eyebeam Art and Technology, NYC and in Second Life, a virtual world and then recreating Gandhi (Cardboard Gandhi, 2008–2009) out of corrugated cardboard in monumental scale.
Joseph DeLappe combines his knowledege of communications media, concrete materials and on-line gaming with political commentary. stating that games are a huge cultural phenomenon that is ignored by most of the art world, something that he finds challenging.
His art practice also has a participatory aspect as demonstrated in his 2014 In Drones We Trust where he produced Predator drone rubber stamps that were intended to mark currency in a manner that people seeing the money would begin to think about the drones being used to target people in foreign countries.
Killbox(2016), created with Malath Abbas, Tom DeMajo, Albert Elwin (as the Biome Collective) is a computer game that explores the cost and consequences of drone warfare. The work is a two-player game named after a military term, Kill box, for an area targeted for destruction. The game, a winner of a 2016 Bafta award expresses the inhumanity of drone strikes.
DeLappe was the Director of the Digital Media program in the Art Department of the University of Nevada, Reno until 2017 when he accepted the position of Professor of Games and Tactical Media at Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland. DeLappe was named a Fellow in Fine Arts by the Guggenheim Foundation in 2017.