Regardless of your stance on anything that isn't 'traditional' art, this is interesting and raises some very valid points.
Content shamelessly ripped from EDGE (see link at bottom)Joseph DeLappe works in many media, from sculpture and digital photography to online gaming performance.
From March 12, FACT in Liverpool is exhibiting an excerpt from dead-in-iraq – a performance piece he describes as an 'intervention' in the game America’s Army, the popular shooter developed by the United States Army.
Since 2006, DeLappe has enacted sessions where he logs into the game, stands without shooting, and types in the names of American soldiers who have lost their lives in the current conflict in Iraq.What I’m showing in Liverpool is a 20-minute long edited video projection of my intervention into the America’s Army game. So it’s basically from my perspective, recorded directly from my computer screen. When I’m inputting the names, it shows me over and over again arriving at the start of the game: I drop my weapon and start typing.
I thought people would be bored. It’s a rather tedious process. But people were really fascinated and quite moved by the experience. Particularly for people who don’t engage in these kinds of games, the first time you see somebody get killed it’s a little jarring.
As you see this over and over again, the typing in of the name starts to become a re-enactment in text, and then the soldier gets killed.
On the day that President Obama announced the surge of troops, I created a new avatar for the America’s Army 3 game, [and] I have started a new project. Instead of typing of the names, I’m actually doing a verbal roll call.
What I found is, as soon as the game starts and I open my mouth and say, “October 1, 2001,” one or two of them are yelling, “Shut the fuck up,” blah blah blah. But after about the second name, it gets really quiet.
I think the next game I got interested in because it was very controversial was Quake.
I don’t remember which version it was, but as soon as that started migrating to online play, I almost immediately noticed the text going on. Here you have these 3D virtual environments and you’re running around and jumping and flying and shooting, and yet the only way you could communicate with each other was to type on the 19th century keyboard. I thought that was oddly literary.
I guess what concerns me about so much of the gameplay you know is that it’s all so much based on really simplified interactions. Killing something, or missing it. And it’s kind of, life is more complex than that. Iraq is more complex than that. So it may help create a simplified way of looking at the world.
With America’s Army, that’s so specific too that particular game, [as a] government-made propaganda device. It’s a brilliant game. I mean you’ve got to hand it to them, they know what they’re doing.
They set the level of violence to let it be used by anyone over 13 without parental permission – they’ve thought all this stuff through. But I find it really deeply troubling.
It’s such a serious thing to think about, joining the military, especially in time of war. To dignify it through something as simple as a computer game is deeply troubling.
I know from feedback that there are either people who come across documentation of this or in the game itself that, it’s been that kind of nudge, where it’s like, “Oh, shit, I never thought about that this [as] connected to real people.” And it is. [T]here are people on that list of names I type in who started their experience in the military playing this game, and now they are dead. And that to me is outrageous, and it just makes me sick.
I have gotten [complains from veterans] saying, “We really think this is disrespectful.” My thing is like, “Well, maybe it is – if it is that, then this context is the problem, not the names.”
What is more disrespectful, [reading the names of the dead or] creating a computer game that presents a virtual pretend cartoon-like experience of the war in order to get people to sign up to go to war? That’s the question.
Read the full interview here:
EDGE Online
