04.06.2026 –, ZKM Vortragssaal Sprache: English
The American artist Joseph DeLappe is considered a pioneer of video game–based performance art and among the first artists to systematically use virtual online game worlds as sites of artistic intervention. To mark the 25th anniversary of his online performance Howl: Elite Force Voyager Online (2001), DeLappe is restaging the work for the first time in a slightly abridged version before a live audience.
Playing as “Allen Ginsberg,” DeLappe (*1963, San Francisco, US) joins online sessions of the multiplayer shooter Star Trek™: Voyager – Elite Force (2000) and explores the in-game chat as a poetic medium. Line by line, he types Allen Ginsberg’s famous and controversial Beat poem Howl (1955) into the chat interface in real time while reciting it aloud. He does not shoot. He stands still and types. The text appears on screen in real time, visible to other players in small fragments as the performance unfolds.
Howl: Elite Force Voyager Online was created in 2001 in the privacy of DeLappe’s studio in Reno, Nevada. Lasting over five hours, the performance was directed exclusively at players who happening to be in the same virtual space of the popular online shooter. The work originated in the artist’s early exploration of digital network environments as spaces of social, political, and aesthetic negotiation. As early as the late 1990s, he understood the then-emerging online game worlds as a new form of digital public sphere and conceived of the performance as a kind of digital street art project: Why play the game and follow its rules? What would happen if someone entered an online shooter and recited poetry instead of firing a weapon?
By subverting the functional logic of the game, DeLappe transformed the virtual space into a stage for poetic and media-critical intervention. In doing so, he challenged players to reconsider their relationship to the video game world and its social function and invited them – sometimes reluctantly, sometimes with amusement – to engage with poetry.
DeLappe further developed this performance method in later well-known works such as Quake/Friends (2003) and dead-in-iraq (2006–2011), and paved the way for numerous other experimental works in video game performance art.
To join the performance as a player, follow these steps:
1. Download the Windows or Linux client, (this is a free
version of the game’s multiplayer element made with permission from the
developer)
a. https://last-outpost.net/index.php?page=holomatch
2. Install on a windows pc or Linux
3. Open and go to “multimatch”
4. click “specify server” and enter IP address 37.120.173.241:27960
5. Play the game as you would
6. Please be respectful towards the community
depictions and sounds of gun violence / combat from a first-person shooter video game; war and militarized imagery; explicit language; references to drug use and addiction; references to mental illness and psychiatric institutionalization; references to sexuality and erotic desire; themes of alienation, suffering, and death; flashing and rapidly changing digital imagery
Laura ist Kuratorin für Games am ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien. Sie liebt kleine, ungewöhnliche und kreative Spiele, die überraschen. Guilty pleasure: Point-and-Click
Joseph DeLappe, born San Francisco 1963, is an artist, activist and educator, he relocated to Scotland from the USA in 2017 where he is the Professor of Games and Tactical Media at Abertay University, Dundee. Working with electronic and digital media since 1983, projects in online gaming performance, sculpture and electromechanical installation have been shown throughout the world. He has developed works for venues such as Eyebeam Art and Technology in New York, The Guangdong Museum of Art, China, the Southern Utah Museum of Art, NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC], Tokyo, Japan and Transitio MX, Mexico City, among many others. He is considered a pioneer in the realm of video games and performance art, developing such seminal works as “Howl: Elite Force Voyager”; “Quake/Friends”; and “dead-in-iraq”, all which involved various readings conducted within video game contexts online. He is as well one of the first artists to develop monumental scale low polygon sculptures using cardboard and corrugated plastic, notable projects include “The Cardboard Gandhi”, “The Drone Project: A Participatory Memorial”; and “Liberty Weeps”, among others. Creative works and actions have been featured widely in scholarly journals, books and in the popular media, including the New York Times, The Australian Morning Herald, Art in America, The Guardian and the BBC. He has authored several book chapters, including “Me and My Predator(s): Tactical Remembrance and Critical Atonement, Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, Open Humanities Press, 2022; “Making Politics: Engaged Social Tactics, A conversation between Joseph DeLappe and Dr. Laura Leuzzi”, Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change, Routledge, 2022; and co-edited with Leuzzi, the book “INCITE: Digital Art and Activism”, 2023, Peacock Visual Arts. In 2017 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts.
Dr. René G. Cepeda is a Mexican multidisciplinary designer, artist, and art historian specializing in new media art. They hold advanced degrees in information design, museum studies, and art history, and earned their Ph.D. by integrating design and curatorial practice to enhance the exhibition of interactive digital works. They are the author of the Manual for the Curation and Display of Interactive New Media Art, a living document supporting curators in engaging with digital and interactive media.
They have curated immersive exhibitions that blend formal curatorial methods with creative spatial design, published several book chapters and have given various talks and workshops at institutions such as Museums Without Walls, the Museum Learning Hub, Connecticut College, London, UK and the ZKM | Karlsruhe. They are also co‑author of the »Game Arts Curators Kit«, a guide for exhibiting video games.
Since 2022, they have served as curator of the Header/Footer Gallery, a digital exhibition space hosted by the New Media Caucus, where they focus on inclusivity and emerging voices in new media art. They recently completed a postdoctorate at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where they were part of the Coded Secrets research group, studying how internet culture and virtuality are reshaping performance art.