DeLappe, dead-in-iraq, 2006.

This work commenced in March of 2006, to roughly coincide with the 3rd anniversary of the start of the Iraq conflict. I enter 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. The work is essentially a fleeting, online memorial to those military personnel who have been killed in this ongoing conflict. My actions are also intended as a cautionary gesture.

I enter the game using as my login name, "dead-in-iraq" and proceed to type the names using the game's text messaging system. As is my usual practice when creating such an intervention, I am a neutral visitor as I do not participate in the proscribed mayhem. Rather, I stand in position and type until I am killed. 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.

As of 5/3/08, I have input 4002 names. I intend to keep doing so until the end of this war. As of this date there have been 4066 American service persons killed in Iraq.

Source

More DeLappe
RetroYou (interactive software project)

Trigger Happy - Thomson and Craighead 1998

A playable on-line re-creation of the ATARI classic, 'Space Invaders' where instead of fending off pixelly alien invaders, you must defend yourself against paragraphs of philosophical text taken from Michel Foucault's essay, 'What is an Author?' This game assumes the classic format of Space Invaders, but instead of shooting UFOs, the player must destroy a descending paragraph excerpted from Michel Foucault's essay, "What is an Author?" In destroying the passage word by word the player metaphorically deconstructs Foucalt's text which itself deconstructs the idea of the author. After shooting a few words, a "Yahoo!" search page appears on the screen with results defined by the eradicated words. This forces the player back into the Internet which is a platform for the death of the author on a daily basis.