Joseph DeLappe - Drone Strike Visualizations

Joseph DeLappe - Drone Strike Visualizations

Perfecto P. Manuta Jr.

10/22/2016

Art 346 - New Media Art

Lecture Paper

            In today’s lecture by Joseph DeLappe, he talked about some of his work. The lecture was held at The Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada. This lecture consisted of works he had done with drones that the U.S. Military would use overseas. He describes his fascination of the Iraq war, the U.S. uses of drones and how he depicts the war into his art work is intriguing. He talks about the military service men and women that were lost to the war. Also, not to be forgotten, the civilians in Iraq who lost their lives.

From my perspective he demonstrated that he cares for the U.S. Forces that were lost during the war and also the devastating amount of civilian lives that were lost as well. There usually is never a good out come to war just expenditure of resources and people losing their lives. From my own experience, as an Iraq veteran, I have grown a better understanding of Joseph DeLappe point of view and how his art sheds light to the loss of life during the war.

One of his pieces that caught my immediate attention was an online game called America’s Army 3; which was a game created by the United States Department of Defense as a marketing and recruitment tool. The game is a first person shooter and in this game you are an Army soldier in Iraq doing missions. In this game Joseph DeLappe created a character and named it “dead in Iraq”. His character would lower his weapon and Joseph would start typing the names, age, service branch and date of death of each American killed in the war. He talked about people sending him hate mail and death threats. But looking at the YouTube video he posted the amount of ridiculous comments posted on there was amusing to me. It was very interesting to see these comments and to see it immediately see that people were negative towards their art medium. But reading the more recent comments, people seems to understand what he was doing. I had to read 100 names out of the 4,486 soldiers that died in Iraq for Veterans Day in 2011. This was on a stage and reading those names off you start to realize these are men and women who will never see their kids, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, relatives and so on. It hits close to home for me because I could have easily been one of these name that I was reading off. Very strong, provoking and moving piece.

Drone Strike Visualization was another piece he talked about in today lecture. It was an installation of drone figures with a complement of lights that would hit the drones in a certain manner which projects the shadow of the drone on the walls and ceiling. I thought it was interesting to see the shadows on the walls and ceiling because if you saw a real drone the shadow would be on the ground. Just an observation I made. The placement of the drones and the light show was a bit eerie to me. To think that these machines could have been the cause of death for many civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan, but at the same time could have saved U.S. military members lives during the Iraq and Afghanistan war. That was what I had going through my mind when I was looking at this piece. It is just a very weird position to be in and also very difficult to put into words.

There were a few other piece he presented during his lecture but my conclusion about his work is that he brings up deep issues that most people are not willing to shed light on. My thoughts are that there is not much good that comes out of war. It is a lot of loss on both sides. It is definitely something we need to keep an open mind to talk about because there is so much anger that comes from these issues. When I was a young man fresh out of the military there was definitely a feeling of anger and hostility. When I got out I didn’t know how to deal with the anger and these feelings. But talking to others helped. These topics should be known and we should talk about them. Sometimes the difficult topics are the hardest to start a conversation about. I feel like Joe has opened the door for some of these topics. It is left to us to come to our own conclusion.