Howl: Elite Force Voyager Online

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.

A Performance as Part of the Gulaschprogrammiernacht

The 24th Gulaschprogrammiernacht or GPN24 will take place from June 4 to 7, 2026. This four-day conference for hackers, technology enthusiasts, and interested laypersons is the second-largest annual event organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), following the Chaos Communication Congress. GPN25 is hosted by Entropia e. V., the Karlsruhe chapter of the CCC.