Joseph DeLappe
La Malédiction
2023
- Artist / Artist group
- Joseph DeLappe
- Title
- La Malédiction
- Year
- 2023
- Category
- Sculpture
- Material / Technique
- mixed media, game controller, carpet tacks
- Dimensions / Duration
- 9 x 21 x 14 cm
- Collection
- ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
- Description
- Born in San Francisco in 1963, artist Joseph DeLappe has been working with new media since the early 1980s. Since 2017, he has lived and worked in Scotland, where he teaches as a professor at Abertay University in Dundee. DeLappe’s works are included in international collections and explore the boundary between artistic practice and activist action. In his works, DeLappe creates intersections between art, history, technology, and political issues. His projects critically reflect on the use of digital media and their societal impacts, while also encouraging viewers to adopt a questioning stance. At the center of this is the exploration of apparent contradictions, such as between analog and digital, physical and virtual, or art and politics. DeLappe reveals the interconnections between such opposites and recontextualizes them. The basis for his series “Mice and Game Controllers” was the observation that the computer mice in his teaching lab were regularly damaged due to frequent use. Instead of discarding them, DeLappe began using the broken devices as material for various sculptural works. Since the late 1990s, Joseph DeLappe has developed a series of works in which he transforms everyday computer and gaming interfaces into mixed-media sculptures. In his 2023 work “La Malédiction,” Joseph DeLappe transforms a standard gaming controller by completely covering its surface with black carpet tacks. While the uniform, dense arrangement of the tacks still allows the controller’s original shape to be recognized, it strips it of all functionality and makes it impossible to use. By rendering it unusable, DeLappe subverts the controller’s actual function. An object that normally enables control over a virtual game world now appears to turn against the user. The familiar relationship between human and interface is reversed and redefined. The French title “La Malédiction” translates roughly as “the curse,” “the hex,” or “doom.” It points to a potentially negative relationship between humans and digital media. It reveals this ambivalence by visualizing that control in digital game worlds can not only be exercised but also lost. The work thus points to forms of dependency and the dangers of an unreflective engagement with virtual spaces.
Author
Lara
Mainzer