Howl: Elite Force Voyager Online

The American artist Joseph DeLappe is regarded as a pioneer of video game-based performance art and is one of 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 now restaging it for the first time in a slightly shortened version in front of a live audience.

As "Allen Ginsberg", DeLappe (*1963, San Francisco, USA) joins online sessions of the multiplayer shooter Star Trek™: Voyager - Elite Force (2000) and tests 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, reciting it aloud. He does not shoot. He stands still and types. The text appears on the screen in real time and is visible to other players in small sections as the performance unfolds.

Howl: Elite Force Voyager Online was created in 2001 in the privacy of DeLappe's former studio in Reno, USA. The performance, which lasted over five hours, was aimed exclusively at those players who happened to be in the same virtual room as the popular online shooter. The starting point for the work was DeLappe's early exploration of digital network environments as sites of social, political and aesthetic negotiation. As early as the late 1990s, he understood the then still young online gaming worlds as a new form of digital public sphere and conceived of his performance as a kind of digital street art project: Why should people play the game and follow its rules? What would happen if you entered an online shooter game and recited poetry instead of shooting?

By subverting the functional logic of the game, DeLappe transformed the virtual space into a stage for poetic and media-critical intervention. He challenged players to question their relationship to the video game world and its social function, while at the same time forcing them to engage with poetry - sometimes reluctantly, sometimes amusedly.

DeLappe developed this performance method further in later well-known works such as Quake/Friends (2003) and " dead-in-ira" (2006-2011), thus paving the way for numerous experimental works of video game performance art.