Making politics: engaged social tactics

In this interview, Joseph DeLappe describes a lineage of works and circumstances that led to a series of community-based and crowdsourced projects to encourage participation and creative critical action with participants, volunteers, and collaborators. This chapter describes DeLappe’s transformation from solo practitioner to socially engaged artist, illustrated by explicating upon works developed since 2008 that involved people in various modes of participation. Throughout, Laura Leuzzi and DeLappe uncover an engagement of the digital as a fulcrum for action, as process or platform. Woven through all of the works described is a keen sensibility of engaging issues surrounding memory, violence, peace, and social justice. Such projects have involved either the creation of temporary, large-scale low-polygon sculptures and installations created on site with local communities/collaborators; internet-based engagements, including an early experimental global sing-a-long; and a series of crowdsourced rubber-stamping projects to intervene with political symbols on cash.