Ryder Ripps: An Artist of the Internet
2015-02-26
Ryder Ripps
Computer skills do not usually correlate with a strong fashion sense. So when Nicola Formichetti, Lady Gaga’s former stylist and the current artistic director for Diesel, met a whiz kid named Ryder Ripps four years ago, he expected a geek.
Instead, “he turned up wearing like, almost hot pants — a crazy outfit with a mohawk,” Mr. Formichetti said. “And he looked so cool. I was like, ‘You’re Ryder?’ ”
Yet when Mr. Ripps sat down at a computer and began coding, there was no mistaking his true identity. “It really looked like Picasso painting, or like Beethoven playing his piano,” Mr. Formichetti said. “He looked like this mad scientist writing all these codes on the computer and just creating all these visuals that were really twisted.”
Mr. Ripps, the 27-year-old artist, programmer and creative director, is the consummate Internet cool kid, as fluent in HTML and JavaScript as in the language of conceptual art. Unlike most techies who hail from computer or business backgrounds, Mr. Ripps arose from the fashion and art worlds.
He was a founder of the influential online art community Dump.fm, and has made a name for himself with imaginative cyberpranks, including a 2012 website, WhoDat.biz, that pretended to be associated with Kanye West.
dismagazine.com
Sprites Gallery, 2011-present
As the creative director of the digital agency OKFocus, Mr. Ripps and his place at the increasingly chic nexus of art and technology have attracted clients like Nike and Red Bull. His programming know-how and hyperactive digital-native sensibility have made him a sought-out adviser to creative professionals like Mr. Formichetti, with whom he is working on a “digital experience” for Diesel.
Mr. Ripps has also designed websites for the musician M.I.A. and the hip-hop producer Mike Will Made It, and collaborated with the video artist Ryan Trecartin. “He is definitely somebody who I feel like I find myself consulting when I want to talk out an idea that he particularly has the knowledge space for,” said Mr. Trecartin, who met Mr. Ripps in 2010.
At the time, Mr. Trecartin was struggling to find high-resolution images of corporate logos for a project for W magazine. A mutual friend introduced him to Mr. Ripps, who quickly tracked down the images. “He had all these different tools he’d developed where he can mine different Asian websites,” Mr. Trecartin said. The collaboration went beyond simply tech support. “He’s very generous with his ideas,” Mr. Trecartin said. “It was like collaborating with any artist. He just happened to be a programmer.”
Mr. Ripps’s ability to straddle disparate worlds springs from years of trolling the forgotten corners of the web. “The Internet is just a ton of different people,” he said. “So, being good at knowing how to equally access these people to speak to them is being good at the Internet.”
Born in New York City to the designer Helene Verin and the painter Rodney Ripps, Mr. Ripps was exposed to old-school creativity at an early age. But it was the freewheeling Internet of the mid-’90s that captured his imagination. He hung out with hackers in AOL chat rooms and lurked on video-game message boards. He learned HTML at a computer camp and used his skills to project a confidence online that he didn’t have in the real world.
Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
“In real life I was a really shy 10-year-old kid with arty parents,” he said. “Online I was someone who was powerful, who could create things that people saw immediately.”
In 2011, three years after graduating from the New School with a degree in media studies, Mr. Ripps founded OKFocus with the artist and programmer Jonathan Vingiano to subsidize his less-than-lucrative art career. OKFocus’s work is infused with both Mr. Ripps’s sincere belief in the liberating potential of the Internet and the mischievousness of early AOL hackers. Its websites are loud, playful and often disorienting.
A good website, Mr. Ripps said, “is one that understands that users are sitting there, possibly in their underwear, in a dark cave, feeling alone together. One that can connect with people on that level. It’s like with music, like when you listen to a song and you cry because it understands you.”
This approach has attracted hip brands that see their websites as a storefront window onto youth culture. “Nowadays, web know-how isn’t enough,” said Virgil Abloh, the creative director for Mr. West and a founder of the streetwear brand Been Trill, whose website OKFocus designed. “How web design can resonate with culture is what Ryder and OKFocus excel at.”
Mr. Ripps’s skill at manipulating culture in the digital age is perhaps best exemplified by his various online stunts.
In 2012, OKFocus developed a multiplayer game in which users compete to find a single pixel, and in late 2013, it garnered attention with Drake Shake, an app that pastes a random image of the rapper Drake on any photo when users shake their iPhones. The app went viral; at one point, Drake himself posted an Instagram photo using the app, perhaps unaware that Mr. Ripps had forged a note to Apple granting himself permission to use Drake’s trademark.
He signed the forged letter “Ralph Romeo.” “Which is a fake name I use sometime because it’s very illustrious and romantic,” he said.
The Internet has let Mr. Ripps assume many creative roles, not all of them rooted in real life.
dump.fm
miauk.com
Old Tools (2011)
LuckyPlop
“Source”: http://www.nytimes.com/