Omega Seamaster Titane Watch

Ryder Ripps is a conceptual artist and creative designer whose multi-disciplinary practice aims to dismantle the porous boundaries between art, the internet, and commerce, agitating the structure of the attention economy and revealing the flow of power in online relationships. Both a product and interrogator of internet culture, Ripps’s work rejects snobbishness and traditional gatekeepers, instead embracing a holistic and democratic view of popular culture as essential to understanding how we move through the world. Recognizing its impact on and importance to modern discourse, Ripps has catalogued early internet art in its multivalent forms, through his project Internet Archeology, and as a founder of the influential online art community Dump.fm. In his studio art practice, Ripps views these themes through a conceptual lens, analyzing contemporary life as mediated by the internet, and its capacity both for community and atomization. OKFocus, Ripps’ digital design studio, engages image-making in a deliberately egalitarian mode, splicing the worlds of art, fashion, and technology into something totally accessible, while evincing an intimate understanding of the mechanics of branding and social connection. His commercial work spans the cultural moment, overlapping and collaborating with those who shape and define it including Kanye West, Travis Scott, James Blake and Grimes. In this way Ripps is media agnostic, designing visually engrossing album covers, producing and directing conversation generating music and music videos, mapping websites, and realizing entire product launches. He has created the branding for Soylent; worked with Kanye West as a part of DONDA; and developed the concept and visual identity for the influential fashion archive and incubator VFILES, among others. Instead of starchily defined zones, the spheres of Ripps’ work blend and influence each other. All his work shares a deep humanism, emblematic of Ripps’ belief that good art has to reflect human emotion and meet society wherever it is.