20 Years of Creating Stuff On The Computer. Introduction by E.C.D., Ryder Ripps

Form without function is bad. Being an artist these days has a lot to do with who you hangout with. Both my parents have their portraits by Warhol. I was born in 1986. I create physical work to freeze a moment of internet time. Being antisocial is cool now. People no longer look up from screens. I love animals, especially cats and llamas. OKFocus was started in 2011 after I creative directed VFiles and before I bought a 1987 BMW convertible but after I rewrote Ginsberg's Howl for the internet generation. I invented sea-punk as well as vapor-wave. I made a site in 2010 that allowed people to communicate in real-time with images, it hosts over 2 million images and is still running, Facebook probably got the idea of real-time fav notifications from us. Before that in 2009 I created an online museum for early internet graphics, after that I worked for M.I.A. pontificating online with her many nights at 2am. My girlfriend says I should be less braggy in this writing. I am considering writing a passage about her as a response. Tweets killed books. Images killed tweets. Clickbait killed images. I played Doom through a dial-up modem in 1995. I made earnest 3d graphics of dolphins jumping through hoops in Adobe Photoshop 3.0.I rewrote Ginsberg’s Howl for the internet generation. You can not call yourself a creative director unless you could take the place of anyone under your command, someone one told me that. I write CSS because it’s efficient. We create our own backends because templates don’t understand us as individuals. I strive to be understood as a human and as media. Good work exists outside of trends. Trends are just over simplifications of a pithy new things. I once tried to create luxury email in 2008. When asked to make Burberry “cooler” on the internet in I thought about what between luxury goods and the internet were at odds. I told a creative director that a luxury good is something those with enough money can stroll into a store and buy, while status online isn’t as the same. Online clout comes from having a lot of followers or a Wikipedia entry, things that have little connection to what an individual can or can not afford. I explained this and introduced a concept that I felt was genius. I told him that we needed to merge these two disparate worlds, and create luxury email. That’s right, for $30,000 consumers could purchase a Burberry email address, to flaunt their wealth and status within the virtual world. The creative director looked me right in the eye, with inexcusable disgust and plainly said, “that’s the worst idea i’ve ever heard” the following day I quit working at that agency and have been my own boss since – still on a mission to make luxury email a thing and innovate culture through multiple disciplines online. I had asthma, then I quit smoking. On my desk I have a large piece of driftwood. I am the only person you will ever meet who has spoken at RISD and never been fly fishing. Who has worked with Kanye West, The Wolfsonian Museum, Mike Will Made-It and spoken at The Smithsonian. I am not a rapper...