Ryder Ripps, the 28-year-old conceptual artist known for his cyberpranks, controversial art pieces and other Internet projects, has created a site-specific installation that is as much a sculpture as it is a performance piece.
Called “Alone Together,” the work, at Red Bull Studios New York in Chelsea, plays with the idea that the more connected we are online, the more physically withdrawn we become.
Visitors to the exhibition first encounter a huge shipping crate, as well as the subtle sound of typing. The crate is elevated three and a half feet off the floor, with a mirrored front face, eyeholes and a metal staircase leading to it.
As visitors peer into the eyeholes, they see a stream of digital content. A large tube filled with electrical cords travels from the shipping crate to the floor below, where there is a Plexiglass box filled with six workstations – each with hired “user-performers” who interact with the web as they would in their daily life. Overlapping images of what they see on their screens is displayed inside the crate.
The user-performers are able to do anything they’d like on their workstations, but are expected to do it from Thursday through Sunday from noon to 7 p.m. Here is a video of Mr. Ripps giving a tour of the exhibition:
Mr. Ripps, who is the creative director of the digital agency OKFocus, also answered a few questions about the show, which runs from Feb. 28 to April 12. Here are edited excerpts from the interview.
What is “Alone Together” about?
The whole idea is to create a microcosm of the Internet, a sculptural exaggeration of what is going on, and to have that be this self-contained thing. The box looks like a shipping crate because I think there is a huge mismatch between the objects we use and what’s inside of them.
In some sense, people, devices like iPhones or computers and objects like luggage or shipping crates are all the same thing. They’re containers and the way they look isn’t indicative of what’s inside of them. You can fill them up and change what’s in them.
I like to think about how a shipping container or a phone is analogous to a human. Humans are bodies that go from one place to another and we take things in and we store things and then sometimes we let it out.
Social media has changed the way we display the things we create. Anyone can put anything out and we are free to consume, criticize or promote it.
That kind of ephemeral output is about connecting with another person and feeling good about your own individuality — feeling loved and a part of something. When people are told to create and post and share and do all of these things, they also share that same emotionally charged need of validation and love and acknowledgement.
It’s like a never-ending feedback loop. How do you think this affects our real lives?
When you ask people to do things like “upload a profile picture,” they start reflexively thinking about their own identity. Who am I? What kind of stuff should I post? What do people want to see from me?
You are what you post. And you better keep posting because you have a lot of people looking at your stuff and you owe it to them. That idea of people owing something to an anonymous group, it’s new. It’s totally Internet.
The whole world is a reality TV show and we are typecast and we cast ourselves in it. Many of the people we follow we don’t actually know. And we don’t actually care to know them in real life. We follow them as content. They are content for us.
Young people seem to spend their days scrolling through feeds. Is “Alone Together” a manifestation of that?
When someone looks into those eyeholes, what they see will be different from what I see. The images are always changing. If the six user-performers are active and looking at the Internet, whatever they are looking at is going to be the feed. In that sense it is extremely intimate and personal because what you see will be different from what I see and I can never see what you saw, because it’s gone.
Will the user-performers be notified that something of theirs was “liked”? Does the audience have a way to tell them that they are doing a good job, the way they normally can online and via social media?
We have a “like” button installed, but it’s just a general alert for the group. The whole thing conflates all of their content into one single relentless feed. Because that’s how it feels [in real life]. There’s something really beautiful and interesting about the serendipity of the sequential nature of the feed. I post something, the next person posts something; those were two disparate events, but those two events made up someone else’s understanding of the day. For instance, if we could take what everyone on the train is doing — look at their phones and project it on a big wall, individually but all on the same wall. That would be an amazing snapshot of Feb. 26, 2015, New York City.
How did you choose the user-performers?
They are all sourced from Craigslist. I put up an ad up that said, “Do you want to get paid to use the Internet as art?” and I got hundreds and hundreds of responses. I ended up interviewing around 60 people. I was thinking about the dynamic between people, and who would make for a really compelling group of content, whose content will juxtapose or compliment another person’s. We wanted to have a good mix. We have a gamer and someone addicted to online shopping and two bloggers and an accountant and that kind of thing.
You’ve been called an “Internet artist.” From what I’ve seen of your work, you’ve taken things from the Internet and brought them to physical life. Is that a conscious decision, to make physical art?
I’ve done way more digital art that isn’t ever physically manifested and it was never intended to be. For me, it’s about making stuff that’s effective. I’m not an Internet artist. I’m a 28-year-old artist. I don’t want to exist just on the Internet.
“Alone Together” runs through April 12 at Red Bull Studios, 220 West 18th Street, Chelsea; redbullstudios.com