Ryder Ripps, Alone Together (Installation View), via Art Observed
The New York-based artist and designer Ryder Ripps capped his first solo gallery show with Postmasters earlier this year, and has spent the past two months in residency at the Red Bull Studios, where his current show, Alone Together, has turned the space into a self-reflexive digital laboratory, complete with test subjects, flickering hardware, and its own, occasionally fractured ideologies.
Ryder Ripps, Alone Together (Installation View), via Art Observed copy
 Strangely enough, this isn’t the first time Ripps has partnered with ubiquitous energy drink brand. Some may remember his work Hyper Current Living from several years ago, when Ripps locked himself away and consumed can after can of the high-sugar, high-caffeine beverage, all while generating a constant stream of questionably feasible “innovations.†His sly take on the dynamic, creative-centered rhetoric of the tech sector and the corporate cross-branding that follows close behind has become one of his most definitive modes, an ability to mix subversion and corporate iconography in a near seamless final product or performance.
Ryder Ripps, Alone Together (Installation View), courtesy Greg Mionske for Red Bull
Yet for all of his Ripps’s ability to get the best of his subject matter, the show here seems somewhat staid compared to past pieces. The actual physical content of the show consists of a Plexiglas cubicle, where a group of selected participants “labor†day in and day out, posting to social media accounts and consuming music, video and images. All activities are aggregated and beamed to an immense cube on the second floor, where the user’s activities are reflected in a hall of mirrors, and viewed through a small peephole. The physical architecture of the work is considerable, and its end product is almost comically slight by comparison, a phenomenon that questions the value and proliferation of data to the untrained eye.
Powrplnt at Alone Together, via Art Observed
Yet the consumption of persona and the representation of self is nothing new in the post-digital landscape, and Ripps seems to be at least partially aware of this. Â Placed unobtrusively in the basement of the space, the artist’s gift shop downstairs mocks the conventions of the blockbuster exhibition as a format itself, and seems to build upon the spectacle he has created nearby.
Ryder Ripps, Alone Together (Installation View), courtesy Greg Mionske for Red Bull
Perhaps then, the true strength of the exhibition is what Ripps allows his work to support, a space where his user’s interactions and feedback serve as an initial draw for visitors and interested parties, while offering a strong platform for interactions and learning on-site.  The exhibition serves as a platform for Ripp’s collaborator Angelina Dreem’s Powrplnt project, a “learning collaboratory,” which has invited young New Yorkers to free classes in a variety of software and programming languages, while also curating discussions on feminism, art production and music.  The community-building focus at the core of Powrplnt’s mission is a fitting counterpoint to the installation at the front of the space, where the structure makes much of its exploitation of the user’s browsing.
Ryder Ripps, Alone Together (Installation View), courtesy Greg Mionske for Red Bull
Ripps’s exhibition is notable in its separation (or perhaps fragmentation is a better word) of these elements of the end-user experience, where the frequent gallery-goer or the uninitiated student are ultimately afforded vastly different experiences during their time with his project.  The exhibition seems to ask much of itself, driving at the actual necessity of the physical objects at the front of the space in order to facilitate more immaterial benefits for aspiring artists and under-represented voices in the New York arts discourse.  But if Ripps’s project builds on the gray areas of commodity branding and labor, his work here is perhaps the most complex he’s done so far, as well as the most altruistic.
Alone Together closes on April 12th.
— D. Creahan
Read more:
Ryder Ripps: Alone Together [Exhibition Site]
Alone Together [Project Site]
“URL to IRL: Controversial Artist Ryder Ripps Captures the Struggle of Existing on the Internet” [Complex]
“Ryder Ripps on Putting Virtual Reality Into a Box” [NYT]
“Meet The 6 People Living Online For Ryder Ripps” [Creators Project]
