ripcache is an anonymous digital artist whose hand-drawn, pixelated work explores surveillance, privacy, and identity, most often through the recurring image of the security camera. Ripcache works mainly in a 1-bit palette, using a dithering technique to create shades of grey from patterns of black and white pixels. Ripcache first appeared on Twitter in late 2021.
The name ripcache is short for “raster image processor cache”, the storage that holds data for faster retrieval when a digital image is converted into the printer language used to produce a physical copy. Ripcache has said the pseudonym is part of the artwork itself, and chose to remain anonymous partly to reinforce the practice's focus on privacy. Ripcache released a first project, forest for the trees, in December 2021, as part of a Pak-inspired movement built around the ASH token. Of an original 256 trees, ripcache later burned the uncollected pieces, leaving 21. In February 2022 ripcache released a first 1/1, titled stress, establishing the security-camera imagery and hand-drawn style that would define later work. By mid-2022 ripcache began releasing fully on-chain collections, starting with closed circuit in June 2022 and followed by network mythology. In a December 2022 interview, the artist XCOPY named ripcache among the artists they were most excited about, citing that most of ripcache's collections are stored fully on chain with no need for IPFS.
