Tomas Roope
British digital media designer (born 1969)
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Tomas Roope (born 20 August 1969) is a British digital media designer. He is an Honorary Royal Designer for Industry,[1] , is in the BIMA Digital Hall of Fame,[citation needed] and has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lincoln for his contribution to digital culture.[2]
In 1994 Roope co-founded the Antirom artist collective as a protest against "multi-mediocrity, ill-conceived point-and-click interfaces grafted onto repurposed old content and repackaged as multimedia."[citation needed] Their eponymous CD-ROM,[3] explored interactivity as an art form in its own right, inspiring many of the agencies that went on to form the UK digital industry centred around the Old Street roundabout.[4] As Brendan Dawes says of Antirom, “nothing was the same in the world of so called multimedia ever again”.[5]
The Antirom CD-ROM featured in The Barbican's Digital Revolution exhibition[6] as a significant milestone in the history of digital creativity.[7] Antirom continued until 1999 when Roope went on to co-found Tomato Interactive.
In 2007, Roope co-founded The Rumpus Room, a digital agency with a focus on co-creating immersive experiences with audiences. Clients included Lewis Hamilton, One Direction, Pet Shop Boys, Richard Curtis, Pharrell Williams, Coca-Cola, Nike and The X Factor.[8]
In 2016 Roope became the Group Creative Lead for Google ZOO in EMEA, leading a team of creative technologists solving problems for top clients and agencies using Google technologies.[9] His work included Fabricius, a hieroglyphics translator that uses machine learning to decode ancient Egyptian language.[10]