Harry Kipper was the pseudonym created by the performance art duo the Kipper Kids who were known as Harry and Harry Kipper. Based on a family friend of Kipper Kid and performance Artist, Brian Routh, the name Harry was added as a first name for each Kipper Kid in 1971. When The Kipper Kids, Martin von Haselberg and Brian Routh coined the name Kipper Kids, they were originally called Harry and Alf Kipper and had two distinctly different characters. Because von Haselberg and Routh could never remember who was Harry and who was Alf, they dropped the name Alf and decided to call each other Harry. At the same time they decided to make their characters identical. The Kipper Kids as Harry Kipper and Harry Kipper were born in 1971.
In the '90s, the pseudonym "Harry Kipper" was appropriated and made into a fictional character invented by the multiple-identity underground movement Luther Blissett. The story was created and propagated that Harry Kipper, a British conceptual artist, had mysteriously gone missing on the Italian-Yugoslav border whilst on a biking tour of Europe, allegedly with the intention of tracing the word Art across the continent. The target of the prank was a popular Italian family TV show with a particularly aggressive right-wing bent. Shortly before the show was to be aired, it was revealed that Kipper and Blissett never existed and the episode had to be pulled off the air to the great embarrassment of the producers. This prank served a double purpose, first it demonstrated how easily the media are manipulated, and second, it introduced Luther Blissett as a figure that lives entirely in the media space.