about: profile

Laura Trippi is a writer, information architect and content/process wrangler who’s been designing, writing, coding and project managing for the web since 1994. A curator of contemporary art in the 1990's, a professor of digital culture in the early aughts, Laura has been blogging, diving into wikis, and engaged with open source software since 2001.

Her research tracks emerging forms and dynamics of networked culture, with an an eye toward the long view. In her design consultancy, Latrippi Designs, she focuses on information architecture, findability, and the Linked Data web, geared to the needs of nonprofits and independent content producers. Behind this lies a larger research interest in information architecture as 'critical infrastructure' for shared and personal narratives, for adaptive cultural production.

Before this, Laura worked as a producer and project manager with Jazkarta, a small, agile web development company specializing in custom applications of Plone, a leading open source content management system. There, her focus was on applications supporting collaborative, cross-disciplinary research.

From 1999-2005, Laura taught digital culture at Simon Fraser University's School of Interactive Arts and Technology (formerly TechBC), just outside Vancouver, B.C. She pioneered the use of weblogs, wikis, and IRC in teaching, built a 4-year sequence of humanities courses informed by complexity science, and learned (among other things) to install software from source.

While there, from 2001-05, she blogged at net.narrative environments (performing in/as code). Before that, Laura lived and worked in New York City.

From 1997-99, she was the web manager for Carnegie Hall, where she played with Perl, scribbled with Visio, and manned the decks through high seas when Avalanche, was swallowed up by Razorfish. Ah, Silicon Alley!

From 1995-97, Laura produced a project-driven web site, Drawing oN Air (dn/a): an evolving system for distributed art. dn/a's Intelligent Life, an essay and thematic map of web sites, was commissioned for and still appears at CyberAtlas, a project of the Guggenheim Museum and Magazine. dn/a projects also appeared at Printed Matter, New York, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Originally hosted at äda'web, the dn/a website is now in the Digital Arts Study Collection of the Walker Art Center.

From 1987-1995, Laura was a curator at The New Museum, New York, organizing exhibitions of contemporary art. Among them, The Spatial Drive (1992) explored the emergence of relational, configurative forms of installation art, allied with the rise of electronic writing. Her first large-scale exhibition, Strange Attractors: Signs of Chaos (1989), pursued parallels between chaos theory and contemporary art, suggesting that postmodernism marked the onset of turbulence, not just in the art world but beyond...

And, well, here we are!

Laura has an M.A. in Intellectual History from The Johns Hopkins Humanities Center and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She works to the tune of KCRW, practices kyudo and aikido, studies Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, and sometimes does other things, too.

[07.07.22 / 09.12.19]