about: profile
Laura Trippi is a writer, content strategist, information architect, and team/process wrangler who’s been designing, writing, coding, and project managing for the web since 1994. A contemporary art curator in the 1990's, a professor of digital culture in the early aughts, Laura has been organizing “content” into navigable knowledge structures for more than 20 years. She’s been engaged with open source software since 2001.
A lover of language, code, and diagrams, Laura finds patterns across disciplines and scales. She thrives on teams producing open, participatory systems. Her research tracks emerging forms and dynamics of networked culture, with an an eye toward the long view.
In her design consultancy, Latrippi Designs (content), Laura works with authors, artists, and other independents, and with progressive, mission-driven organizations, to design and build elegant websites with an emphasis on simplicity and ease of use. Behind this lies a larger interest in the design of adaptive systems as 'critical infrastructure' for shared and personal narratives, for sustainable cultural production.
From 2010-2012, Laura was Director of Web Services at San Francisco Zen Center — with three practice centers, one of the largest Buddhist communities in the West, including the first Zen monastery established outside of Asia. While managing operations across a network of web properties, she initiated an innovative program of live stream dharma talks and events, led redesigns of the newsletter and news blog, and provided critical project management and design oversight for the migration to Salesforce and the campaign for the 50th anniversary.
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.
From 2001-05, Laura 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, magna cum laude. She lives in a small village with her cat Bamboo where she helps lead community emergency response. She works to the tune of KCRW, practices Zen Buddhism, and sometimes does other things, too.
[2007.07.22 / 2020.09.11]