About Triple Canopy

As a magazine, Triple Canopy is dedicated to sustained inquiry, careful reading and viewing, resisting and expanding the present. We are set on engaging the world at our own speed. (In “The Binder and the Server,” a memoir-manifesto published in 2010, we proclaimed our intention to “slow down the internet”; later, in recognition of the erosion of the line between “online” and “offline,” we pivoted to “slow down the world.”) This aim is reflected in our design interfaces, which encourage prolonged, focused engagement, and extends to our methods. We work closely with contributors from the inception of a project to (and often beyond) its publication or presentation, ensuring that each work is the product of a thoughtful conversation. We consider the editorial process to be a collective enterprise, not a utilitarian transaction; a workspace for testing ideas and cultivating aesthetic experiments that might otherwise lack a proper context. We are committed to learning from past efforts to rethink and renovate the print object and the exhibition space, as well as the literary and artistic forms they have engendered. And we are convinced that the web—or the concatenation of hardware, software, communication networks, and technical protocols that we typically experience via the browser—can act as a fitting venue for these endeavors.

The central form for Triple Canopy’s publishing activities is the magazine issue. Issues may include digital works of art and literature, public conversations, books, editions, performances, and exhibitions. New issues are devoted to the collaborative production of bodies of knowledge around specific questions and concerns. Issues are published over the course of several months, often concurrently, at a rate of approximately three per year. As of March 2018, Triple Canopy has published twenty-four issues of the magazine and twelve books, and has worked with more than nine hundred contributors.

Triple Canopy’s public programs are meant to enrich the relationship between editors, contributors, and readers, and to establish the kind of intimacy that cannot be replicated online. They enable us to test theories, incorporate friends and strangers into the production of projects, generate encounters that are later adapted for the magazine, foster collaborations with other organizations, and realize ideas that won’t work on screens. We’ve organized numerous public programs and participated in residencies in New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Chicago, Tucson, Paris, Berlin, Sarajevo, Turin, and elsewhere. Once or twice per year, we offer the Publication Intensive, a free two-week program in the history and contemporary practice of publication.

Triple Canopy has collectively authored works that have been presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), MoMA PS1, MCA Denver, and Kunsthalle Wien, among other institutions. These works include installations that meditate on the circulation of colonial-era furniture or house temporary schools for speculation; videos in which librarians explain digital media for denizens of the distant future; broadsheets and paperbacks that prompt, condition, and incorporate the artifacts of conversations and performances. They reflect on and utilize publishing as a mode of organizing time; molding behavior, tastes, and opinions; structuring cultural experiences, personal relationships, and political expressions; marking distinctions as well as forging bonds between strangers and intimates. We often embark on such projects as a form of research and development; as a way of investing a magazine issue with a particular narrative or form, in response to a particular context or public.

Triple Canopy creates publishing systems that enable the magazine to elucidate relationships between activities that occur on the web, in print, and in person. The first iteration of Triple Canopy’s online platform aimed to create a richer, more coherent experience of online reading than existed at the time, trading the vertical scroll for two historical information-organization tropes: the magazine page and the proto-browser application HyperCard. The constraints of the page metaphor, which was central to that design—and can still be seen in the first nine issues of the magazine—eventually chafed as we sought to develop projects built around more various, multidimensional, and nonlinear experiences of text and visual media. (“Every innovative new-media publishing venture is born obsolescent,” we wrote in the introduction to issue 9, Unplaced Movements. “No sooner has an editorial initiative laid claim to a new technology than some newer technology arrives, turning its predecessor into an outdated curio.”)

In November 2010, we debuted a new design that jettisoned the page, atomizing it into a smaller structural unit, the column. This move established a greater degree of plasticity, in keeping with the increased fluidity of reading, viewing, and interacting online (and the explosion of the interfaces traditionally associated with those activities). In early 2013, we dug into John Dewey’s Democracy and Education and announced “a rethinking, from the ground up, of how we create culture and a coherent body of knowledge in a resistant, efficient, particularized world.” Months later, we again revamped our publishing model and inaugurated a third system for authoring and presenting digital projects, Alongslide. We called the new platform “a framework for the relationships, conversations, and collaborations that underlie Triple Canopy—which is to say the deliberate, intimate interactions that are fundamental to culture, and cannot so easily be captured by digital tools.” Alongslide balanced the visual dynamism and formal structure of print layouts with the temporal and spatial experiences afforded by web browsers, while accounting for the proliferation of screen-based devices and reading experiences, the narrowing of the distance between online and offline.

Since the summer of 2016, Triple Canopy has been based in an office and venue at 264 Canal Street in Manhattan, where we regularly organize public programs. For the previous five years, Triple Canopy was located at 155 Freeman Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with Light Industry, the inimitable venue for film and electronic art. For nine months in 2010, Triple Canopy, Light Industry, and the Public School New York shared a 5,000-square-foot storefront at 177 Livingston Street, in downtown Brooklyn—and feverishly organized nearly one hundred events, which attracted more than six thousand attendees. (We’re still recovering.)

Triple Canopy’s work is supported by many generous foundations, grantmakers, and individuals. (You might like to read an argument for supporting the magazine, tailored to those who are chronically disappointed with reality, emphasizing our efforts to devise alternatives. Be warned: “I cannot guarantee that reading Triple Canopy will not allow you to quit your day job, though, realistically probably it will not—since if you do quit your day job, other factors will likely be involved.”) Triple Canopy is a founding member of Common Practice New York, an advocacy group that fosters research and discussions about the role of small-scale arts organizations in New York City. Triple Canopy is proud to be certified by W.A.G.E., which ensures that all contributors are fairly compensated for their work.

Triple Canopy is named after a security company that was founded in 2003 and received numerous contracts from the United States government as part of the privatization of the war in Iraq. The company chose the name “to evoke the protection offered by a ‘triple canopy’ jungle,” and to define itself “by the multiple layers of security it offers as well as the levels of redundancy built into every operation.” We stole the name to emphasize the richness, fertility, and diversity of such a habitat and, simultaneously, to communicate that “murder is the logical extension of business,” as we wrote, quoting Charlie Chaplin. “And, well, war-for-profit is the logical extension of that. Private fucking armies paid by our government with BEAUTIFUL corporate names seem exemplary of our present moment. Taking their name is an appreciation of their art, and a small, tiny, act of war on their disgusting brand.” We hoped, at least, to remind all who Googled the magazine of the activities of the security company and its ilk, and we envisioned the other Triple Canopy eventually foundering, disappearing from the top ten, fifty, one hundred results. (The other Triple Canopy was rebranded in 2014 as Constellis Holdings.)

I propose you explore the audio, images, and text in this excellent multimedia magazine that—however attuned its editors are to what the web does well—hasn’t forgotten what magazines also need to be: written.
—Wyatt Mason, Harper’s Magazine

A beautiful art object in and of itself—and a welcome reminder of the wonderful things Web publications (and only Web publications) can do when they take advantage of their medium.
—The New York Observer

Triple Canopy is a multitasking brain trust of a nonprofit that publishes an extremely smart Internet magazine, presents performances and organizes exhibitions.
—Holland Cotter, the New York Times

Triple Canopy is an online magazine that lets you watch videos, is not limited by word or page length, and can be read simultaneously by people anywhere in the world. In other words, it’s the future. Only thing is, you can’t read it in the bath. Yet.
—Jennifer Higgie, Financial Times

Like [Triple Canopy], Corrected Slogans sidles curiously between print and digital. Its fastidious edits, a vestige, increasingly, of the printed page, lend it the feel of a dog-eared book, removed from the web’s frictionless slick. At the same time, it takes the footnote and subjects it to the logic of the Internet. Its annotations seem beholden to the sort of tangential wandering through sources that Google and its bevy of digitized books enable. Search for a phrase, and you’re bound to end up elsewhere, often in a topic only tenuously threaded to your initial query. Viewed through this frame, Corrected Slogans hypostatizes the web’s abstract flow, where every text yawns into another.
—Courtney Fiske, the Brooklyn Rail

Triple Canopy adds video to the usual prose and photographs, but there’s no question you’re reading a literary magazine—even if it has no paper counterpart. It’s not the first place on the Web to try this trick, but it’s one of only a handful where it works well.
—Blake Wilson, the New York Times

An intriguing example of innovative online publishing—a reading experience that draws you in like print, with the flash and frisson of the Web.
—Bookforum

One of the densest, highest ideas-per-page reads I’ve had in a long while. Innovative and very likable.
—Kevin Kelly, the Long Now Foundation, Wired

One of the best things you’ll read this year … and it also seems to me to be the Writing of the Future. It is its own thing.
—Ed Park, the Believer, Personal Days

Little did [Bob Dylan] know that his Beat generation mentors (the original slackers) would be thoroughly out-slothed by subsequent cohorts, primarily my own (Generation X), to the point where a bunch of talented youth from Triple Canopy can hang an event on failure, be successful, and look good, if appropriately maudit, while doing so. Indeed, these busy Y-sters have distilled and perfected the deception of cloaking themselves in the distressed sartorial aesthetic of their predecessors while being, in truth, fiendishly ambitious and competent.
—Andrew Hultkrans, Artforum

Triple Canopy is a fascinating, ambitious, terrifically designed new literary-and-more online magazine.
—Dennis Cooper

Smart, gorgeous, informative. They’re doing the sort of stuff that people say is not happening on the Internet: intelligent reportage and analysis that isn’t afraid to go in-depth. I’m going to be digging through the archives for a long time to come.
—Paul Constant, the Stranger

A highly protean publisher that routinely experiments with the concept of “format,” Triple Canopy has become one of the most engaging and conceptually innovative projects in the American landscape. And it’s one of the few publishing outlets that seems to have digested the finer points of media theory. —Jonathan Sturgeon, “Five Small Publishers Who Are Changing the Face of the Industry,” Flavorwire