Carl E. Loeffler

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Carl Eugene Loeffler (14 November 1946, Cleveland - 5 February 2001) was founder and director of one of the first alternative artist-run organizations in California -- La Mamelle/Art Com in San Francisco, established in 1975. As artist and publisher, Loeffler produced books on performance art and correspondence art, and the periodicals Art Contemporary/Art Com Magazine, Videozine, Audiozine and Imagezine. In 1986, he started the Art Com Electronic Network on the Whole Earth Electronic Link (WELL), one of the first online networks for specifically for artists.

Loeffler received his Bachelor in Art from the California State University, Hayward (1973). An instructor at the Academy of Art College during the 1970s and 1980s, he was also an artist trustee for the San Francisco Art Institute and a recipient of the San Francisco Art Commission Award of Honor for his contributions to video art. Loeffler established the first video art collection in Northern California. These archives -- documenting video, performance, artist book and periodical activities from the 1970s and 1980s -- are now held at Stanford University and the Pacific Film Archives. After serving as director of Art Com (1975-1991), he worked as director of virtual reality project at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh (1991-1995) and research director of Sim Laboratory at Carnegie (from 1996), organizing projects such as The Networked Virtual Art Museum which was featured at the Guggenheim Museum (Virtual Egyptian Temple, 1994) and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco (Virtual Pompeii, 1995-96).

La Mamelle, Inc. / Art Com[edit]

La Mamelle, Inc. / Art Com was a not-for-profit arts organization and artist-run space active from 1975-1995 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The organization’s first venture was publishing but it became involved in a multiplicity of activities including maintaining an artists’ space and presenting exhibitions and events of mail art, performance art, conceptual photography, video art production and screenings, a library, distributing artist-produced works, and creating one of the first artists’ online networks.

La Mamelle, Inc. / Art Com emerged in the 1970s during the proliferation of artist-run spaces across the country. In the San Francisco Bay Area this included Intersection for the Arts, Museum of Conceptual Art (active 1970-1984), Galeria de la Raza, SF Camerawork, Crossroads Community (the farm) (active 1974-1980), The Floating Museum (active 1975-1977), 80 Langton Street (later New Langton Arts active, 1975-2009), Site/Cite/Sight, and Southern Exposure.

Publications[edit]

  • editor, La Mamelle Magazine/Art Com, San Francisco, 1975-1995. Started out focusing on San Francisco Bay Area performance, conceptual, video, and multimedia and electronic art, but quickly expanding to cover international performance art. Renamed Art Com in 1980.
  • editor, with Darlene Tong, Performance Anthology: Source Book for a Decade of California Performance Art, San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press, 1980, xii+500 pp; 2nd ed., upd., Performance Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art, San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1989. [1]
  • "Tom Marioni, Director of the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA), San Francisco, in Conversation", La Mamelle 1:4, Spring 1976; repr. in Give Them the Picture: An Anthology of La Mamelle and ART COM, 1975-1984, eds. Liz Glass, Susannah Magers, and Julian Myers, San Francisco: Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice/CCA & CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, 2011, pp 25-32.
  • "Performing Post-Performancist Performance, Part I-IV", ART COM 16/4:4, 17/5:1, 18/5:2, 19/5:3, 1982; repr. in Give Them the Picture: An Anthology of La Mamelle and ART COM, 1975-1984, eds. Liz Glass, Susannah Magers, and Julian Myers, San Francisco: Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice/CCA & CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, 2011, pp 87-103.
  • "Toward a Television Art: Video as Popular Art in the Eighties", in The Second Link: Viewpoints on Video in the Eighties, ed. Lorne Falk, Banff, CA: Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre School of Fine Arts, 1983, pp 14-20.
  • editor, with Roy Ascott, Leonardo 24(2): "Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications", 1991.
  • editor, with Tim Anderson, The Virtual Reality Casebook, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994, 357 pp. An anthology of essays by Howard Rheingold, Myron Krueger, John Perry Barlow, a.o. Review: Wright (Convergence).
    • Virtuell virkelighet: teknologi og kultur - muligheter og utfordringer, trans. Nina Loeffler, Oslo: Spartacus, 1994, 144 pp, NB. Includes sections on the histories of networked technology in Norway and Sweden [2] [3]. (Norwegian)
  • "Artificial Life of Agents", in Advanced IT Tools: IFIP World Conference on IT Tools 2–6 September 1996, Canberra, Australia, eds. Nobuyoshi Terashima and Edward Altman, Canberra, 1996, pp 48-55. [4]

Literature[edit]

Archives[edit]

Links[edit]