Carl Loeffler

The late Carl Loeffler 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/publisher, he produced books on performance art and correspondence art, and the periodicals Art Contemporary/Art Com Magazine, Videozine, Audiozine and Imagezine.

Loeffler established the first video art collection in Northern California. These archives — documenting video, performance, artist book and periodical activities from the 1970s and ’80s — are now held at Stanford University and the Pacific Film Archives. In the mid-1990s, Mr. Loeffler became a Carnegie fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and Project Director of Telecommunications and Virtual Reality at the school’s Studio for Creative Inquiry, organizing projects such as a Networked Virtual Art Museum, Virtual Pompeii — which was featured at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco.