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Birth:          14 Nov 1946 Mentor, Ohio
Death:          5 Feb 2001 

Notes
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intelius
http://classified.post-gazette.com/details_obits.asp?id=6565149
LOEFFLER
CARL EUGENE 
On Monday, February 5, 2001, age 54, of Fombell, PA, beloved husband of Polly 
(McCune) Loeffler; father of Carle Loeffler, of Norway; son of Lottie Loeffler, of 
Mentor, Ohio and the late Charles B.; brother of Gregory Loeffler of Mentor, Ohio, 
Jeffrey Loeffler of Alaska and Carol Goldstein of NYC. Service and interment private. 
Carl was an international pioneer in virtual reality. Arrangements by the SCHELLHAAS 
FUNERAL HOME, West View.
At http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/artcom.html there is an essay by a Judy Malloy 
about Carl and his work.
following this portion is a transcript of a 1988 interview:

Memories of Art Com and La Mamelle
 
 Carl Eugene Loeffler was born in Mentor, Ohio in 1946. He was raised on a small farm 
near Lake Eire, according to an interview with Mark Jones, in which he notes that 
farming was not the main family occupation; his father was an aerospace engineer 
who worked for TRW, and wanted to provide a good place where his children could 
grow up. "Farms are wonderful, and I do think that experience has contributed to my 
development as a creative person. I was pretty isolated out there, so my imagination 
ran wild and turned everything into toys."[1} 

 South of Market in San Francisco in 1975, Carl Loeffler opened the art space, La 
Mamelle, and at the same time he initiated an extensive publishing program with the 
aim of making contemporary art more accessible and publishing performance and 
video art documentation, conceptual photography, and texts. In the first few years, 
performances included T.R. Uthco, Linda Montano, and Judith Barry; exhibitions 
included West Coast Conceptual Photographers, Photography and Language, Joyce 
Cutler Shaw, the seminal 1977 Send/Recieve telecommunications project, and 
Community Art Radio 1976 on KPFA with performances by Richard Alpert, Hank Bull, 
Stephen Moore, Jim Melchert, Doug Kahn, Helen and Newton Harrison and many 
others. 

 As it was for many artists in the Bay area, in the following years La Mamelle was an 
important part of my experience of contemporary art. [2]  


Informally edited information and excerpts from:
Judy Malloy, "Keeping the Art Faith, Interview with Carl Loeffler",
 Artcom Electronic Network, on The WELL, 1988
 Participants in addition to Loeffler, Malloy, and Fred Truck,included, among
 others, John Coate, Abbe Don, Janey Fritsche, David Gans, Freddy Hahne, Raul 
Gilbert MinaMora, and Howard Rheingold. 
per www.goodreads.com, he and Tim Anderson wrote the Virtual Reality Casebook
per http://www.bornyesterday.ca/cyberstage-archives/2011/3/23/e-mail-from-
carl.html he collapsed at an airport, and it is speculated it was related to a recent 
case of malaria
To: Mark J. Jones
From: Carl Eugene Loeffler
Subject: Re: CyberStage

I was raised on a small farm in Ohio, near Lake Eire. We weren't serious farmers, 
though. My father was a space engineer for TRW, and thought it was important to 
give us kids a neat place to grow up. Farms are wonderful, and I do think that 
experience has contributed to my development as a creative person. I was pretty 
isolated out there, so my imagination ran wild and turned everything into toys. My 
father worked on the Lunar Landing, Viking and Voyager, and earned a Presidential 
citation. I inherited his interest in science and systems. He loved to read sci-fi, me 
too. I just finished Snow Crash and loved it...

I am someone who has traversed in a wide range of electronic art media, from 1/2 
inch open reel black and white video, to satellites, to television, to computer nets to 
distributed virtual reality. To work in virtual reality is the next step in visualisation 
technology. And it is the ultimate intermedia... so it is natural for me to work in VR. 
And I have nearly 20 years experience as an electronic media artist behind me that I'm 
now bringing to VR.

I went to California in 1967, to continue my education. First I tried L.A., living in a 
beachtown -- Manhattan Beach actually. I didn't like LA, too big. So I went up to San 
Fransisco, and took a degree in art from California State University. I showed up there 
in 1969, pretty cool year. There, I was a dual art major -- studio art and art history -- 
so I studied lots and lots of art history. After completion, I wanted to go to graduate 
school to study conceptual art, but my professors advised me to go out and be a part 
of the conceptual art scene, [saying] that [it] was the best [thing to do to] understand 
it. At that point stuff like video and performance was not discussed at all, so I 
[decided to] start "Art Com" in 1974/75, and began creating lots of art and organizing 
projects.

I founded Art Com as a site for advanced art, and it still exists today. Art Com is active 
in 14 countries. Nowadays, it has a low profile in SF. The space was a gallery. 
Actually, in those days it was called an "artist run space" or "alternative space." Art 
Com was one of the first handful of such spaces in the U.S., such as the Kitchen in 
NYC. We had fun. Art Com is a non-profit organization, but nearly 90% dependent on 
earned revenue a path I put them on in 1983, and they are really happy about it now. 
The public funding here is politicized in a twisted sense, and is being cut way back. 
The California Arts Council barely exists, I saw them come into existence and go 
away.. amazing. So, for a decade I was responsible for staging a lot of experimental 
video and performance art in San Fransisco. While there I assembled an anthology 
about performance in California, called Performance Anthology.

Art Com never exhibited paintings or other more traditional art. It exhibited books as 
art, mail art, video, concept, performance, and sound poetry. We did a lot of 
electronic stuff, like transcontinental satellite performance events in 1977. In 1978 we 
got involved with slo-scan video and computer networking projects with similar 
Canadian art spaces. The Art Com organization had a kind of retrospect exhibition at 
SFMMA (San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art) in 1979, and I directed a project called 
"Artist's Use of Telecommunications" -- it took 2 years to set it up, and it was over in 
2 hours! Essentially, a two way audio and slo-scan video link to Australia, Japan, 
Canada, Austria, and points in the U.S. This was the first time a slo-scan networked 
project found its way into a museum. It was neat to connect up like that. The 
organization was conducted over computer networks, largely the I.P. Sharp system, a 
Canadian teleconferencing company that donated connect time. We also used Atari 
computers that had acoustic couplers, built-in modems, and just printed out on paper, 
no screens! [On that project] I worked with Robert Adrian (Austria), Bill Bartlett 
(Canada), Liza Bear (NYC) Hank Bull (Canada), Eric Gidney (Australia), Ko Nakajima 
(Japan), Willoughby Sharp (NYC), and others.

I taught lots of courses at the SF Academy of Art, on both Art History and Studio Art. 
The Studio classes were about Video and Performance, and Video-Performance Art. 
Students would also help stage live Art Com events, a great learning experience. The 
Academy considered me a high risk, because I encouraged lots of experimentation.

Then, in 1991, I was brought in as a Research Fellow for The STUDIO for Creative 
Inquiry, a research facility in the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie-Mellon University. I 
proposed to conduct projects in distributed virtual reality. [My first task was] to build 
the only immersion-based VR lab at CMU from the ground up. I would guess that this is 
the first and only VR production facility in any art department in the US.

ssn 275 40 7284 issued in Ohio 1961-2




Parents
LOEFFLER Charles B. ()
----- Lottie ()

Siblings
LOEFFLER Carl Eugene (14 Nov 1946 - 5 Feb 2001)

Marriage To MCCUNE Polly Sander ()

Notes

Parents
MCCUNE James Angus (11 Jan 1932 - 8 Apr 2014)
SANDER Anne Converse ()

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