La Mamelle

Carl Loeffler (1946-2001) foudned the alternative arts space La Mamelle in San Francisco in 1975 and began publishing La Mamelle magazine (which will become ArtCom).

In 1976, La Mamelle Arts Center, a space for conceptual, performance and video art, opened at 70 12th Street in San Francisco with an exhibition of Xerox art. (...)

In 1977, with Avalanche magazine in New York, La Mamelle coordinated the Send/Receive Project - an early two-way satellite transmission between New York and San Francisco, with simultaneous broadcast on New York and San Francisco cable TV channels.

1980: "Carl Loeffler and La Mamelle organised the "Artists' Use of Telecommunications Conference" at the SF MoMA in 1980. (Bill Bartlett did the network)" (src)
The on-line part of the "Artists' Use of Telecommunications Conference" was organised by Bill Bartlett for "La Mamelle" (an artist-run space in San Francisco) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMMA).

1983: La Mamelle is one of the nodes to take part in Roy Ascott's La Plissure du Texte (team: Gregory McKenna and Tom Klinkowstein).

ArtCom magazine, network, etc
"Art Com" was started in 1975 as an arts magazine (succeeding "La Mamelle Magazine) and expanded into a printing press in the early 1980s. Michael Crane's and Mary Stofflet's anthology "Correspondence Art", published by Loeffler/Art Com in 1984, still remains the seminal sourcebook on Mail Art. As far as I know, the electronic artcom forum was launched in "The Well" BBS in 1986. It initially served as redistributor of articles that had appeared in "Art Com" magazine. Later, that forum was routed into the Usenet as alt.artcom (where it still exists)."
Source: Florian Cramer, Nettime, 2001
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0103/msg00125.html

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