I founded mediawork: The Southern California New Media Working Group back in '94 to enable theorists -- Lev Manovich, Norman Klein, Phil Agre, Steve Mamber, Vivian Sobcheck and N. Katherine Hayles - to come together with scientists -Ken Goldberg, Danny Hillis, Paul Haeberli, and Mike Noll; architects -- Tim Durfee and Marcos Novak - mixed it up with curators like Carole Ann Klonarides; and graphic designers - including Rebeca Mendez and Somi Kim - shared a space with industrial designers like Lisa Krohn and artists ranging from Bruce Yonemoto to Jennifer Steinkamp to Diana Thater. LA is a place where you have to plan spontaneous events, so it was both more complex and more rewarding to spark such interactions on a (vaguely) quarterly basis. When mediawork was first founded it was, in many ways, the only game in town for those who wanted a public space to discuss the changes that digital technologies were having on society. The astonishing growth of academic programs in the region since 1994 has seen a proliferation of conferences, seminars, residencies and symposia on all facets of this transformation. In 2001, mediawork moved on to become a publishing initiative and the planned spontaneity of its meetings has been put to the side, at least for the foreseeable future. For more on Mediawork Pamphlets, see <mitpress.mit.edu/mediawork>.

The regular meetings were always on Saturday afternoons and usually held at Art Center's Los Angeles Times Media Center but occasionally off-campus as well. My favorite of those was mediawork 7 at the Three Clubs, a bar in Hollywood. The late poet, performance artist and self-proclaimed "supermasochist" Bob Flanagan played the poetry he'd written for his Powerbook's voicecoder, his partner Sheree Rose showcased her digital collages, LMU1s Paul Harris talked about the French avant-garde Oulipo movement and contemporary hypertexts, and Heidi Gilpin, formerly at UC Riverside, discussed the impact of the computer on choreography through her work with the William Forsythe1s Frankfurt dance company. After all of that, the Radio Ranch Straight Shooters (maybe the greatest Western Swing band in the world) played a few sets while we drank Hurricanes -- the Three Clubs' own micro-brew -- and kicked off mediawork1s third year. There were also a few special topic mediaworks. These included:

mediawork 9 | Architecture & Imaging at The Schindler House in West Hollywood had, among others, UCLA's Marcos Novak speaking on cyberspace and liquid architecture, and artist Diana Thater (who spent part of the following year in residence at the MIT Media Lab) on her site-specific video> installations,.

mediawork 11 | Magic & Media featured Paul Haeberli, then Senior Scientist at SGI and organizer of the Fiat Lux underground happenings that ran during SIGGRAPH, Erik Davis who was then putting the finishing touches on his book Techgnosis, and Pae White, the Southern California-based artist who bridges the gap between art and design, who showcased her work on pony girl fetishists on the World Wide Web.

mediawork 15 | Post '89 Theory hosted Sara Diamond from the Banff Centre for the Arts, international media activist and <nettime> co-founder Geert Lovink, digital artist/theorist and mediawork stalwart Lev Manovich, and RTMark, the corporation which sponsors sabotage of mass-produced products. They were working to move beyond the concepts inherited from the generation of '68 to deal with the electronic, networked, market-oriented culture that emerged from the events of '89, the year the Berlin Wall fell and communism imploded.

mediawork 16 | Print Post Print invited some of the region's leading designers -- Anne Burdick, Denise Gonzales Crisp, Geoff Kaplan, Rebeca Méndez, and Louise Sandhaus - to show their transmedia work and discuss the Moebius strip connecting print and post print design. This gatehering, on Saturday, May 16th, 2001, was the last mediawork meeting.

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