Interviews

1. School held emergency drills at the start of World War II

2. Father lost everything during World War II

3. Sister was born before family was taken to Heart Mountain

4. Learned what it meant to be called “Jap” in Heart Mountain

5. Family left camp to work at Seabrook Farms

6. Facing housing discrimination in Rhode Island

7. Experimented using portable video systems with kids

8. Explored non-professional use of portable video recorders

9. The first print image from film

Mitsuru "Mits" Kataoka

(1934–2018) Japanese American designer, educator, and pioneer of media technologies

Experimented using portable video systems with kids

I began exploring interactive. Interactive meaning using the Akai and the Sony portable systems for what we would consider as video letters. And, who would want to participate? No adult wants to, no teachers, it was too risky. But second graders, third graders, would be interested… excited because no one’s going to say “No” to them.

I had colleagues in Irvine in California and in Los Angeles, either colleagues or students, my students, who approached the elementary schools to see if they would allow this kind of experiment...exchange of visual and oral information between children. So we did that from Westwood, Watts, other places in LA to Japan, to Tel Aviv, to France, to Sri Lanka, to all kinds of worldwide...because...Of course, they had no equipment yet. This is all still very early stage. So, it was a very exciting period because basically it meant that children were the ones that were leading the way.

children schools videography videos

Date: September 15, 2017

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Jennifer Cool

Contributed by: Jennifer Cool, Matthew Purifoy

Interviewee Bio

Mitsuru “Mits” Kataoka, a designer, educator, and pioneer of new media technologies, was born in 1934 in Jefferson Park, California. In 1942, his family was sent to the Pomona Assembly Camp and then to the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming. At the end of World War II, Kataoka’s parents were among the incarcerees recruited as laborers for Seabrook Farms in New Jersey.

Kataoka graduated from high school in New Jersey, then studied at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he received a B.A. in Arts Education in 1957 and an M.A. in Communication Design in 1959. From 1957 to 1965, he served in the U.S. Army Reserves as an armored tank officer. He became a faculty member at the Department of Art, Art History, and Design at UCLA in 1966. In the early 1970s, he developed the first two-way, decentralized citywide cable television system in the United States.

Kataoka was instrumental in bringing digital printmaking to the art world. He envisioned a computer and printer system that could be operated by artists with museum quality resolution and archival inks and paper, years before ink jet technology was capable of such quality.

He passed away in May 2018. (July 2019)