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

Kataoka,Mitsuru "Mits"

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

The first print image from film

Robert Heinecken, who was a colleague of mine, and a fellow student when we were students at UCLA. He now, at this stage, in the 80s, began to have a reputation for experimenting with technologies, but not with video, but mainly as a photographer. He was already exploring putting photo paper against the surface of a television set, the cathode tube. But nothing would happen for many, many tries. And then, eventually, he actually started getting images from taping the photographic paper, in a darkroom, against a television set, and so he used the newscasters, evening news, in order to explore. But he decided to take a risk with me with the InkJet machine that I had just helped develop with Fuji. And with that machine we produced the first images of the newscaster, of one which was of a newscaster named Connie Chung. This particular print that he made on this machine, we now have the image of the print, as well as the Metropolitan, it's also hanging in the San Francisco MOMA and also in the Chicago Art Institute.

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)