The Bay Area’s photographic tradition nurtured a new generation of innovative and insightful photographers.

The Los Angeles-born but San Francisco-based Judy Dater (class of 1966 at San Francisco State University) started out documenting the “flower children” of the Haight-Ashbury, the neighborhood where she lived between 1964 and 1967, and then created unusual portraits of legendary women, such as "Cherie" (1972), a nude of Cherie Hiser, founder in 1968 of the Center of the Eye workshop and residency program at Aspen, and "Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite" (1974), in which her elderly mentor Imogen Cunningham meets a nude young woman (Wayne Thiebaud's daughter Twinka Thiebaud) in a forest. Dater mixed self-portrait and desert landscape in "Self-portrait with Stone, Badlands, South Dakota" (1981) and "Self-Portrait at Craters of the Moon" (1981).

The Los Angeles-born but Berkeley-based self-taught photographer Richard Misrach started out as a social realist with "Telegraph 3 AM" (1974), depicting the panhandling homeless, and, turning away from people, devoted his black-and-white series "Night Desert Photographs" (1975-77) to the nature of desert landscapes at night before the vivid color photography of his "Desert Cantos" (started in 1979, 42 cantos as of 2022).

Barbara Kasten, the former fiber artist, turned to cyanotype prints on watercolor paper ("Torso", 1974) and diazotype prints.

Two photojournalists both born and raised in the Bay Area stood out. San Jose-born Bill Owens printed books of photographs such as "Suburbia" (1973), devoted to middle-class tract homes, and "Working" (1977), devoted to middle-class jobs. Chauncey Hare, a former chemical engineer, was self-taught and never worked professionally as a photographer, but, discovered by New York curator John Szarkowski, he published another book that was a tribute to the working class: "Interior America" (1978). He refused to sell his photos and bequeathed them to UC Berkeley with the condition that they never be exhibited.

Catherine Wagner, still a student at San Francisco State University until 1981, followed in the footsteps of the "new topographers" with her "Early California Landscapes" (1974-79). She started teaching at Mills College in 1979.

California had become a major center of photography, as proven by several important shows: "Contemporary California Photography" (1978) at SF Camerawork, curated by Jack Welpott and others; "Attitudes" (1979), curated by Fred Parker at Santa Barbara's Museum of Art (485 photos by 247 artists); "Photographic Directions" (1979) at the Security Pacific Bank of Los Angeles, curated by Robert Ketchum; "Fabricated to be Photographed" (1979) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, curated by its new director Van Deren Coke; "Invented Images" (1980) at UC Santa Barbara, curated by Phyllis Plous; and "Photography in California 1945-80" (1984), curated by Louise Katzman at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, that traveled internationally.

Soon, San Francisco even boasted a group of "conceptualist" photographers. Sam Samore's "The Suicidist" (1973) staged the artist's own suicide in various manners (strangled, overdosed, stabbed, buried alive, etc). San Francisco native Lew Thomas, Donna-Lee Phillips (a New Yorker who had arrived in 1973 in San Francisco) and Hal Fischer (who had studied cinema at University of Illinois) co-founded the SF Camerawork Gallery in 1974. The manifesto of Lew Thomas' conceptualist (and mostly black-and-white) photography was "Black & White" (1971), which consists of two prints: a black one with the white word "BLACK" in the center and a white one with the black word "WHITE" in the center. Thomas was the brain behind the "Photography and Language" movement, named after a group exhibition organized in 1976 (118 artists, including Peter D'Agostino, John Baldessari, Robert Cumming and Jim Melchert) with help from both SF Camerawork and La Mamelle. In 1977 Hal Fischer exhibited the series "Gay Semiotics", which documented gay life in San Francisco’s Castro and Haight-Ashbury districts. Lew Thomas and Donna-Lee Phillips also founded NFS Press in 1976, which published both the catalogs for "Photography and Language" (1976) and "Gay Semiotics" (1977), besides Lew Thomas' own "Structural(ism) and Photography" (1978) and Peter D'Agostino's "Alpha, Trans, Chung" (1978), documenting three installations of 1976-78 based on stills taken from Jean-Luc Godard’s dystopian sci-fi film "Alphaville" (1965), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s film within a film "Trans-Europ-Express" (1966) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s documentary "Chung Kuo, Cina" (1972). Artists were also fascinated by found photographs: Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan took images from corporate and government archives to make the book "Evidence" (1977), while Suzanne Hellmuth and Jock Reynolds used images from the archives of the California Historical Society to create the installation "A State of the Union - Photographic Juxtapositions" (1980).

The exuberant creative energy of the visual arts and of photography began to spill over into video art.

In 1970 Sony introduced a half-inch color portable videotape recorder, just when the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco held one of the very early exhibition of video art, “Body Works” (1970), and on the other coast Willoughby Sharp and Liza Bear launched the Avalanche magazine (1970) that included coverage of video art.

In 1970 (one year before the Kitchen in New York) two artist-run cooperatives opened in the Bay Area for independent video artists: Video Free America, founded by Skip Sweeney and Arthur Ginsberg in San Francisco, and the Media Access Center at the Portola Institute in Menlo Park.

Performance artist Howard Fried, who had just founded the Performance and Video department at the San Francisco Art Institute, made the video installation "Inside the Harlequin" (1971).

In 1971 Sony introduced the U-matic format, which employed 3/4-inch videotape, the first format endorsed by all makers of videorecorders (previously, a videotape could be viewed only on the device that had made it). At this time, Elyse and Stanley Grinstein in Los Angeles were among the first collectors to acquire videotapes.

KQED was San Francisco's public television station. In 1967 they hired Brice Howard to run a workshop with artists to discuss what made television different from cinema and theater. In 1969 his workshop became the National Center for Experiments in Television and inaugurated an artist-in-residence program, funded in 1971 by the Rockefeller Foundation. William Gwin built a "Templeton Machine" to make a 40-minute video composition. Steve Beck (from University of Illinois) built a "Direct Video Synthesizer" Other videos were made by Bill Roarty and Willard Rosenquist (from UC Berkeley). Don Hallock built a giant pyramidal kaleidoscope that created the illusion of a floating spherical display, the "Videola", which was then used to project videos made with Beck's machine. The Videola was premiered at the San Francisco Museum of Art in September 1973 in a show that consisted of a live performance by Beck accompanied by Don Hallock on the Buchla Electric Music Box.

In September 1974 the San Francisco Art Festival included a "Mobius Video Pavilion" which counts as one of the earliest video festivals, predating by one year the “Video Art” exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

In 1974 Sony introduced the AV-8650 reel player/recorder half-inch color and b&w production and editing. and in 1975 the home videocassette recorder Betamax, which greatly improved quality, price and friendliness, and popularized the encased cassette format.

The Ant Farm collective produced the videos “Media Burn” and “The Eternal Frame” in 1975, conceived as agitprop guerrilla television.

The Bay Area even stole a bit of Hollywood's limelight in 1971 when film producer George Lucas opened Lucasfilm in San Francisco, a production company that went on to create "American Graffiti" (1973), "Star Wars" (1977) and "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981).

The San Francisco Art Institute established a film department in 1969, thanks to Larry Jordan. The faculty of 1970 included James Broughton, the former Beat poet, and Gunvor Nelson, born in Sweden and graduated from Mills College. George Kuchar, the prophet of lo-fi cinema, moved from New York in 1971 to join the faculty.

Dance remained one of the top arts of the Bay Area. Merce Cunningham's alumna Margaret Jenkins moved from New York to San Francisco and in 1973 started her dance company and in 1974 opened the Bryant Street Studio which soon became a prestigious venue for underground performance art. In 1976, the Oberlin Dance Collective, founded in 1971 by Brenda Way, moved from Oberlin (Ohio) to San Francisco.

It wasn't only conceptual art that was seeking to redefine the art object. Both the artist's book and mail art (made possible by the rise of mimeography, offset printing and xerography) contributed to establish new art forms.

The San Francisco mail artists Anna Banana and Bill Gaglione launched in January 1974 Vile Magazine, a parody of General Idea's mail-art File Magazine. The cover of their first issue had Monte Cazazza tearing out his heart and a later cover had Jimmy DeSana naked hanging himself, both proto-punks.

Judith Hoffberg, a Los Angeles art librarian, started in 1978 a newsletter titled "Umbrella" about the growing scene of artist's books and mail art. In February 1978 she and Joan Hugo organized an exhibition of artist's books and mail art at Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA): "Artwords & Bookworks". It included "As No Storm, or, the Any Port" (1975) by Johanna Drucker (the future philosopher and art historian), "F of x - Containing Information Necessary to the Solution of the Dilemma of the Three Gods" (1977) by Theodore Svenningsen (another future philosopher) and "Heavenly Bodies" (1977) by Mark Lere (the future installation artist).

Johanna Drucker, still a student at UC Berkeley, made highly conceptual artist's books such as "Experience of the Medium" (1978) that collects etchings and iterative commentary on their making.

The "underground comix" movement continued to prosper, but now the reference points were the printing shops. Originally, in 1965, Don and Alice Schenker had opened the Print Mint in Berkeley to print distributed the psychedelic posters created for music events. In 1968 Bob and Peggy Rita convinced them to become a publisher of underground comics. Don Schencker in person edited "Yellow Dog" (1968) and the Print Mint printed comics like George Metzger's "Moondog" (1969). In 1969 Gilbert Shelton and three hippie friends launched another distributor of underground comics: Rip Off Press, based in San Francisco. During those times underground comics proliferated: Bill Griffith's strip "Young Lust" (1970), that mocked sexual taboos, Roger Brand's magazine "Real Pulp Comics" (1970), that promoted the burgeoning scene, Trina Robbins' "It Ain't Me Babe Comix" (1970), the first all-women comic book, Dan O'Neill's collective Air Pirates (1971), Gilbert Shelton's "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers" (1971), Justin Considine's "Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary" (1972), etc. In 1975 New York cartoonists, namely Bill Griffith, who had arrived in 1970, and Art Spiegelman, who had arrived in 1971, started the influential magazine Arcade, but Spiegelman soon moved back to New York (where he would create the graphic novel "Maus" in 1980 and at the same time launch the magazine RAW, styled after Arcade). A byproduct of the conceptual art movement was that technology, and computers in particular, no longer appeared threatening to artists but instead came to be seen by artists as practical and creative tools.

In 1969 the physicist Frank Oppenheimer opened the San Francisco Exploratorium at the Palace of Fine Arts. Its first show was "Cybernetic Serendipity", an exhibition of computer art that Jasia Reichardt had organized the previous year at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

In 1973 British painter Harold Cohen joined Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab to build AARON, a program capable of making art, thus creating an artistic equivalent of the Turing test: can a machine be said to be a good artist if the experts appreciate its art? The project would continue for several decades.

In 1975 John Chowning founded Stanford's laboratory for computer music, later renamed Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).

In 1975 Los Angeles native David Em, who had moved to San Francisco, started creating digital pictures at Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), thus pioneering digital art, while collaborating with computer scientist Alvy Ray Smith (a future co-founder of Pixar). In 1977 he was selected as an artist-in-residence at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) where he created, the precursors of virtual reality.

Such fluid crossovers among disciplines helped give rise to the emerging field of “intermedia.”

Paul DeMarinis, who had graduated in electronic music from Mills College in 1973, collaborated with Jim Pomeroy on the performance "A Byte at the Opera" (1977) and then created computer-mediated audio-visual interactive installations and digital sound sculptures such as "Sounds and the Shadows of Sounds" (1979).

Another pioneer of interactive computer music was sound engineer and electronic instrument builder David Behrman, hired in 1975 by Mills College to direct its Center for Contemporary Music at a time when microcomputers were becoming cheap, whose "Cloud Music" (1978) was generated by digital machines based on the light in the sky, and whose "On The Other Ocean" (1977) was a collective improvisation of humans and computer, each reacting to the other.

Mills College became the epicenter of computer music experimentation. The independent tinkerer Jim Horton, who had already built self-playing electronic machines for all-night concerts, in 1977 had the idea of a microcomputer network band, initially the trio of Horton and Behrman's students John Bischoff and Rich Gold. Behrman joined in November 1978 and they became the League of Automatic Music Composers, each armed with a microcomputer (the KIM-1), staging live performances (never pre-recorded) of machines interacting with each other utilizing the method of "On The Other Ocean". Tim Perks joined in 1980 after Gold and Behrman had left, but in 1983 Horton's rheumatoid arthritis put an end to their shows.

La Mamelle helped to stage the first ever real-time interactive long-distance artist collaboration: "Send/Receive Satellite Network", organized in September 1977 by New York underground magazine editor Liza Bear and neon-light sculptor Keith Sonnier. Artists in a NASA laboratory of Mountain View (Terry Fox, Sharon Grace, Carl Loeffler, Richard Lowenberg, Alan Scarritt and dancer Margaret Fisher) interacted live with artists in a Lower Manhattan studio. For example, Margaret Fisher danced "with" Nancy Lewis via satellite.

Richard Lowenberg was an artist-engineer of New York's Experiments in Art and Technology collective who had relocated to the Bay Area in 1973 and was working on interspecies communication and collaboration, notably with dolphins and apes.

Lloyd Cross was a physicist who in Michigan had worked on lasers and holograms, and (in 1970) organized the first exhibition of holographic art (at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills). In 1971 he moved to San Francisco and founded the San Francisco Holography School in the basement of a warehouse known as Project One that also worked as a hippie commune. There he invented the "integral hologram" that combines holography with cinematography and creates moving three-dimensional images (a holographic film). In 1976 Simone Forti (now based in New York) worked with Cross to develop an innovative technique of holographic dance pieces, such as "Striding/Crawling" (1977). These "movement holograms" were first exhibited in 1978 at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York.