About

Last updated: June 30, 2026

RAKMAN (Regan A. King) has spent more than three decades treating art and inquiry as the same practice. He is, by training and instinct, a researcher who happens to think in images, networks, and systems — and an artist who happens to think in data.

His path through Hamburg's experimental media scene began with a German Diplom in Graphic Design and Publication Media from the School of Fine Arts, Department of Visual Communications, completed with honors in 1996. The formal degree only frames a much earlier commitment, though: in 1990, RAKMAN co-founded the Telematic Workgroup, a Hamburg-based collective that built the technical bridge between artistic concept and the still-nascent public networks of the early internet. The group's work — performance, hypertext, and early online collaboration — was less concerned with finished artworks than with asking what happens to encounter, authorship, and meaning once they are routed through a network. That question has not really left him since.

Through the 1990s, RAKMAN worked on both sides of the studio-and-server divide. As Conference Co-Editor and Project Mentor for the Symposium Editorial Board at Hamburg's Cultural Ministry, he helped lecturers translate academic concepts into electronic network media — including the 1995 exhibition "X-Change Space" with theorist Gregory Ulmer at Interface 3. As a Web Applications Developer at Digital World GmbH, he concepted and programmed "Storyline," an early Java-based collaborative "treefiction" writing system. He illustrated for international publishers, built an online film catalog and an Internet-access proposal for the Appalshop media collective in rural Kentucky, and helped artists at Cologne's GVOON collective realize "Hypertextree," a collaborative web application supporting network artists including Heiko Idensen, Holger Czukay, and Arthur Schmidt. His telematic performance with a silk moth larva — staged simultaneously in Kentucky and at the Baltic Interface Net conference in Hamburg — is exactly the kind of project that resists easy categorization as either art or experiment, which was always the point.

That refusal to separate the two has shaped everything since. As Technical Director and co-owner of Cake Farm for over two decades, he ran the technical and quality-assurance backbone of a design studio while teaching multimedia authoring and scripting at UC Davis Extension. Today, as a digital strategist and equitable data and AI practitioner working at the State of California, he applies the same instinct at public scale — building user-journey analytics and most recently informing the state's digital recovery effort for the 2025 LA fires as the lead steward of resident feedback streams, as a means to improve government systems by listening carefully to what survivors need.

That close, daily contact with how institutions collect and route people's data has sharpened rather than dulled his original Hamburg-era questions. RAKMAN is an outspoken advocate for data sovereignty — the principle that people should retain meaningful ownership and control over the data systems generate about them — and for conviviality in the design of new communication tools: the idea, with roots in Ivan Illich's work, that technology should expand a person's capacity to act and connect rather than quietly substitute for it. He brings both commitments to bear wherever he works, treating them not as constraints on good design but as part of what good design is for.

RAKMAN sees his current and historical work as variations on a single method: art as research, and research as a form of care. Whether the medium is a 1990s hypertext experiment, a state government's resident-facing service, or a gallery archive, the underlying discipline is the same — build the structure carefully enough that whatever passes through it can be witnessed honestly.

FORTHCOMING EXHIBITION

Bad(ende) (tentative title) — vernissage Fall 2026, Galerie M|R, Hamburg, Germany

RAKMAN's first exhibition for Galerie M|R takes its title from a pun on Mir Ali Hassanzadeh Khedmatkar's mixed-media painting Badende ("Bathers"), the work the show is built around. Read as Bad Ende ("bad ending") turned toward its opposite, the exhibition functions as a kind of memorandum of understanding between the two artists — Mir Ali Hassanzadeh Khedmatkar, born in Tehran, and the U.S.-based RAKMAN — opening a new chapter in a friendship that began thirty years ago in Hamburg with their collaborative story "The Man from Isfahan," a retelling of the One Thousand and One Nights tale of the ruined man who dreamed his fortune lay in a distant city, only to find it buried at home all along — relocated, in their telling, from Baghdad and Cairo to Isfahan, Iran's historical capital.

An accompanying speaker series sets three subjects against one another: the aesthetic "cool" of Persian culinary tradition, the zero-sum "hot" politics of America-First-style deal-making, and what both leave behind in the culture of the public pool, in an age of Gulf Futurism and surveillance kleptocracy. Later exhibitions in the series will turn to the universal language of art, art as research, and experimentation.

ART EXHIBITS & EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA

Bad(ende) (tentative title), Galerie M|R, Hamburg, Germany — vernissage Fall 2026, forthcoming
Telematic Performance, Baltic Interface Net (BIN), Hamburg, Germany, 1997 — performed with Antheraea Polyphemus (silk moth) larva between Kentucky, U.S. and the BIN conference in Hamburg
"X-Change Space" with Gregory Ulmer, Interface 3, Hamburg, Germany, 1995
"Odyssee," artistic exploratory gaming between Hamburg, Germany and Pointes, France, 1995
"LivingRooms," HyperKult III Symposium for Digital Media, Lüneburg, Germany, 1993
"Aha!Connect," Hamburg Mediale, Hamburg, Germany, 1993
"Das Rauschen der Apparate," experimental TV production for Northern German Television (NDR), 1992
Telematic Workgroup, co-founder, Hamburg, Germany, 1990 — providing the technical bridge between artistic concept and electronic media for public exploration of networks during the 1990s at the School of Fine Arts, Hamburg

GALLERY EXPERIENCE

Galerie Ascan Crone, Hamburg / Berlin — assistant
Artist's Quarter Gallery, Fresno — visitor services
Fresno Art Museum (Fresno City College, "Gallery Practice" special studies 47)

RECOGNITION & AWARDS

Silver Quill Award of Merit, International Association of Business Communicators, U.S. District One, 2001 — for "yourOTS" Output Technology Solutions company overview, interactive CD-ROM
Silver Award for Excellence in Creative, Effective Advertising, Sacramento Advertising Club, 1998 — for Anderson Solone Inc. corporate website
Silver Award for Excellence in Creative, Effective Advertising, Sacramento Advertising Club, 1998 — for Level One Focus 2X interactive CD-ROM

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

March 2022 – Present

Website Performance Analyst State of California Office of Data and Innovation

CalInnovate | User Research, Sacramento

Supports user-centered service designers with quantitative user journey data insights across California State departments. Develops measures and data analytics for program accountability reporting; researches Web 3 / Digital ID service delivery paradigms. Codes Python and JavaScript for data analysis, A/B testing, and card sort processing in UXR and information architecture work. Supported digital disaster recovery for the 2025 LA Fires — survivor research, user journey analytics, and LLM-summarized page feedback across 19 weeks of research reporting to the Governor's office.

September 2000 – February 2022

Technical Director / Co-owner Cake Farm

Rancho Cordova

Co-founded Cake Farm, a digital design and development studio. Managed IT infrastructure, project logistics, technical programming, and QA for all client projects. Delivered SEO, web design and development (Drupal, WordPress, React, and other platforms), CD-ROM/DVD-ROM production, and motion graphics for electronic sales and product presentations.

July 2000 – October 2002

Instructor, Multimedia UC Davis Extension

Sacramento

Taught nightly and intensive block courses for the multimedia certificate program: Multimedia Fundamentals, Multimedia Authoring and Scripting, Multimedia on the Web, and Multimedia Practicum.

August 1997 – August 2000

New Media Manager Anderson Solone Inc.

Rancho Cordova

Established and led the New Media department. Drove interactive strategy for Intel 810-840 animated Chipset demonstrations on hybrid OEM CD-ROMs. Managed a core team of four web developers and two multimedia producers. Conducted information architecture and technology needs assessments, including for the Level One Communications website and Intel SCG sales intranet/Internet knowledge base.

May 1996 – July 1997

Freelance Illustrator / Web Consultant & Programmer

Advised a CPB grant concept for community Internet at Appalshop, Whitesburg, KY, and developed the organization's website and online film catalog. Illustrated a children's English workbook, Take Action!, published by Klett Publishing, Stuttgart, Germany. Created "Hypertextree," a collaborative web application for GVOON (Artist Collaborative), Cologne, Germany, supporting network artists Heiko Idensen, Holger Czukay, Arthur Schmidt, and others. Developed utilities for Gruner+Jahr's "Stern Business Online," Hamburg, Germany.

September 1995 – April 1997

Web Applications Developer Digital World GmbH

Hamburg, Germany

Concepted and programmed the Java "Storyline" collaborative "treefiction" writing system. Provided technical support for editorial and design staff on web projects for clients including EMI, Lufthansa, and Stern Magazine.

1995

Conference Co-Editor / Project Mentor for Presenters Symposium Editorial Board

Cultural Ministry of Hamburg

Assisted lecturers in applying academic concepts to electronic network media; promoted the School of Fine Arts, Visual Communications department, as a technology innovator in Hamburg.

EDUCATION

German Diplom in Graphic Design / Publication Media (graduated with honors), School of Fine Arts, Department of Visual Communications, Hamburg, Germany, 1996

RECENT TRAINING

Stanford Ethics, Technology and Public Policy — Fall 2025
Snowflake Data Analyst — April 2024
Salesforce Certified Administrator (SCA) — August 2023
MIT Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy — July 2019

MEDIA

Cited in Interface 3: Labile Ordnungen (Fragile Order), Klaus Peter Dencker (ed.), Cultural Ministry, Hamburg, 1997 — for collaborative hypertext strategy and technical programming with Kurd Alsleben, Heiko Idensen, Matthias Lehnhardt, Gregory Ulmer, and others.
Cited in Intimately Public: A Review of the Telematic Workgroup by Carolyn Guyer. Archived version