Under the influence of artists like Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, and Tony Smith, he left Texas in 1968 and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.
[3] He disliked the rigid separations between media maintained by most art schools and referred to himself as a "general practitioner"[4] and is now considered a pioneer in the field of new media art, developing an anti-spectacular, witty aesthetic that fed on his lifelong interest in popular mechanics, informal science experiments, garage invention, and home-brewed technology.
"[5] Two of his best-known pieces of the mid 1970s, Mozart's Moog and Fear Elites, used music-box mechanisms to raise questions about the role of the human performer in an era of increasingly automated and synthetic forms of music production.
He also created a pair of works, Composition in Deep/Light at the Opera and Clear Bulbs Cast Sharp Shadows, based on 3D technology of the period and requiring anaglyphic (red-green) glasses for viewing.
In 1999, on the occasion of New Langton Arts's 25th anniversary, the space organized a posthumous Jim Pomeroy retrospective, catalogue, and website.
Most famously, for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's influential 1980 exhibition of conceptual and performance art entitled “Space/Time/Sound–1970’s: A Decade in the Bay Area", Pomeroy contributed a piece entitled Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog, consisting of his scathing article “Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog” (which had been commissioned by the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art two years earlier), together with enlarged reproductions of his correspondence with exhibition curator Suzanne Foley pursuing further reflections on the subject.