Post»More. Old. Additions.

Posted by Steve Or Steven Read on Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 1:36 PM in the News & Stuff section

Have continued to invest time this year to upload older projects and still have many to add, coming soon are biology experiments and paintings. For some reason I've found the process to be almost as enjoyable as making new. But the joys of documentation and cleanup are waning... planning lots of new work for 2010. Here are some of those old newbies:

This series from late 2005 was cheap, fun, and slightly mischievous. I was taking a dark room photography course at the time, and after obediently completing a few quasi-predictable pinhole and 35mm projects, I got bored with dark rooms and so for the final assignment I started hitting eBay for weird toy digital cameras like the Casio WQV-1 wrist watch camera. With the deadline approaching, I decided the photos taken with it were only 'OK' so I reduced the already minimalist b/w photos to 1 shade each and had them printed up through the Online Walgreens Photo Center as described on the project page. Upon displaying these beautiful photographic prints, carefully pinned to the wall in horizontal fashion, the curmudgeonly teacher threatened to fail me out of class, with the additional stern bonus warning "you will never make it in the gallery world". Well today I kindly retort with a *fart*.

 

Here was a Microsoft Windows software product that I singlehandedly designed, developed, marketed, sold, and supported in 1998-1999. The eccentrically named (but 8.3 compliant) ... Auc-Win!. I'd say it was a pretty good application with very few bugs and which sold reasonably well. It was designed to manage online auction transactions with features such as transaction staging, order/invoice printing, financial exporting, html ad generation, and such. At the time the auction platforms at eBay and Yahoo offered none of this functionality. When I started there were only a few 3rd-party competitors with similar products in the $20-$40 range, and so I undercut them all at $10. The most expensive (and cheesy) of these competitors was Blackstone Software who was later acquired by eBay. After a few upgrade releases of Auc-Win, I ended it for a variety of reasons, one of which being customer dissatisfaction of the visual designs. I had given the interfaces a colorful, legacy computer look because I was tired of that drab gray Window/GUI paradigm. It so happened that the market didn't appreciate my creativity, and I refused to listen to such whining. (this was before application skinning) Please note that today I'm an artist, not a software entrepreneur.

            

Scoured my hard drive and found a handful of digital experiments from 2005-2006. Was attempting to use creative and powerful software tools like Illustrator, Photoshop, Maya, Painter in an expressively lo-tech manner - thereby causing actual content (otherwise) to disappear.