Craig Hickman's imagination and whimsy have taken him to the top of the computer art world

ALMOST 20 YEARS AGO, in a basement room at Evergreen State College in Olympia, a young photographer named Craig Hickman was drawn, his curiosity fired, to the clatter of a roomful of teletype machines. A friend told him they were terminals for the school's computer. A computer? he thought. One you can actually use? That explosive moment provided the answer to a question Hickman never realized he had. "I've just literally never been the same since," Hickman says. "I've always loved making the computer do things in the real world."

And such odd things, too. A program that, for no particular reason, destroys perfectly good English. A home burglar alarm. A kids' drawing program that won the world over by sheer delightfulness. Hickman's latest production, a CD-ROM titled "The Box in the Basement," is an artistic square peg without even a round pigeon hole it can call home. It is, in other words, a pioneering artwork in search of a genre. That much might be said about Hickman himself, a perceptive, imaginative tinkerer whose originality and quiet humor have let some oxygen into the airless worlds of fine art and computers. An artistic friend says Hickman has "the nerve to ask the right questions." From the other side of the brain, a software producer calls him "an alchemist."

A quiet man with a boyish face and curly dark hair turning gray, Hickman, 48, teaches multimedia and fine arts at the University of Oregon. He is one of the founders of Blue Sky Gallery, a photography gallery in Portland for more than 20 years. He may be best known in the computer world, though, as the author of Kid Pix, an extremely successful computer drawing program he designed, at first, solely for his son Ben. To the surprise of few who have played with it, Kid Pix, which later became a commercial release, has won almost every software award for which it was eligible. Unlike practically any other "educational" software on the market, it's been reviewed favorably in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic magazine and Newsweek. Hickman, who has made enough money off Kid Pix that he could retire any time, never even sent the program to a publisher. But a friend of a friend of a colleague of a friend, more or less, did, and the fledgling program landed in the hands of Leslie Wilson, then a young product manager for the software giant Broderbund.

"I have an art background," said Wilson, who now helps design Web pages for Disney. "At the time I was very flamboyant about my bohemian background. My boss at the time walked in, looked at me, said, 'Why not?', and gave me Craig's program. I had so much fun with it. I just adored it." The public adored it, too. "It went out and sold so well that in a month we raised the price $10 a box," Wilson said. "Which is unheard of." "Graphically he has a way to communicate things very simply to people," she said. "Iconography' might be a term for it. He does very clean work, pristine visual work, and he keeps a kind of whimsical humor to it all. A lot of it is the magic of an artist. He is an alchemist."

The characters featured in "The Box in the Basement" come with first names only: Terry, Ann, Chris, Kay. In Hickman's old black and white photos, they often look like a bunch of '70s-style Merry Pranksters with cameras, beards and sun dresses, youthfully aware of their collective talent and energy. On the surface simply a well displayed collection of more than 500 photos from the files of a mid-career artistic photographer, "The Box" manages to combine aspects of family album and artistic photo show, delightful computer diversion and evocative story telling. "I'm not sure I know what it is, either," Hickman said. "It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It was something I wanted to do. It's personal in nature. Some people see it that way. I see it in the category of autobiography."

Hickman was born in Klamath Falls. His father, a tinkerer too, worked in the timber industry as an expert on wood drying. By the time Craig was in second grade, the family had moved to Portland. At Cleveland High School - he graduated in 1967 - young Craig was sure he wanted to be a scientist. That's how he met one of his best friends, Terry Toedtemeier.

Toedtemeier, now curator of photography at the Portland Art Museum, shows up early in "The Box." In one picture, he is shown taking a picture of Hickman taking his picture. In another, he fakes a motorcycle accident, fake blood flowing from his head onto the sidewalk. "Craig's father was always inventing different things," Toedtemeier recalled. "Whenever I'd go up to visit Craig at his parents' home there was always an element of invention - low tech but surprisingly interesting things." The two friends were nerds together before nerds were cool. Toedtemeier recalled Hickman heading home from school one day on the bus with leaky vials of hydrochloric and sulfuric acid in his raincoat pockets. "The next day he showed up at school in a raincoat with no pockets," he said. "Just two holes."

Like his father, he tinkered. He bought infrared film and an infrared filter from Kodak so he could take nighttime flash pictures without people seeing the flash. The first roll of film came back blank, Toedtemeier said, but Hickman was not deterred. "He figured out it had to be something wrong with the filter," he said. "Now Kodak never gets anything wrong, but Craig was right - they had somehow sent a filter that was completely opaque." Every friend describes Hickman's projects: Taking eclipse pictures by loading photographic paper into a box camera. Teaching himself color film processing. Playing with automatic print machines to change the look of prints. "I just love the way he thinks," Toedtemeier said. "The kind of ironies he gets into. His curiosity is wonderful to play with. There was always something interesting and new he was thinking about."

A few years after graduating from Portland State University, where he majored in political science, Hickman took a job as an adjunct photography instructor at the new Evergreen State College in Olympia. Chris Rauschenberg - that's "Chris" in "The Box" - is the son of world famous artist Robert Rauschenberg and a professional photographer in Portland. He was one of two students on the committee that hired Hickman at Evergreen. The choice had come down to Hickman and one other candidate, Rauschenberg recalls. The other photographer had incredible technique. Hickman had flair. "All the technical people wanted this other guy," Rauschenberg said. "But Craig's pictures were just so wonderful." At Evergreen, Hickman found himself immersed in a creative community of restless students and faculty who talked, drank, shot pictures and partied together. Although he was a photographer, he spent more time hanging out with art students.

After that experience with the teletype machines, he began playing incessantly with computers, and bought his first home computer, an Atari 400, by about 1980. Right off, he tried to figure out how to get photographic images onto the Atari's low resolution computer screen. Tinkering with the computer's wiring, he had discovered that the game paddles were simple electronic resistors. So he wired a little Radio Shack photo cell into the game paddle port and mounted it on a typewriter carriage, where it could run across and down a sheet of paper, measuring the relative darkness and light of an illustration. "It worked!" Rauschenberg said. "And even if it hadn't worked, it would have been as good. What's great is, he thought of it. The fact it worked is the cherry on the whipped cream."

Hickman wrote simple computer games and even turned his Atari into a burglar alarm when there had been a prowler near his and Kay's house in Olympia. It worked, too, alerting the household every time wind rustled the bushes outside his window. "He has the nerve to ask the right questions," Rauschenberg said. "So many people who could figure out the answer don't ever think to ask the question." All of Hickman's programming is self-taught. He learned by doing, following his imagination and perfectionist drive. The old dictum that easy writing makes hard reading applies especially to software, and Hickman has been known to spend a week or more polishing the operation of a single command.

"Kid Pix was aimed at children," he said. "But everything had to be fun for me, too." Hickman's software style runs directly counter to the commercial mainstream, which in recent years has produced monstrous, feature-laden programs that try to be all things to all customers. "My design philosophy is more akin to E.B. White: Try to reduce everything down to its essential elements. Just whatever you need to get the job done. If in doubt, take it out."

In 1984, Hickman came to the UO as an associate professor, teaching computer graphics, photography and visual design. That last job jump brought him into midlife, the kind of adulthood where students are no longer contemporaries but, rather, remind you of your own children. He no longer is surrounded every day by intense friends but rather by his family: his wife, Kay Kruger, a Spanish scholar; and their two young sons. In a well-appointed but modest Eugene home, Hickman hangs out in an attic workroom that features three Macintosh computers and two Windows PCs, all networked together, along with a color printer, a slide scanner, a flatbed scanner, a drive for writing CD-ROM disks and a television set and hi-fi system.

There he continues to play. A recent program he's written takes good English prose and turns it into illiterate drivel. One button changes the wording, another mangles spelling. You can introduce common typos. Why? "It's totally useless," he says with a smile. He's bought himself a robot kit. "Problem is, I'm a menace with a soldering iron," he laments. The future remains happily unknown. Hickman doesn't expect another Kid Pix. "I don't know that I could write software that could do that again, attain that level of success," he says. Though he could afford to retire, and certainly could make more money working for a private software company, Hickman has stayed at the UO.

"I ask myself that question," he says. "But I enjoy interacting with students. And I see people in industry, and they're working in a cubicle. What a job I have, where I get to invent things ...."

June 22, 1997