Hunter Cross '03, B.A. Art
How does he do it? And with only 24 hours in a day? We're talking about Hunter Cross, musician, artist, writer, producer, software designer, programmer, product designer, and budding beekeeper—among other things.
Let's start with the basics. Hunter grew up in Austin, Texas, where he had "a pretty decent band for a while." Influenced by his parents' idyllic description of their own small, liberal arts college experience at Austin College and the desire to stay close to his music friends, Hunter says "Trinity seemed like a smart choice." And so it was.
"It was so interesting to attend Trinity while the Internet ideas and businesses that seem commonplace today were being prototyped," he says. "I remember being so excited to have wired Ethernet." An art major, who had never taken art in high school and had a "very low understanding of what a contemporary artist's role could be and what form that engagement with society could take," Hunter found Trinity's art and art history department an "amazingly empathetic and rigorous critical environment that I just fell in love with." He cites professors Liz Ward and Trish Simonite for being helpful as mentors and pointing him to many interesting cultural ideas. "I am forever in their debt," he says. Among Hunter's memorable experiences, listening to professor Charles Talbot "describing sexual truths and historical backdrop encoded into a Renaissance painting" ranks among the top.
Hunter remembers San Antonio as a "huge cultural swirl of First Fridays, Finesilver, and ArtPace" and exuberantly embraced the opportunities Trinity offered. He loved being able to use analog synthesizers in the music department as part of a music composition class where he built a computer poetry generator in C. "It barely worked," he laughs, "but in fact, some of the stuff it wrote was actually kind of great." As an art major he also loved being able to take a computer science course and is pleased that his courses on world religions and Middle East history still provide "interesting points of reference in everyday life."
After graduation, Hunter spent a year working with REAL Software, Inc. before venturing out as a solo web developer, finding jobs through Craigslist. As his client's projects grew in scale, he founded Ponticlaro, Inc., an independent software consultancy, in 2006 and bootstrapped his way up without any outside investment. With offices in New York City and Austin, the firm's clients include World Wildlife Fund, Columbia University, Pentagram Design, and Helmut Lang, along with other clients across the country. In one recent project, he helped produce a Yoko Ono digital artwork with custom iPad software for The Contemporary Austin—the city's community art museum.
In addition to the fact that his company has helped many organizations interact with their audiences online, Hunter is proud of how his Geode, 2014 turned out and how much it means to the Austin neighborhood where it is sited. His first public commission and the product of five years work with the city, Geode, 2014 turns on every night around dusk and pulses throughout the night. "One kid told me it reminded him of the save point on a video game, and I thought 'he gets it.'"
While Hunter plans to continue working with Ponticlaro on content, design, frontend, backend, and cloud services for discriminating clients, he still foresees lots of avenues to explore. For starters: learning about script writing and film production; applying for more public art commissions; spending more time in Japan, Switzerland, Italy, and Sardinia; seeing SNL live; and writing for SNL. He'd also like to serve on an "effective" Board of Directors to learn more about organizational leadership and is "very hopeful that by this time next year I'll have my beehive buzzing."
You can contact Hunter at hunter@huntercross.com
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