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West Des Moines, Iowa, multimedia and computer artist Fred Truck (b. 1946) played a pivotal role in the burgeoning computer art world of the 1970s, was an early and vital participant in the Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN; 1986–1999), one of the first virtual artist communities, and has been active in the mail art network throughout his career. Truck is a sculptor, a photographer, and a creator of artist books, software, and virtual reality artwork.
Born in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, Truck graduated from Iowa Wesleyan College in 1969 with a B.A. and then briefly attended American University in Washington, D.C.. From the mid-1970s to mid-1980s he worked in the printing trade and attended printing school in Ankeny, Iowa, where he was able to print the books he had been writing and making. His work included the offset book Camping Out (1975), and George Maciunas, Fluxus and the Face of Time (1984), in which which used his own Jean Brown Ultrabold typeface.
Truck was a co-founder and systems engineer for the Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN), an artist-built virtual social network established in the early internet era before the development of web-based graphics through which artists communicated and performed in text-based graphics. Truck established a menu-driven structure that would allow easy access to ACEN content invented collectively by Truck and co-founders Carl Loeffler and Anna Couey. In the late 1980s to 1990s Truck developed ArtEngine, a stand-alone software application applying artificial intelligence to graphics, text analysis, and design. His software Bottega was an interactive CD-ROM developed for the Macintosh which allowed users to explore a digital artist's workshop and also introduced users to Analog Engine, a steam-powered visual analog of his ArtEngine software.
Truck is also known for his work with virtual reality and in 1993, with the assistance of programmers, built Labyrinth, a flight simulator based on Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine. The project took place at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Carl Loeffler.
In 1998 Truck created the fictitious Badge of Quality Corporation with Mr. Milk Bottle as it's public representative and himself as president and CEO of the corporation. In 2007 he was commissioned to build a 62" tall steel sculpture of Mr. Milk Bottle dissolving into nature.
Truck became interested in digital photography in 2005 and joined Flickr in 2009, where he continues to post his photographs. Truck is a pioneer in the use of stereographic projections and anaglyph images and describes his work as using digital processing to move his 2-D images into "a 3-D arena via anaglyph techniques, stereograms or 360 720 panoramas."