Intent creates the future

Rising Gods

Steven’s Rising Gods series imagines figures emerging from natural forces. Fiery colors and cool blues set creation and turbulence against calm. The 2024 collection brings photomontage, generative imagery and physical layering together, extending that tension from the depicted scene into the viewer’s perception.

Love of Nature

Steven places luminous words inside forest scenes, making an expression of love part of the landscape itself. Light, shadow and reflections draw the eye between the trees, the lettering and the imagined space around them. The 2024 work combines photomontage, generative imagery and physical layering.

Taffy Stream

Steven made Love of Nature #3 for Taffy Stream in Portland in 2024. The project’s imagery moves between a yellow Love composition and a montage of flowing color. The studies below develop lettering, circles, ocean forms and ribbons into different ways of organizing the image.

Astro Cats

AstroKittens is a proposal by Steven Ochs / Goose Cube Studio for the Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon. Twenty compositions place kittens among luminous rings, planets, gold curls and fields of color.

The Book of Houses

After the ending of Pudding Heroes: The Rising Child, the printed story presents The Book of Houses as “Volume 1 / A Guide to Surviving AI.” Its in-world author is Sterling Geisel. The cover shown here appears inside the novel on printed page 304, with Sterling Geisel named as its in-world author.

The Mind Lottery

The Mind Lottery is simple: you write a thought, draw a symbol that represents it. Then using your imagination, you place it in front of me in my meditation space, where I will read it and write it here.

Your thought and drawing stay in this browser. Compare shapes, then decide what the resemblance means to you.

SteamPotVille

Steven wrote and illustrated SteamPotVille under the author name Steve Ouch. An independent edition was circulating by early 2009, followed by the Running Press edition in 2010. The book brings improbable animals, familiar objects and impossible structures together in a town that rewards looking closely.

ArtFaceOff

Steven developed ArtFaceOff as an online art community combining artist portfolios, galleries, curator connections and voting-based contests. The project grew from his interest in making the audience an active participant in art. His principles statement, dated March 19, 2007, describes a community in which artists, curators and viewers help shape what receives attention.

PicThread

PicThread’s interface concept brings people together to make collaborative collages. The annotated design board follows a participant from starting a thread and inviting members through taking a photo, scaling and rotating it, and posting the result. Other screens explore profiles, groups, chat and discovery.

WWPD.ai with PSU

What Would Portland Do.ai, also called Generative Agent Moment Experience, explores how a person can participate in a situation with AI characters. A participant introduces a situation or intention; characters respond through their different personas. The project favors short interactive moments and one-to-one conversations over watching a long simulation unfold. The map and spatial layout below show the visual world developed around that idea.

Commissions

Steven’s commissioned work ranges from individual layered artworks to architectural installations and public experiences. His studio approach is to develop art in relation to its setting and the people who will encounter it. The dated record below brings together eight commissions from 2012–2024.

Historical artwork

Photomontage continued through exhibitions in Seattle, Aspen, Dublin and Newberg. The historical portfolio below brings together Steven’s selected montages, object compositions, drawings and installation photographs.

Bush Dinar

Steven used Iraqi dinar as a surface for political collage, describing the work in his artist history as a protest against bombing. The use of currency brought the political image onto an object already tied to the place and its everyday life. Bush Dinar was exhibited at Everett Station Gallery in Portland, Oregon, in 2006.

Amazon installations

D1N translated campus and neighborhood information into an illustrated, animated lobby experience. A location-based comic-book interface brought together navigation, transit arrivals and nearby events, with ways to carry information from the screen to a phone.

Architectural Sociability

Architectural Sociability as a Strategy to Drive Technology Integrations into Architectural Structures and Smart Environments is a 2012 article by Steven W. Ochs in the International Journal of Architectural Computing, volume 10, issue 2, pages 301–317. The work considers social connection, digital information and technology within architectural structures.

Toll Bench Protocol

Toll Bench: Can AI Systems Deliver Real-World Human Wants? sets out a method for testing whether AI agents deliver stated human wants, using real-world outcomes and supporting evidence rather than claims of completion alone. The PDF protocol is version 1.7, dated October 6, 2026, at 39 pages. The HTML presentation includes amendments through October 17, 2026. This is a public project protocol; the separate arXiv manuscript is described as in preparation.

The Want-Have Collapse

Steven Ochs’s speculative founding thesis considers the gap between what people want and what they can actually have. It is a distinct work from the Toll Bench methodological protocol, though both concern real human wants and their delivery.