Karl X Hauser was born in Michigan City, on a small farm in northwest Indiana. He played in the dirt under the family's trailer home, drew pictures, and learned to swim in Lake Michigan. His mother, a self taught artist who invented and painted "blue roses", encouraged him to draw as it didn't have the messy potential of paint.
Later, he worked for the railroad as a track laborer in order to save money for art school. He attended the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis where he studied sculpture and had his first introduction to video art. Soon after, he received his MFA in video and performance art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
While attending Herron he learned to make neon signs, which provided a livelihood as well as a medium for art. His early career was filled with experimentation - fronting a punk rock band, performance and video art, neon art, digital art, but throughout, drawing and the desire to make objects has been consistent.
“Everything starts with drawing. It causes me to think differently. Drawing lets me have fluid thoughts, internal dialogues, and teaches me fearlessness. I could stop at the drawing, but drawing opens conceptual possibilities for collage and sculpture, which are by contrast deliberate acts connecting me to the outside world. In the 90's, my sculpture and drawing didn't overlap much. Now, the drawings inject characters and sets into my sculpture which also incorporates castings of found materials, cut up and reassembled. Likewise my collages incorporate elements from my drawings and my photography, along with other found sources close to home.”