Today, Google has announced “Suncatcher”—its plan for a space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system. Advanced Projects Group collaborated with Google’s Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi) team to create the physically accurate interactive visualizations that helped green-light the project internally.

Advanced Projects Group—led by myself (Stewart Smith) and Robert Gerard Pietrusko—worked directly with Pi co-founder Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Pi Senior Director Travis Beals, and their incredibly talented colleagues to create materials for pitching “Suncatcher” to Google / Alphabet executives—including Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Our effort was a success.

Our short film, “Planetary Vision”, is on view at the Palazzo Diedo in the exhibition “The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology”—part of the 2025 Venice Biennale. Director Peter Galison narrates this meditation on the creation of an Earth-scale radio telescope to observe unimaginably distant blackholes.

Peter Galison, Robert Gerard Pietrusko, and myself have collaborated on a short film specifically for the Venice Biennale that meditates on the coordination of multiple radio telescopes around the world to create an Earth-sized “camera”—a transformation of our planet into an instrument for “seeing” far beyond our own Milky Way galaxy. Our film serves as a preview for our entry in the inaugural edition of the interactive Antikythera journal, an MIT Press publication.