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.

This week marks twenty years since publishing my music video for Grandaddy’s song “Jed’s Other Poem”—a musical elegy for a deceased robot character. What began as a renegade fan video would eventually become embraced by the band and their label, V2 Records.

It feels like a lifetime ago; an entirely different online landscape. Before smart phones existed. Before social media took over. In honor of the anniversary I spruced up my old description of the project with more photos, screen grabs, and personal anecdotes. I’ve even caved and added the Jed source code to GitHub. Also timely: Grandaddy is currently on tour in the US in celebration of the 25th anniversary of their breakthrough album, The Sophtware Slump. Catch ’em while you can!