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!

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.