Remember methaphone?

It’s finally available and ships internationally! Just in time for a last-minute gift and New Year’s resolutions:

methaphone.com/buy

A much longer update on methaphone is overdue — but it’ll have to wait for another time. Until then: Happy holidays, with phone-free thoughts!

PS. If you’re new subscriber here, last year’s holiday post featured a Christmas album made from corporate terms & conditions. Exactly as festive and unhinged as it sounds.

Update June 2025:
methaphone has a new website and Eric wrote up methaphone’s origin story.

“Three things that will always get you through: Art, friendship, and nature.”
—Tilda Swinton on Fresh Air

Some time ago my friend Eric gifted me a lasting insight: making art can be an act of friendship. His advice was simple—“Make art for friends.” It’s an invitation to create for an audience of one or two … to label a package with a friend’s address long before the piece for them is finished.

Through more conversations with Eric, I learned that the phrase can also recombine—each version holding its own unique energy:

• Make art for friends

• Make art with friends

• Make friends with art

Thus I was all the more excited when Eric and I finally had the chance to make something together this month:

Methaphone

We carry our phones everywhere. It feels strange and unsettling when we can’t feel them. We twitch, worried we've lost something.

Methaphone looks like a simple acrylic slab—and it is. But it’s also a stand-in, a totem, and an alibi. It’s the first step on the road to freedom.

Take it instead of your phone. Let it ride along in you jacket or your jeans. If you’re anxious, rub the surface with your thumb. When you need to avert your gaze, it’s there for you to pull out and look through.

Opioid addicts have used methadone to help step down from dependency, and now you have this.

Buy the Methaphone

• Translucent by design
  Light and imagination pass through it uninterrupted

• Fully compatible with innate curiosity
  Optimized for your own agency and emerging ambition

• Do Not Disturb reimagined from the ground up
  Runs on the Eternally Unbothered OS

• Powered entirely by ambient light
  Display adjusts instantly. Dark mode is really dark.

We will make 80 methaphones — plus a few limited edition neon versions (see below). If they are wildly successful, we may make more.

Buy the Methaphone

I love the surprise and serendipity of songs that friends send me out of the blue. It’s my favorite way to discover new music.

I have a few “music friends” like this and I wondered what it would feel like to share this interaction with many people around the world … with people I don’t know … and where the only messages would be songs—a kind of universal exchange beyond language.

Say hello to Teddy. Teddy is a little buddy (in the shape of an app) who sends you music shared by other people. It’s like texting with a friend about songs … only now that friend might be anyone in the world.

Teddy is available via TestFlight for now:

• Step 1:
  Install TestFlight on your iPhone

• Step 2:
  Open this link to install Teddy via TestFlight

Like many of my projects, Teddy sits somewhere between social art and social product. It’s intentionally basic, small in scope and it certainly can’t mirror all aspects of a true music friend.

But still, it was a fun and refreshing exercise to design a tool through the lens of a personified buddy: Giving the tool a first name, giving it a voice, thinking about interactions not as navigation flows but as a back-and-forth between two conversation partners. I think we’ll see a lot more apps with first names in the future—and I’m excited about that.

A few more things about Teddy:

Where do the songs come from?
All songs are shared by real people from all around the world.

Does Teddy send the same songs to everyone?
No. Teddy chooses songs for you based on the feedback you give, so everyone's selection is different.

How often will Teddy send me songs?
Teddy regularly sends songs a few times a week. If you want Teddy to send you a song sooner, just share a song first—he'll reply shortly.

Do I need a music service subscription to use Teddy?
Right now Teddy only works with Spotify. You'll need an active Spotify account to listen to the songs Teddy sends you.

Does Teddy have siblings?
Not yet—but stay tuned.

Where does Teddy go on vacation?
Usually someplace quiet, with trees.

Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring different interfaces for creating images with AI. For one of these explorations, I gave myself a playful constraint: designing specifically for kids who can’t yet read or write. It would force me to move away from text-based inputs—while also emphasizing fun and joy (rather than “utility”).

The result became Zoodle, an app for making images about cute animals and their adventures. You select up to 4 pictogram stickers and the AI will go to work, creating a cheerful image … and a narrated story to go along with it.

In our own home, my partner and I quickly fell in love with many of Zoodle’s creations. I printed some of our favorites as postcards and thought, “These would make a great picture book,” imagining a stand-up desk calendar, but filled with adorable pictures on every page.

What started as a quick prototype soon snowballed into a custom print run in China (and more reasons for me to love Alibaba).

I sent the finished picture books to friends with young kids—many of whom had also tried the original app. The novelty of the digital version often wore off — but parents, to this day, keep texting me photos of their kids flipping through the physical book with big smiles.

Sometimes, the best app is no app—especially in a world that’s increasingly “non-tangible”.

Buy the Zoodle picture book

Get Zoodle for iPhone

I built a Chrome sidebar called TLDR that quickly summarizes webpages, YouTube videos and PDFs:

I first started working on this because I couldn’t find an extension (or new browser) that did webpage summaries well. I had assumed, after all this time of AI hype on every corner, that this basic problem was solved by now — but no existing tool I found was fast, cheap and simple. (Granted, that’s a tall order in any category.)

Enter TLDR. It’s a sidebar for Chrome that quickly summarizes webpages, YouTube videos and PDFs. And it works in 40 languages — meaning: you can read a webpage in French, for example, and instantly get its summary in English (or one of the other supported languages).

Add TLDR to Chrome

TLDR also seems to have cured my life-long tab overload problem. I would regularly average north of 800 open tabs (try not to judge, my laptop fan certainly did). Now, instead of queuing tabs “for later,” I skim them right away with TLDR, keeping only the very few* worth reading in full.

ps. If you like TLDR, you can help more people discover it by telling friends about it and leaving a review.

pps. Check out Spring Cleaning Week’s earlier post about Ice Cream Spoooons! 🥣

*I’m currently hovering at 62 tabs—huge improvement! A few of them:

• cruz-diez.com

• reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html

• robwalker.substack.com/?sort=top

• mood.site

• docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1j4rj883slFvh1zZLGedqQFM0wqCrHlIEPE62K0LkKak/mobilebasic

• x.com/damonxart/status/1908773644723249224

• archive.is/e9kva

The Spoooooon 🥣

I made an ice cream spoon. 1000 of them, in fact. Read the full story of my rabbit hole below—and buy a set if you’d like to experience the spoon’s surprising charm yourself.

Buy the Spoooon (Set of 4)

On a trip to London last year, I had dinner at a Mexican restaurant—the kind that has perfected the “Millennial siren call,” by which I mean just the right combination of catchphrases to make a Millennial’s wallet go bling (“Smoky Sonoran Hummus,” “Tres Leches Tiramisu”). Needless to say, I loved it.

The ice cream dessert came with a spoon—but not just any spoon, as I would soon discover.

Put the spoon in your mouth and an unexpected shape reveals itself. It’s flatter on top and much more curved on the bottom—my tongue was not prepared! Instantly, I was obsessed. In my many years on this earth, I’d never been surprised by the shape of a spoon in my mouth. Have you? But here it was: my black swan moment of ice cream utensils.

Back at my hotel, I had to know more. I started typing the restaurant’s name into Google: “Wahaca—” and the first autocomplete suggestion? “Spoon.” Thank you, internet — I was not crazy.

Moreover, the first results revealed that the restaurant had once launched an amnesty program for customers to return “missing” spoons in exchange for free tacos. I scream, we scream: Wahaca ice cream spoon!

At this point, my obsession had reached the point of no return: I needed to recreate this spoon somehow (and had found no place to buy it online). At the very least, I wanted to share its surprise with friends because words alone could never describe what made it special. (Reminder: you can buy the spoon here)

I will spare you the many attempts at replicating the shape. The subtle magic of this spoon comes from a wonky combination of flatness, roundness, and chunkiness—every detail makes a difference. It took many tries, many iterations with different 3D designers, and many more 3D print orders.

Next was manufacturing. How *do* you make a custom plastic spoon? Who makes them? And for how much? I had a hunch about where to start based on previous projects: Alibaba (truly one of my favorite places on the internet—a digital field trip to the other side of the world!)

Lo and behold, I was soon chatting with 12 different suppliers in China, each peppering me with spec options I never knew existed—a striking reminder that even the simplest details of everyday life (plastic spoons!) conceal endless layers of complexity.

Our new chatbot overlords proved ingenious here. The suppliers asked me to choose among at least a dozen acronyms for different plastics: Did I want PET? ABS? PP? PMMA? PC? PS? CPET? HDPE? The Chinese-English language barrier was not going to help me find the right match—but ChatGPT surely did! I wanted food-grade, dishwasher-safe, microwave-safe, shiny, and with many color options. The pulsing dot thought for one second and replied: “PP HI381!” Cheerful exclamation mark and all.

The minimum order quantity was 300 per color—but the unit cost dropped rapidly with every additional hundred. I ordered 500 in two colors (Pantone 226C and 116C). After weeks of ocean shipping and a customs inspection in Long Beach (Harmonized Tariff Code 3924.10.4000, aka “Tableware & Kitchenware, of Plastic, others”), they arrived!

After all this time, I have yet to learn the original story behind these spoons. Did Wahaca commission them? (The originals are molded with Wahaca’s logo on them.) Are they a wholesale gimmick from restaurant suppliers? Who chose them for Wahaca, and why?

When I returned to Wahaca on my most recent trip to London, I approached one of the waiters: “I wanted to ask you about your spoons—” (save that for your next icebreaker!) But before I could say another word, she jumped in: “Oh, do you want one? Which color?” I immediately froze, fully unprepared for this turn of events. I stuttered, “Blue—” and then hurried away with spoon in hand but no new answers. Another visit will be in order—Wahaca’s true scheme here all along.

Buy the Spoooon (Set of 4)

Play it on first dates, subway rides with signal problems,
and everything in between.

When I was still dating in New York, I would often text the other person before the first date: “Hey, come with 3 interesting questions you want to talk about. I’ll do the same and we’ll go back & forth.”

You would think that this prompt should be unnecessary given that first dates are *all about* questions —and yet, it always made a huge difference. Thankfully, I managed to escape the New York dating vortex long ago but my love for great questions continues to this day.

In the canon of “great questions for strangers”, there is perhaps no list more famous (or wonderful) than the NYT’s 36 Questions. I was inspired to take this list and adapt it for New York City … such that people could get to know each other through the lens of the unique city they share.

You’ll find the full list at 36questions.nyc.

Visit 36questions.nyc

I also created a physical version so that one day someone could use it on a first date without staring at their phone … or pass it around at a dinner party:

Buy Print Booklet

What question for New Yorkers would be on your list? Reply in the comments!

And if you’re looking for even more questions to explore, my partner Marc and I also created questions-game.com several years ago.

I had way too much fun this weekend turning corporate legalese into holiday tunes. What started as a whimsical exploration of how terms of service tomes might be turned into short-form poetry … ended with a 10-song holiday album and my first “upload” to Spotify et al.

The process: I used Suno for “making” the music: a lot of exploration, a lot of trial and error, but above all: an experience that was just very fun. Claude helped with first drafts for each song — I couldn’t have started without these, though they were quite stale, and I ultimately re-wrote most of the lyrics. But what the robots lacked in subversive humor, they surely made up for with their singing. I was floored.

May I suggest playing this in the background (unannounced) at your upcoming holiday party? Everyone might even learn a thing or two about all the rights you signed away long ago.

With joy,
Greg.

Open in Spotify

Open in Apple Music

Playlist on YouTube

Instagram (Plastic Joy)
“Craving all your clicks, they fence in your dreams with terms like legal bricks.”
youtube.com/watch?v=cP_0iWpB1eg

Amazon (Buying Wine)
“It's beginning to look a lot like lawsuits everywhere you scroll …”
youtube.com/watch?v=iDTHuJNvd9A

Tinder (Swipe All Night)
”No refunds if you swipe in vain, your likes are just for rent.”
youtube.com/watch?v=Hon2dgas-qY

Apple Pay (Fa-La-La-Liability)
”If you share your passcode with your friend, you're liable till the bitter end…”
youtube.com/watch?v=7ADk_XseKpo

Netflix (Subscription Blues)
“No sharing outside my home, watching Ultra HD all alone.”
youtube.com/watch?v=aN4tPpUtOok

Waymo (Rules)
“Driver’s seat is off-limits, pick another seat!”
youtube.com/watch?v=XgavIvek0-8

TikTok (It's Beginning to Look Like a Contract)
“Like Saint Nick checking his special list, we monitor content that you transmit!”
youtube.com/watch?v=1N5PJMEA6Dc

Starbucks Rewards (Expire)
“'Twas a night with legal terms galore when arbitration came knocking at my door…”
youtube.com/watch?v=SFYCIV54gwI

United Airlines (Five Pounds of Dry Ice)
“But holiday spirit's always free, even in Economy!”
youtube.com/watch?v=-AQrMXHhLI8

ChatGPT (Oh AI Friend)
“These decisions, big and small, need human experts after all …”
youtube.com/watch?v=exNVq33nMrY

Get README for iPhone

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My first encounter with today’s AI was in March 2022, inside a dark cave called Discord. I had clicked a random link on Twitter and somehow landed in a frenetic, gray-colored group chat. This was Midjourney, still a private research project at the time with only a few hundred users. I typed a text prompt and Midjourney’s bot soon turned my wish into a picture (my first was: rainbow train). I was instantly intoxicated, spellbound, excited, terrified. I started telling everyone about this wild new technology — I didn’t know computers were capable of such a leap. This was before the launch of ChatGPT and my understanding of AI was still stuck in the age of clumsy robots.

Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time with this new wave of AI, trying to learn as much as I could about how it works and how I could use it. I went on to work at Midjourney for almost two years, and I recently left to pursue new projects like this one and others.

I’ve gotten countless questions about AI over the last few years, especially from artists. Many feel overwhelmed by its capabilities and rapid pace, a feeling that’s only made worse if the technology remains mystical and beyond reach, like a dark solar eclipse beaming down from above.

To help more artists make sense of AI, I'm hosting one-on-one Q&A sessions. I want more artists to feel knowledgeable and confident about AI, not intimidated or powerless. My goal is to help others demystify this new technology so that it may feel less overwhelming (and perhaps even exciting).

Sign up for a session

The format: You prepare a list of questions that we’ll go through together on a phone call. We can talk about tools, we can talk about technical foundations, we can talk about whatever topics are helpful. No question is too simple or too broad — and you don’t have to be computer-literate.

Sign up for a session (they’re free) and please share the link with others who might find this valuable. Later on, I plan to publish a summary of my conversations.

The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

About me, if you’re new here: Most recently, I worked at Midjourney for two years. Before then, I was the second engineer at Instagram. In parallel to a career in tech, I developed an art practice over the last decade with a focus on social art & interactive projects. I’ve been working closely with AI for several years and hope to share my experience with other artists now.

VHS is a 24-hour video art rabbit hole.

• Start with YouTube’s first video

• Pick a new video based on YouTube’s recommendations every few seconds

• Record the next 24 hours onto VHS

20 years ago, television and video were distinct. What we watched on television was communal, while video was a private medium.

Today, watching television means watching videos, each of us tuning in for different ones at different times for different reasons. The videos are public but what we watch (and when and why) is private.

“VHS — 24 Hours of YouTube” records the act of watching television in 2021, making visible an isolated, hyper-personalized experience so that it may be seen collectively again.

The piece is made to be watched live as a 24-hour continuous installation. If you’d like to exhibit the piece (or know someone who might), please get in touch.

Process

• I screen-recorded YouTube using a regular browser.

• The recording starts on YouTube’s first video.

• A browser extension that I wrote would pick a recommendation from YouTube’s sidebar every 5 seconds and jump to a random timecode within the first third of that video.

• This process went on for 24 hours, making its way down a linear thread of more than 15,000 recommended videos.

• I split the final recording into 12 pieces of 2 hours and recorded each piece onto a VHS tape.

• For posterity’s sake, I re-digitized the VHS tapes and also recorded each one playing back on a CRT TV.

An 8-hour excerpt is available on YouTube, showing 4 of the 12 tapes:

“The content of any medium is always another medium.”
—Marshall McLuhan

Download Jukebox here:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jukebox-discover-music/id1573960215

This project continues my interest in how to discover things online. Discovering new, good work has gotten harder and harder in the last few years, I find — the toil of clicking, digging and scrolling feels ever less rewarding. I’m interested in tools, methods and community structures that can reverse this trend.

What are your favorite tools, sources or communities for coming across new, good work? Reply to this email, I’d love to know.

ps. For a low-tech, all-human take on music discovery, check out my earlier project Disco, which pairs people with each other’s Spotify obsessions.

Sometime last summer, I finally gave in. I just really wanted the Old Instagram back. 

As some of you know, I was an early employee at Instagram. So reminiscing about the past (and dealing with a lot of disappointment) is nothing new for me. But by now, my yearning had grown too strong after all.

Old Instagram was perfect in many ways. Kevin and Mikey had created a gold standard for simple, fast and beautiful. But that Instagram is clearly gone. And it’s clearly not coming back. And so I decided, very reluctantly, to bring it back myself.

Fast forward to today, and I’m glad I started coding. 

Say hello to Friends, an app for sharing photos with close friends.

Friends is not OG IG because we live & share differently than we did in 2010. But many things will feel familiar, while others will feel new and more intimate.

A few of us have been using Friends for a while now — and it’s been wonderful.

The doors are slowly opening for the next few people to join — so if you’d like to use it with your friends too, sign up for an early spot on the waitlist.

Update, August 2022: Friends is now open to everyone if you’d like to use too. Download it from the App Store and tell your friends about it:

..............................
grex.nyc

i made a new project: disco.grex.nyc — it’s for discovering music.

disco matches you with a different spotify user every week: you get a playlist with their current obsessions (most played songs), and they get a playlist with yours.

i wanted a recommendation system that’s not run by machines. i wanted something as simple as asking a new friend: what songs do you like?

happy listening,
greg.

ps. i also made lost + found a while back but never told you about it: you enter a youtube search and watch the result for the search that was entered just before yours.

I’ve been fascinated by questions for a long time. A single question can be so transformative and yet so short. “What do you want?” 4 words with a lifetime of answers.

Together with my partner Marc, I published a new project this week: 

questions-game.com

It’s a newsletter that sends you 3 new questions every Friday.

These questions are meant for couples, dates or close friends to get to know each other better. Marc and I started The Questions Game because a simple format like this has been a special part of growing our relationship, both early on and ever since.

My friend Gideon and I had been hoping to collaborate on an idea for quite a while. Both of us are drawn to ideas that take place away from the screen and that include the audience as part of an experience, rather than being just its recipient.

About a week ago, we published our first such experiment: A small social art project named Confession.

Simply call the number below and press 1 to confess, or 2 to hear someone’s confession.

(917) 809-7319

Confessors can speak for as long as the listener remains on the line. Listeners can only listen, as they will be muted. Whatever number you press, find some catharsis via repentance. Whatever you say or hear, the truth will set you free.

1 Week, 800 calls, 75 confessions
We figured that the likelihood of a confession might be quite low; after all, a confessor and a listener need to call the obscure number of an art project at the same time. Maybe there'd be a handful of confessions and we'd be very happy about that.

But no. Much to our surprise, the calls started coming in and were matching by the dozens. By now, more than 75 confessions between 150 strangers have taken place. Confessors talk for 5, 10, 15 minutes -- while listeners stay on for as long. The number has become a special place.

Call Confession today. Call again tomorrow. Tell a friend if you're intrigued.

Thanks for listening,
Greg.

grex.nyc

Over the last years, I’ve worked with very different kinds of data. But no matter how different in origin or shape, the desire of the data was always the same: it wanted to be seen. It would refuse to offer meaning and refuse to be shared until it was a thing on the page, a swoosh or a spike, perhaps a pulsing color. Data that wasn’t visual made no sense whenever it was called to duty, while data that was beautiful didn’t even have to make sense before it was already greeted with smiles & nods.

But a few months ago, I came across data that didn’t ask to be visual. It wanted to remain unseen, because it always had been that way. Perhaps you can imagine my mix of self-doubt and skepticism (mostly self-doubt), thinking about months of work that no one would ever “look at” (even if they wanted to). But this skepticism gave way to a deep fascination as I spent time with this material and gathered more & more of it. The name of this strange, unwieldy matter? Radio news. More than 6 years of it.

For every hour since June 2009, I’ve gathered NPR’s 5-minute news updates — a collection of more than 58,000 broadcasts and 4,900 hours of audio.

Much of the news’ power, much of our ritualized experience with the news, derives from its consistency: the same time, the same voice, the same point of view, the same inability to change it. I was interested in breaking this consistency, hoping to offer a series of projects that reinterpret the news in very different ways.

Today, this hope meets reality as I invite you to explore 3 projects that are based on this non-visual data of radio news. The following posts offer a short description & the link to each project:

• Truth & Quantity

• Don’t Play With Your News

• Silent Sky

Headphones recommended. You may even close your eyes.

Sign up for announcements about future projects at grex.nyc/mailing-list. To get in touch with me, visit my website.

This post was originally published on Medium.