The Catalyze podcast: Sam Lowe ’20, Scott Diekema ’19, Nicholas Byrne ’19, and Jonny Huang ’24 of recycleReality on launching a creative technology studio in New York
Today’s guests are Sam Lowe ’20, Scott Diekema ’19, Nicholas Byrne ’19, and Jonny Huang ’24, who Zoomed with Morehead-Cain from Brooklyn.
Sam, Scott, and Nicholas are the co-founders of recycleReality, a creative technology studio in New York that specializes in bespoke design and software solutions in music, fashion, art, and architecture. Jonny interned with the alumni this summer for his Morehead-Cain Professional Experience summer.
On this episode, the Morehead-Cains share about the early collaborations at UNC–Chapel Hill that led to forming their own company, how their different backgrounds and skillsets (computer science to communications and music) complement one another, and a music responsive light box that recycleReality plans to release within a year.
recycleReality garnered recognition earlier this year with two OBIE Awards as part of the 2022 “Breakthrough Artist” ad campaign by Amazon Music and Overall Murals. The alumni won the OBIE Craft Award for Best Illustration and a Silver OBIE Award in the Billboards category. The OBIE Awards, presented annually by the Out of Home Advertising Association of America, recognize outstanding contributions to the world of advertising and design.
Nicholas and Sam are returning Catalyze guests. The two (along with Eric Lee ’18) spoke with Morehead-Cain back in 2020 during a road trip across the country with a U-Haul-turned-mobile-recording-unit.
Music credits
The episode’s intro song is by scholar Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.
How to listen
On your mobile device, you can listen and subscribe to Catalyze on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. For any other podcast app, you can find the show using our RSS feed.
Catalyze is hosted and produced by Sarah O’Carroll for the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Twitter or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.
Episode Transcription
(Sarah)
Well, Sam, Scott, Jonny, and Nicholas, thank you so much for joining Catalyze.
(All)
Thanks so much for having us.
(Scott)
Thank you for having us.
(Sarah)
So recycleReality. I’m not surprised that you all got together and did something really cool, but I would love to hear more about the company and just where it started. The last time we talked, Sam and Nicholas, y’all were in Georgia in Smithonia doing creative projects there back in the pandemic.
(Nicholas)
It goes much further back than.
(Scott)
We don’t really have a clean start, I guess. It really emerged out of kind of a network of creative collaborations that, I mean, I don’t know when you two started making music and stuff together, but yeah.
(Sam)
Like junior year, I think Nicholas’s senior year, was when we really were digging into things.
(Scott)
Yeah, so Nicholas and I met in 2018. We both spent that summer, our Morehead internships were in Los Angeles, and we lived in a house together. And that was kind of when we started doing freelance creative work together in media and entertainment through Nicholas’s internship at Red Bull. We both worked as production assistants at Lollapalooza, a big music festival, that summer. And that was like a foray into some of this for me, at least. Our senior year, 2018 to 2019, or my senior year, was when we got into Office Hours, which was kind of Nicholas’s big guest thesis project is the best way to put it. It was like an independent study you were doing at UNC. And that was a big, at that point, I’d been really focused on The Meantime [Coffee Co.] for my first three years, and then I was on the board at that point, I think, and had freed up a bunch of extracurricular time and kind of dove into this with Nicholas. And Sam was also there and played a part in that, as well, in terms of our early thinking about the video synthesizers and TVs and everything that we were getting into.
But yeah, then I think the summer, fast forward, like summer 2020 when Sam—and into fall of 2020—Sam and Nicholas were living in Georgia. I was there for maybe a month chunk in the middle, but we were all kind of doing other stuff primarily, but had been doing creative work together in this sphere. And we had someone reach out asking for a website for this band called Baby Boys, and it was a Durham-based artist management company called The Glow that manages Sylvan Esso and a bunch of other amazing artists in the indie genre primarily. But they reached out and saw some of the work that we had been doing just independently as kind of an artistic practice and asked us to do like a visual campaign and website for this artist. And it sounded super cool to us. Obviously it wasn’t really like, yeah, it emerged spontaneously from that. We did that project, we worked on this ipod emulator website that was a labor of love. And it was like, really fun working. I don’t know, this is kind of getting . . .
(Sam)
Yeah, that was definitely main spark, I would say, was that project. It was the first thing that brought all three of us together. And I think we really just enjoyed collaborating in that environment because our skill sets mesh so well together. We filled in each other’s sort of skill gaps really well. The way that I pitch it these days is that Nicholas is really good at making things that are pretty, I’m really good at making things that work, and Scott is really good at making things that are pretty, work, or make things that work prettier. And so the three of us together, coming together on that project, was just a really exciting experience for all three of us, I think, and really laid a solid foundation of wanting to continue to collaborate on these types of projects, see where the word of mouth of that first project could lead. And it’s led all the way here to all three of us being in person together in New York now for the first time.
(Sarah)
So it sounds like there was this idea that you would work really well together someday, but maybe needed this catalyst of the assignment to really see how your different skills could complement each other. And I’d love to hear more about the background. And I love the quick pitch that you gave about the aesthetics versus more machine learning, which, Sam, I know that’s more your specialty. And also catch us up of where you were right before deciding to launch this. What were you doing?
(Sam)
It was a very confusing and interesting time, at least I’d say for myself. I’m sure we all felt that to varying degrees. For me in particular, graduating right at the start of the first peak of the pandemic, right. Came back from spring break in my senior year and sort of everything had changed. And then there was this sort of big open question mark as to what to do next. And that’s what led us all to Georgia. But we were all enjoying our time there, but taking very seriously planning for the future and what the next steps from there would be. So I wound up starting a graduate program, getting my Master’s in Computer Science at Stanford while I was still at The Farm online, and then wound up out on the West Coast for a couple of years finishing that up. And Nicholas was starting to look into graduate programs as well and wound up at Parsons in New York doing lighting design, which he just finished his MFA in.
(Sarah)
Congratulations.
(Nicholas)
Thanks.
(Sam)
Yeah, just a couple of months ago. So that was sort of the last hurdle for us to clear, for us all to have free calendars and the free time to be able to really dive in deep on recycleReality and see what we can turn this into.
(Nicholas)
I think also what has kind of characterized our work together from the start, and our client work in general, is that we do a lot of learning on the job, where it’s like, okay, maybe we haven’t done this exact type of project before, but it sits somewhere in the middle of our skill sets, and it’s something that we want to learn to do. And so I think working together while we’ve been in school over the past couple of years also kind of made learning part of the ethos of what we do. And so I think that we are still figuring out what we’re going to do next and are trying new projects and landing new client gigs and that kind of thing. So it’s been great, and it’s really wonderful to be together in person for the first time because we’ve been working together for years, but now it’s like we are able to focus in a different way, and it feels like we have kind of a fresh start, even though we’ve been working together for a while.
(Sarah)
And you also have Jonny with you. I’d love to hear how you heard about this and what you’ve been working on with recycleReality this summer?
(Jonny)
So that’s a funny story. I actually remember coming into Carolina freshman year and reading about their U-Haul journey on the Morehead website, and that was my first introduction to them. Obviously, they all graduated before I first got there in 2020. But yeah, I was just looking for internships for this summer. I knew I wanted to do something more tech-driven, maybe like software engineering, web development, something in those areas. So I did what a lot of people do, and I turned to the Morehead-Cain Network and scrolled through the current job postings, and I found recycleReality’s posting, and yeah, it brought me back to seeing them freshman year, and I’m like, whoa, now they started a business together, and they’re wanting an intern. And I kind of saw the job description was looking for someone who had experience in tech, like computer science, majoring in computer science, and it seemed really interesting. I checked out their website and a lot of their projects that they have in their blog, and I was just really intrigued. So I applied, and we had a couple of interviews, really not even interviews, just like we were just talking on the phone, getting to know each other and see if it was a good fit. And yeah, now that I’m here, I can gladly say that it’s been an amazing summer, and it’s been a really good time. Really good fit.
(Sarah)
That’s great. I love that you came across their first Catalyze podcast that turned into an internship so many years later. So that’s great to hear that. recycleReality is a little hard to understand for someone who might not be used to the creative technology space. It sounds really neat, the kinds of experiences that you create for different clients, but maybe a way of getting at the kind of expertise you all bring, can you share about some current projects as well as maybe some of the ad campaigns that were recognized by Amazon music and Overall Murals?
(Sam)
So really exciting. The past few months, I’ve been working pretty much full time on an experience, the first version of which released just a couple of weeks ago. It’s for a new sort of spinoff label of the Glow management called Psychic Hotline. And one of their big first releases is a collaborative audiovisual album. There are a sequence of tracks named after the letters of the alphabet in pairs, so there’s 13 tracks A B through Y Z, and there is artwork that goes with each of the tracks. And we’ve been working on an in-browser, but also VR experience for that to build sort of a virtual gallery that people can go through and explore the art and the music in tandem, and really try and take advantage of those mediums to present the art in ways that you can’t do elsewhere. Because they already have plans for a physical album release that’s on vinyl and comes with a printed copy of all the art and things like that. So we were trying to really take that core concept and stretch it as far as possible. So in the version that just released, it’s for the first single CD, you find yourself in a hallway and at either end there’s a painting. And I was sort of inspired by the old video game, the Super Mario game for the Nintendo 64, where you go through all these different paintings and you wind up in different worlds that are the actual levels of the game. So when you get close to the painting, the sort of world around you fades away and you find yourself in sort of a black void with paintings on either side, and things start to grow out from behind the paintings on the walls. Floating pieces of the paintings start flying through the sky in front of you and really sort of try and elevate the fundamental pieces of visual art and audio that we were given from the artist team to try and expand that in new directions. So the VR project sort of has its roots in a lot of the graduate work that I was doing at Stanford. So I was in the CS department, but I spent a lot of time at The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Funnily enough, my first experience with that center, which is called Carma for short, was a Discovery Fund project my freshman year. I did a couple of workshops out there over the summer, and I was really inspired by the way that they sort of combined computers and technology with music and took a lot of classes there while I was a student and did some VR research at the time as well. And so that sort of led directly into giving me sort of the foundation to do this new project.
(Sarah)
It sounds so immersive and really neat that you can pull in things that you might not think would work well together, but create really cool visuals. And Nicholas, I would love to hear if your music has played a part or if it’s more about the lighting design that you’ve been working on up in New York City.
(Nicholas)
I mean, music is in common on all of our projects, essentially, or most of our projects. A lot of them are making visuals for album releases in some way, maybe it’s video content, advertising content, websites, or VR experiences now. I think that music is a huge part of my life and influences how I do work making. My graduate thesis was about pairing visual information and music and how our brain understands those things and how can you use both of those components to make an experience interesting. So, yeah, I’ve been doing also some lighting design in New York, doing lights at venues for different artists and also designing a light fixture, so you can see this thing actually in the top right corner of the screen, the black box, the light box that I designed. And we can send you some photos of what it looks like when it’s lit up, but it responds to musical inputs. I use light and color to inspire my music making process, and I think that you can use music to inspire your visual process as well. So, yeah, it’s interesting. We’re currently looking into getting this so this is a prototype of this light box, but we’re looking into getting it fabricated somewhere in New York and trying to sell a kind of art piece currently, and developing a software that could control the lights, as well, and integrate with music is a goal of ours in the future. And we’re also working on building a smaller miniature version of it that we can 3D print in our studio ourselves. And so that’s something that Jonny’s also been working on this summer, learning how to program some LEDs with Raspberry Pis. So he had some experience with that before he came this summer, building an electronic skateboard. So that’s been a good project that’s been an overlap between my thesis work and also some of Jonny’s interests as well.
(Sarah)
Very cool. And you all focus on music, fashion, art, and architecture. How did you decide on those four to zero in on? And Nicholas, you’re speaking to how music is often intersecting with all of these projects, and so that’s a natural one, but I also thought it was interesting how you’re going into these different industries which have their own different micro trends or different needs.
(Scott)
As a studio or an agency starting out, we have been in the mindset of saying yes to everything. And so it was kind of a strategic lack of focus in the beginning. As a result, maybe some of the language on our website or looking at all of our projects, it’s like, huh, this is interesting, but this seems like they’ve cast a really wide net in terms of what they’re doing. And I mean, from a practical standpoint, you say yes to clients that come to you and are willing to pay for something. And then on the other side of it, we’re new to this. None of us come from, we have kind of eclectic backgrounds, but what we don’t have is like a traditional agency background here in New York City. And so a lot of this has been self taught and figuring it out as we go, and we figure out what we like and don’t like and learn by doing, as Nicholas said. So I think that category of music, fashion, art, and architecture probably was like, a client came to us in one of those lanes, we enjoyed it, we maybe found a couple more things in that lane, and it felt like an umbrella that made sense. And we had enough feedback from enough mentors who were like, you need to create an umbrella like that so people know when they go to your site and when they look at your portfolio, like, what category of work—we’ve done projects that aren’t on our site and aren’t in that category, but the work that we showcase and what we talk about, we try to keep it focused because that’s kind of the direction we want to move in. Partly also just a result of living in New York City, it’s like a huge cultural hub, obviously, and all of those industries are super vibrant here. So it’s just like, we’re choosing to be here. It makes sense to work in those areas. Another project plug that I will give because you were asking there, and it’s going live right after this interview, is we just made a website for VFILES, which is an arts and fashion nonprofit here in New York City. So by the time, I don’t know when this is going to be shared, but it’ll be live@vfiles.org whenever this is live. And that has been a really fun project to work on for me over the past couple of months, helping them with some of their communication strategy and then just traditional web design and development.
So what Sam talked about, the Audiobook 3D VR is more out there in terms of creative technology and pushing the limits of it. We also just make your standard website and make it work and make it look good. And that’s kind of the bread and butter of those web tech services. And so, yeah, this has been a really fun project. I was working in communication strategy at a nonprofit before recycleReality, and then The Meantime, obviously was a nonprofit as well. And I’ve really enjoyed doing communications, marketing, just generally working in that social sphere. And it was a really cool opportunity to get to work for VFILES, which covers arts and fashion, but through that social impact lens, and I’m definitely excited about trying to bring more of that into our portfolio and work as well.
(Sarah)
I’ve also appreciated the kind of through line about learning as you go a bit because you all are doing new things in an industry that’s changing so quickly, using technology that’s rapidly advancing. And so it seems like you all have the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that isn’t daunted by, oh gosh, this new thing has come out, but moreso how do we figure out how to use it well? What does it look like when you get a client or are approached with a problem, just what that first meeting looks like?
(Nicholas)
I think it depends on the project and the people that are coming to us and our current relationship to them. I think a lot of times just like meeting with someone in person and fleshing out the idea is really wonderful if there’s already an existing relationship, and some of our relationships are more casual like that where you’re kind of spitballing and brainstorming either in person or over text or something as simple as that. But if it’s maybe a client that’s a little bit newer to us or is part of a larger organization that is very official, we then start to act official, and we make pitch decks and communicate differently. So we kind of meet the projects where they are and kind of shapeshift in that way depending on how it seems like the relationship will best be served. So that’s kind of a fun part of this whole thing, too, is we each kind of have our own client relationships that started by knowing us individually or somehow, and so we kind of manage them in different ways. So that’s a fun aspect of it. And a lot of our work is communicating to people about the work that we’re going to do or the work that we want to do. You’d like to be doing design work all day, but at least we’re talking to interesting people about an interesting subject. Most of the time.
(Sam)
It’s definitely a spectrum, and I think a big part of the work for us is with repeat clients, like we’ve worked with The Glow in a lot of different formats through the different projects we’ve done.
(Scott)
They are the ones who kicked us off back at the beginning with that Baby Boys project. Shout out to The Glow.
(Sam)
But it’s really been about building a sort of sense of trust with them, and that I think at this point they’re pretty confident in the work that we do and know that we have sort of a high bar for ourselves and would never turn in something that we didn’t personally believe in or were really excited about. So when this audiobook project came around, they just thought it would be interesting to have a VR experience to go along with it, but they didn’t really know what the possibilities there were and sort of kicked the ball pretty firmly in our court at that point to dream up what we could within our understanding of the technical confines and then sort of pursue that project from that point. So yeah, it really is over a spectrum and very constantly evolving.
(Sarah)
Let’s say a year from now, where do each of you hope to be or what’s a mountain you hope to have climbed by then?
(Nicholas)
We just got this shelf yesterday.
(Sarah)
What does the shelf do?
(Nicholas)
Well, so now we’re starting our library, and I think that we’re kind of starting to do all the things that we wanted to always do, literally starting yesterday with this shelf in some sense is starting to have all of our equipment set up so that we can use it at any point in time. And feeling like we have a really functioning studio, I think, is a great goal for the next year for us as far as the work we’re able to produce on a regular basis. I would love to have these light boxes in people’s homes who I don’t know even in a year’s time, that would be really cool, and we’re working towards that. But yeah, we’re also just like taking baby steps and getting comfortable where we are and kind of settling into running this business.
(Scott)
This light box is kind of the first prototype and is one of many kind of internal product and, whether physical or software product ideas that we have as a team, we’re trying to balance that interest research prototyping with the more agency side client work that is kind of like what pays the bills currently. And so we’ve been trying to find that balance, and that’s over the next six months and year, I think, this is going to be when we figure out how to make that work or don’t and pick one. But I think a year from now, I would like to be solid on, hopefully have the light box and some products, whatever form that takes, have our work out in the world in that way and also just continue building and have that really solid list of clients that we trust and enjoy working with and keep building beautiful work there.
(Sarah)
Jonny, I’m curious for you going back to campus, what you’re hoping to get out of this next year?
(Jonny)
Ooh, that’s a good question. I think my priority is to just enjoy the time with people I love. But also, I think coming back from this summer, it’s really given me a really good glimpse into what life after college could be like. It’s been really cool seeing how three friends out of college can come together and really make something really cool. So yeah, I don’t know, I think going into senior year, definitely going to be keeping up with recycleReality. I’m really excited to see how the light box evolves. Yeah, I’m just going to take every moment as it is and really spend time with the people that I probably won’t have that much time, won’t be able to see, I won’t be able to go to Meantime and grab a coffee with anymore. I won’t be able to get dinner at the dining hall with them. I think, yeah, senior year is going to be super fun, but going to be hard to let go.
(Sam)
Who knows, you might start a business with them.
(Jonny)
Yeah, that’s the idea.
(Nicholas)
Figure out how you don’t have to have a boss, you know? You become your boss though.
(Scott)
I was just going to say quick shout out to Jonny. He’s been just the best intern and team member that we could imagine this summer. That’s been a really useful exercise for us, too. We work with a big network of collaborators, but it’s been us three as the core team for a while now, and so it was like a really helpful exercise to add Jonny to the mix. And, yeah, he just fit right in and worked on some great stuff together and was here for such a pivotal point of us moving into this studio and getting our shelf yesterday, as Nicholas said. So yeah. Thank you, Jonny. Yeah, it’s been awesome.
(Jonny)
It’s been awesome, and I think the biggest thing I’ll take from this summer is just that “yes” mentality and always willing to try new things and be open minded. One of my favorite stories from the summer, experiences in the summer, has been going over to New York to set up a lighting design rigging for an event there, and that was something that I never thought that I’d be doing and something that I never expected to do during this internship. But it ended up being one of the coolest experiences of my time here, and I learned a lot about lighting design from Nicholas, learned how to drive a scissor lift, met a lot of really cool people, especially like Nicholas’s friends from Parsons. That’s probably the biggest takeaway from this summer is just to be open. You never know what an opportunity might give you.
(Sarah)
Great perspective going into senior year, for sure. Is there anything you’d want to share to all of you for the Morehead-Cain alumni community because this podcast is for primarily Morehead-Cains and so any ways that you might want to collaborate with alumni or be supported in any way?
(Sam)
We do embrace that “yes” mentality in our work and are always excited to sort of broaden our horizons in the kind of things that we do. And our email inbox is always open. If you have an off the wall idea for a cool media project, and you need a crack team of engineers to hop on it, that we would be more than happy to connect, or even just connect to talk about this sort of shared world that we find ourselves in more broadly. So we definitely would love to get that message out there.
(Sarah)
So if anyone needs some bespoke design or software solutions to reach out to you all. Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you’d want to share?
(Sam)
One thing that I missed my opportunity to touch on earlier in talking about embracing the learning process in our work and always reevaluating the tool set that we use to approach a project. I know you mentioned the Amazon mural project in one of the questions, and I think that’s a really good example because the backdrop for that mural that we designed for this project with Amazon Music and Breland, the artist who was being highlighted in that project, was to generate a backdrop with what at the time were the latest AI models for visual generations, which were generative adversarial networks. And so we had to train our own model that we had gotten off the shelf that could produce impressionist landscapes, and I retrained it solely on city skyscrapers. And it got caught in this sort of weird middle zone between those two things and gave us this sort of really surreal landscape pictures that we could stitch together into the mural. And then here we are now, not even two years out from that project, and that approach is completely outmoded by things like stable diffusion.
So I think AI is a really good example of the types of technologies that we lean on that are changing very rapidly, but that we’re always excited to embrace the newest thing and find out ways to use it and also break it in interesting ways.
(Scott)
I like that. Closing with the most technical for the nerds. That was a great point for the nerds. Yeah, absolutely.
(Nicholas)
Yeah, I also just wanted to say a continued thank you from us four to the Morehead-Cain. Johnny here this summer, you know, you supported him, but you’re also supporting us in that way and also speaking with us today. We really appreciate it and are excited to continue to be part of this network of people.
(Scott)
Yeah, obviously means a lot to us. Thank you so much.
(Sarah)
And it’s cool, too, Scott, that students go to The Meantime still, I mean, hundreds, if not thousands a day, so it must be cool to hear those stories as well.
(Scott)
Yeah, no, it’s amazing. I mean, the people that followed me are such amazing teams, have followed since I left, and it’s really kudos to them. They’ve built it into something that I didn’t even imagine when I was leaving, so yeah, it’s the most special feeling to see the growth and just what it means to the UNC community at this point. It’s totally, yeah.
(Nicholas)
I’m remembering that that’s actually the first time that we collaborated was on the announcement of The Meantime. We made a promotional video that we filmed in the top floor bathroom of the Campus Y.
(Scott)
That should have been the opener.
(Nicholas)
Yeah, it was so long ago. It was literally probably like 2016 or 2015 or something like that.
(Scott)
Yeah, I can send it to you. But that’s so true that the original promo ad for The Meantime was our first collaboration.
(Nicholas)
Yeah, very cool.
(Sarah)
And just in case anyone didn’t know, Scott is the founder of The Meantime and was CEO for a number of years and has also inspired another startup coffee shop by Ria Patel for the class of 25. She’s on the scholar media team and did that profile of you, and her coffee shop is Griatitude, but was inspired reading about your story, so very cool to hear that was also part of how you all got together, too.
(Scott)
Yeah, absolutely.
(Sarah)
Well, thank you so much. I hope things just go really well. It was great to see the news drop that y’all were getting together and doing another cool thing together, and I couldn’t wait to learn more about it. So thank you so much.
(Sam)
Thank you so much.
(All)
Thank you.