In 2011, a video of the This American LIfe host talking about creativity spread across the internet. But for Glass, it was a “weirdly impersonal” experience.
In 2011, David Shiyang Liu created a video that animated words spoken by This American Life's Ira Glass, and posted it to Vimeo. It went crazy viral.
The original video has logged over 800,000 views alone, and posts of Liu's video on YouTube and elsewhere have added at least another 100,000 views. The video has also inspired a few other videos using Glass' words — and it's apparently become something of a standard exercise for designers and design students.
Source: vimeo.com
The audio came from a video Glass had shot for Current TV two years earlier (and posted by PRI on YouTube), in which Glass talked more expansively about the creative process.
This is the section from which Liu pulled the audio for his project — note how Liu snipped out the bit about sorghum, among other smart edits. (It's worth watching the entire thing: Here are parts one, two, and four.)
Source: youtube.com
"It’s just so random.
Like, even the shooting of that video wasn’t a big deal. Some people came by, I didn’t prepare for it, and didn’t think about it at all, before or after. And then years passed, and then it just kind of started to exist on the internet in a way that was so visible. It feels like it doesn’t have anything to do with me, in a weird way. I feel like I happened to say a thing that happened to hit people. It feels weirdly impersonal."
Source: fuckyeahiraglass.tumblr.com
