Been seeing a lot of David Byrne around. I gather he's out bringing Power Point to the people. Given the post below, who am I to argue? His talk at Berkeley was recorded - click here for the webcast. I haven't checked it out yet myself, so this is the usual uninformed commentary you've come to expect. It's more addressed to these comments by heather at art.blogging.la regarding some of what she heard him say during a presentation at UCSB:
One of the more interesting points Byrne makes is that powerpoint can be construed as a type of presentational theater; that is, that the very act of someone presenting information with a visual tool has its roots in theatrical traditions, specifically Brechtian and Japanese theater.
Mostly, Byrne flaunted the ridiculousness of a software tool that comes with various options for possible content if you don't have anything to present. He pokes fun at the bullet points, cheesy graphics and infinite templates that make powerpoint such a ubiquitous and generic tool for presentation. His artistic use of the software is more interrogative than subversive, but he makes a good point in that our culture sometimes uses a lot of bells and whistles to say nothing.
The final point is certainly well-taken. I don't want to criticize too much, as this the above is only a brief blog post and I'm sure it doesn't represent the entirely of Byrne's thought, but it seems to me that the "act of someone presenting information with a visual tool" has deeper and wider roots than theater. One could take that back to the beginning of writing, or possibly of art. Much love to Brechtian and Japanese theater, but if we were to draw the relevant antecedants of Power Point more narrowly, we'd go back to overhead projectors first. And from them, blackboards, drawings, renderings, graphs of all kinds - all that Tuftey goodness that everyone loves so much, even back to the Forma Urbis Romae and beyond.
Obviously Byrne is aware of all that and I don't mean to imply that he's not. As for poking fun, I'm sure he did - but he also seems pretty serious about this stuff. Which is kinda neat, in a very, very geeky way.
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