David Byrne’s PowerPoint Art

Powerpoint makes us stupid. That’s at least what Edward R. Tufte, the professor emeritus of statistical sciences at Yale claims in his book The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. Not only are Powerpoint presentations boring, with an average of 40 words or 8 seconds worth of silent reading material per slide, they can be downright deceptive, with their confusing presentation templates. Tufte goes so far as to claim that without Boeings misleading powerpoint presentations, the Columbia Shuttle accident would never had happened.

But like most ugly and dangerous things, Powerpoint has great artistic potential. The musician and film maker David Byrne of Talking Heads fame has again bewildered us with his latest project, Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information. A book and a DVD that consists of auto-animated powerpoint presentations set to original music shows you the software in a completely new light. The ready made forms, so familiar to the hundreds of millions of regular users move in ways easy to envision but hard to understand. It is beautiful, tought providing and entertaining. Everything Tufte claimed it would not be. So is it we are just using the damn thing wrong?

David Byrne’s PowerPoint Art

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 at 23:05 and is filed under Art & Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.