Monday, August 20, 2007

Pecha-kucha or minimalist powerpoint

Hiroshige III - Train passing along Shinagawa Beach

I use a lot of Powerpoint software at work but never did I think that PowerPoint presentations could be elevated to an art form. Recently I ran into news that talked about an artform called pecha-kucha (pronounced 'pet-shah coot-shah') developed by two Tokyo based artists (Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham) whose premise is almost 'haiku-ish'...

Pecha-kucha (Japanese for “the sound of casual chatter”) involves the presenting of a subject or a topic in exactly 20 slides with each slide lasting 20 seconds. Thus, most 'performances', last exactly about six minutes and 40 seconds - of matched images, words, prose, poetry, flying gifs - call it what you will, but it does seem novel.

Now getting all the corporate mavens to tune their boring presentations into this format will be another matter altogether, but just imagine the benefits - no more of that sitting through hours of 'death by PowerPoint' sessions of concepts or projects that in reality can be distilled to finer levels of detail if the author really set her/his mind to it...

Apparently this 'performance-art' form has caught on - there are regular pecha-nights in 80 cities from Buenos Aires to Taipei...

1 comment:

Tree said...

This is funny because I was recently thinking of doing a "corporate" art piece by creating a story of my life/timeline using flowcharts and such.