David Byrne Subverts PowerPoint 150
NoData writes "The AP is reporting that David Byrne, visionary musician and frontman for 80s New Wave art band 'Talking Heads,' has turned Powerpoint into a visual art medium in a (satiric) DVD/Book combo. Says Byrne in the article: 'The genius of it is that it was designed for any idiot to use.'" Shades of Edward Tufte ("PowerPoint Makes You Dumb"), as the article points out. The book is published by high-end German publisher Steidl.
A cheap publicity stunt (Score:2, Interesting)
This "DVD", it is obvious, is a cheap and quick way to get his name in the papers, if not to make a few bucks. The symbols that are described (such as Dolly the sheep enclosed on a PowerPoint page in quotation marks) sound... well, again, cheap.
Whats wrong with that generation ? (Score:0, Interesting)
I always found new age to be
EVERY NORMAL ARTIST HAS A MAC IN HIS LIVINGROOM.
( i see it all the time on interviews. )
Retep
Re:Whats wrong with that generation ? (Score:1, Interesting)
Of course they would find mindless post modernism produced with a corporate tool to be art . The "artists" of that generation just took a little longer to come around.
Re:A cheap publicity stunt (Score:5, Interesting)
And if there's anyone who's a "nerd" in music, it's Byrne. The new wave art rockers of the 80s were the nerds of music. Of his contemporaries, he's third in nerdiness only to maybe Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo or Thomas Dolby (She Binded Me With Science), who went on to form an interactive music software company [wired.com] in the 90s.
Re:Why not Coka Cola, Daimler Benz and Microsoft? (Score:4, Interesting)
Three words:
Warhol..Campbell's Soup.
It's called "pop art." It's commentary. Not my favorite, but there it is.
its been already done, last year (Score:2, Interesting)
Jemma at
http://www.prate.com [prate.com]
(well known in net-art circles)
has done a few projects as
Re:All You Young Guys Don't Get It (Score:1, Interesting)
As for David Byrne shilling for MS, I don't think that's the case. I think he is shilling for himself, and PowerPoint is being used like it should be--as a sales tool.
old news (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt1.h
Gettysburg Address PowerPoint (Score:2, Interesting)
PowerSpeak (Score:3, Interesting)
Powerpoint is newspeak for presentations. That is, because of it's dumbed down simplicity, making simple things effortless and everything else nearly impossible, it constrains what may be said. At the same time, by being so easy to use, it lulls the user into a sense that it is powerful and expressive to the point that they don't realize what it is that they can't say with it.
Byrne is a linguist who finds himself in a world that speaks only newspeak. He is examining the logical limits of it's expressivity to determine what it absolutely can't say at all.
It's an artistic challenge to express as much as possible in an artificially limited medium. It's a new take on a common theme in art.
To reduce all of that to 'Byrne has become a Powerpoint fanboy' is to completely miss the point.
Powerpoint is an ideal tool for modern sales technique in that it allows the user to say absolutely nothing but make it sound like a good thing.
I've seen his PowerPoint presentations (Score:4, Interesting)
For those people who have only read the article, his "presentations" (if you can call them that) are cooler than I doubt any Microsoft or Apple could put together.
Smarten up, folks...forget the medium, it's his content that is genius.
Content vs Medium (Score:2, Interesting)
Excel subverted to run pacman (Score:3, Interesting)
both sort of right (Score:2, Interesting)
So PowerPoint doesn't make you stupid. It just makes it easier to show how stupid you are. Used by a genius and the result is art. Used by the average Joe and the result inspires books like "PowerPoint Makes You Dumb". Both Byrne and Tufte are almost right. Their mistake was they focused on the tool not the user.