March 3, 2005
Next slide please: Talking Heads founder David Byrne starts making sense of PowerPoint
Editor’s Note: Ken Fine, a News & Information employee who is a graduate of the UW School of Art and our resident expert on PowerPoint, offers his thoughts on David Byrne’s upcoming PowerPoint performance at 7 p.m. Sunday, March 6 in 130 Kane, sponsored by the Henry Art Gallery.
Mocking PowerPoint is easy sport. Badly used, Microsoft’s ubiquitous presentation software can kill the sponteniety of public speaking, condemning audiences to slow death by a thousand bullet points.
Wits and wags have had way too much fun parodying the supposed weaknesses of the PowerPoint idiom. In the past few years, we’ve been treated to the PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address, the PowerPoint complaint letter and even the PowerPoint Ranger’s Creed.
Where others perceive stifling conformity, David Byrne sees a blank canvas. Best known as the frontman for ‘80s post-punk band Talking Heads (memorable anthems: “Psycho Killer,” “Burning Down the House”), Byrne started exploring the artistic potential of PowerPoint a few years ago. In 2003 he compiled his experiments in a 96-page, book/DVD set titled David Byrne: E.E.E.I.
To insiders, E.E.E.I.’s title seems like a well-placed jab at Edward Tufte, the author of a series of opinionated classics on information presentation and design. In coffee-table manifestos such as The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information, Tufte argued that the best information graphics are minimal, reductive, and information-rich. Byrne’s choice of book title is a florid, sarcastic riff on Tufte’s strident minimalism. Parenthetically, we’re told that E.E.E.I stands for “Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information” — a glib reference to Tufte’s Envisioning Information.
Byrne has brought his book to life with I 
PowerPoint, a traveling show and lecture coming to the UW’s Kane Hall on Mar. 6. Within the limits of PowerPoint, Byrne has managed to create works of surprising visual and emotional force. In one image, a web of sinusoidal arrows curve and crawl across Byrne’s canvas, pointing authoritatively toward nowhere. On another slide, the face of Dolly the Sheep is encapsulated by PowerPoint’s stock curly brackets. It’s a loaded image that communicates subtly different messages to writers, logicians, and computer programmers. Are these carefully layered meanings characteristic of gallery-grade, capital-A “Art”?
David Byrne is playing meta-mind games with his audiences, offering up a PowerPoint about PowerPoint — and abundant commentary on our snarky reactions to the form.
Come Sunday, each person in Byrne’s sellout audience will pay between $8 and $18 apiece to watch a PowerPoint presentation. Byrne begs the question: why?
I PowerPoint
7 p.m. Mar. 6, 130 Kane (doors open 6:15 p.m.)
$18 / $15 members / $8 students
Call 206-616-9894 for tickets.
Note: The Henry Art Gallery reports that this event is sold out. However, a very limited number of rush tickets may be available on the day of the performance. If available, rush tickets will be sold at Kane Hall on a first-come, first-serve basis.
