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David Byrne Subverts PowerPoint

Posted by timothy on from the office-cowboy dept.

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.

2 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Whats wrong with that generation ? RTFA by NoData · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm not going to comment on the quality of Byrne's post-modern art here, but he's definitely not a fanboy for Powerpoint. From the article:

    The book includes mostly lucid musings on how PowerPoint has ushered in "the end of reason," with pictures of bar charts gone hideously astray, fields of curved arrows that point at nothing, disturbing close-ups of wax hands and eyebrows, and a photo of Dolly the cloned sheep enclosed by punctuation brackets.

    Plus, I think he's just having a bit of a laugh on the conformist business world. It's, you know, satire:

    Byrne...said the compilation wasn't meant as a "serious statement about anything."

  2. Re:Powerpoint and Linux by spoonist · · Score: 4, Informative

    Impress

    KPresenter

    Keynote

    Any others out there?