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David Byrne Subverts PowerPoint
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.
...if you're featured on the Windows XP CD?
Anyone read that article in wired about why powerpoint sucked? Wasn't there something recently aswell about how power point made you dumb?
...
He's Lazy
-I-I-I'm wicked and I'm lazy
Ooooh, don't you wanna save me
I'm lazy when I'm lovin', I'm lazy when I play
I'm lazy with my girlfriend a thousand times a day
I'm lazy when I'm speaking, I'm lazy when I walk
I'm lazy when I'm dancin' and I'm lazy when I talk
I really hope someone managed to get him to put some *serious effort* into this book+DVD, seems like he's recently been dealing with a major motivation problem.
Then again, if PowerPoint is ForDummies, that probably fits nicely with his lazy attitude to things.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
turning Powerpoint into a visual art medium...
this man is EVIL!!!
A publicity stunt and a cheap one, at that. Someone is beginning to realize that the really important channels of information on the Internet are controlled by nerds and so washed-out artists are starting to jump on the fad train.
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.
Next up, stacking old PCs as sculpture, tiling your bathroom with old purple 486s (and having in-tile heating to boot!), and the new video from Justin Timberlake, featuring MSWord and 'Dancing Clippy'
Impress
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
More than mere navel gazing.
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.
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."
Honestly, I can't take anyone serious who can't tell the differnce between a software brand name and a type of software. Even if he's not a geek but considers himslef an artist.
If you plan to act publicly (artists usually do that), you should display enough brains to tell the difference. Otherwise you're not being an artist rather than a complete idiot.
Art under a brand name isn't. It's a commercial.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Impress
KPresenter
Keynote
Any others out there?
The Marketing here is wa-a-a-a-y more insidious than you think. Back in the Day, when I was awakening in pools of someone else's vomit curbside in front of CBGB's to the encore strains of "Pscho Killer.... Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa... Better run run run run Run Away!" David Byrne was der shizznitz... or whatever ridiculous phrase has replaced the ridiculous phrase "da bomb" in modern parlance.
20-somethings don't make decisions regarding what presentation software is loaded across an enterprise; we 40-somethings have that dubious honor. And all we hear these days is how Powerpoint is, well, so 1996, and un-cool. Who better to convince us otherwise? The lead singer from ColdPlay (am I spelling that correctly?)? No, young man,it's the guy in the big white suit who defined counterculture 'art' way back when the current generation of marketing "grown-ups" were actually artistic.
Funny thing is, I kinda remember how, back in the early '90s, marketing campaigns similarly co-copted Andy Warhol imagery to "artistically connect with" a previous generation who now found themselves in Brooks Brothers suits. I thought that was bogus then, but I think using Byrne is clever. Thanks, Slashdot, for pointing out how I've become what I once loathed.
All of which brings the lyrics to a Byrne song crashing home to me here on a Sunday morning as the children quietly watch a Strawberry Shortcake video in the next room:
" And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-Well...How did I get here?...
"And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right?...Am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself
MY GOD!...WHAT HAVE I DONE?"
A quick search on Google will tell you that Snoop Dog and Microsoft Word yields 4,810 hits, David Bowie and Excel yields 10,500 hits, and Madonna and Flash yields a whopping 217,000 (compare that with only 203,000 hits for Britney Spears and Flash).
Oddly enough, a search Frank Zappa and Filemaker Pro yielded a measly 396 hits (possibly he's not doing much work lately), though Marilyn Manson and ASP Server Side Scripting did return almost twice that number at 694 hits.
So you see it's not just artists from the 80's who are into new technology.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Well now, you make it sound like K&D produced the intro just for Apple which is not true. The song was licensed for use by Apple. It was originally released in 98 on "The K&D Sessions." The title escapes me right now but itself is probably a remix of something from someone, blah, blah, blah.
--Residential Interior Design
Jemma at
http://www.prate.com
(well known in net-art circles)
has done a few projects as
Tufte is for the Masses, and Brnes for a thin Slice of the Masses (the Classes) -
Byrne does does talk about the limitations of Powerpoint
But Byrne is an 'artist" and has been able to "overcome the limitations" in his own whimsical way. Most of what he does would not work in 99 % of the typical presentations.
Again, from the article ... and while reading it just imagine how many people could do then and then "sell" the shit ...
So, what I am trying to say is that Powerpoint has many many (some Terrible) limitations. Byrne has learnt to overcome some of them in a whimsical and creative way. His "artistic" talent is not present in most of the people making presentations. (I did write earlier on /. about Art and Overcoming limitations here)
So, most of the people should not follow his example or philosophy. And, to draw general conclusions from one odd data point (outlier) about the nature of data is pretty naive. On the Bell curve, he would be on one end of a tail ....
What Tufte is saying holds for the masses. What Byrne represents is for a thin slice (the classes) and the masses should not read too much into it.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Of course you don't care. Anybody that obviously considers spelling outdated wouldn't grasp anything that David Byrne has to say.
What is truly sad is that, from your perspective, "noble" wasn't a spelling error -if you were asked to write down the phrase "Nobel Prize" 500 times you would have written "noble" 500 times. I'm not even going to address using pill in place of pile.
[sigh] I'm going to email you a nice Powerpoint presentation on the importance of spelling. I think a book might be too much for you at this point.
Prosper
As far as it goes, I agree with another poster who replied - Byrne isn't a publicity hound. I happen to find him interesting and amusing, but many don't, and he's fine with that. 80's art rock isn't for everyone. Comparisons with Dolby are spot on.
I doubt much money was made on this - 1500 copies @ $80 isn't exactly a new industry. (I'm sure nobody lost money, but if amassing capital were the goal, I'm sure Byrne could sell out in a much more profitable fashion.)
As for obvious and cheap, well, art is in the eye of the beholder (and the bank account of the art dealer), but if it is so obvious and cheap, why didn't someone else do it first?
I forget what 8 was for.
see the wired article from about two months ago.
t ml
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt1.h
I have used Powerpoint upteen times over my career as I occassionally speak on Computer Security issues from general to specific audiences. I have always been forced to use PowerPoint simply because there seems to be nothing better out there at the moment. I have looked at KPresenter , Prosper, OpenOffice's Impress, and maybe one or two others. I love Keynote's features and gloss, but the expense of buying a very powerful 15" Powerbook to get it to work smoothly is somewhat of an obstacle to me. I'd love to have it, but I need it to run smoothly, and I'm not sure I can justify a $2000 expense for something I do about once a quarter.
Seriously guys - is there something out there I don't know about? I hate to open PowerPoint, but there doesn't seem to be anything even close to it right now. We have one Mac for checking web sites (G3 iBook), and otherwise run Linux and WinXP.
Suggestions? I'll look at ANY alternatives to PowerPoint!
I have used PowerPoint upteen times over my career as I occassionally speak on Computer Security issues from general to specific audiences. I have always been forced to use PowerPoint simply because there seems to be nothing better out there at the moment. I have looked at KPresenter , Prosper, OpenOffice's Impress, and maybe one or two others. I love Keynote's features and gloss, but the expense of buying a very powerful 15" Powerbook to get it to work smoothly is somewhat of an obstacle to me. I'd love to have it, but I need it to run smoothly, and I'm not sure I can justify a $2000 expense for something I do about once a quarter.
Seriously guys - is there something out there I don't know about? I hate to open PowerPoint, but there doesn't seem to be anything even close to it right now. We have one Mac for checking web sites (G3 iBook), and otherwise run Linux and WinXP. I'd prefer to avoid WinXP if at all possible!
Suggestions? I'll look at ANY alternatives to PowerPoint!
No MS Conspiracies here. David Byrne has long been obsessed with marketing as artictic medium. A favorite recent piece that I love is called Your Action World. Released as a book, circulating initially in galleries, it opens with colors of famous companies--green, Beneton; orange/purple, FedEx. Then drugs, cities, outerspace, palm tree dreams, and insanity. Then metaphors of weapons coiled like DNA, burning in fire, flying in clouds. These designs were build as advertisments, complete with a pictures of the guns displayed on signs and billboards with confused tourist types staring at them, trying to figure out What's Going On? There are colors between the lines of a legal disclaimer medly. Pictures of actual company design. Music goes with the book. You can listen along to stock photos of corporate phots, beginning: "So let's get's started... let me start with one major warning. There is no need to put any limit limit on what is possible." No MS conspiracies. But damn funny and insidious as usual. Must check out the new PowerPoint is Evil. Now. I guess I've been sold on the idea ;)
The Custom Mary
The whole Corel WordPerfect Office Suite was very good in my opinion, and the cost is a fraction of MS Office.
G
A boring bullet-only PowerPoint could/should be done in Word, but consider a more interesting more graphics-intensive PowerPoint -- have you ever tried to lay out graphics in Word? All the "Float over text"/"Move with text" stuff -- it's a nightmare. Maybe Word's poor layout has something to do with some of PowerPoint's popularity.
Here's the famous, early take on PowerPoint being bad.
''Dateline - New York - Archeologists today discovered some previously unknown DECTapes containing some "TROFF" files created by Andy Warhol. TROFF is a early predecessor to Miscrosoft Word...''
Pardon me while I giggle uncontrollably.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Perhaps you have become what you loath, not by getting a beautiful wife and car, but by longing for a nostalgic past that never existed, getting your knickers in a bunch because some other geezer dared suggest use of a piece of software. A PIECE OF SOFTWARE, NOT A NUCLEAR WEAPON OR BIOTERROR AGENT. The zealotry of a 20 something becomes pathetic if you're still tooting that horn when you are in your 40's.
It was a delusion that our generation was any different or less pimpable the generations that came before. Despite that, we still have quite a long way to fall to replicate the crass commercialism of the baby-boomer's stars. I'm sure we will catch up.
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 use:
-= Slashdot as Presentation Software =-
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Look, Gramps, I know the ghost of Mrs. Parker, your 8th grade English teacher back in 1940 still haunts you (and probably gives you a woody to this day), but purfekt spelling is just not a priority in todays digital media (email, blogs, IM, open-comment sites like /., etc.) Tpyos happen at the speed
of thought -- who cares? It is exactly those thoughts that are important
here, not pavolvian submission to the stooooopid spelling rules of the English
language.
Oh, and many folks posting to sites like /. have other first
languages than the one you're so obsessed with. Your comments come off not
only as curmudgeonly, but racist and nationalistic as well.
-k
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
If shirts with bullet holes can be a medium, powerpoint is definitely eligible to be one.
Though how much did M$ pay this guy?
Trent Reznor is squarely in the Mac camp. Here's a few URLs:n t/ o r/
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/articles/2000/06/tre
http://www.macminute.com/2002/01/31/01311710
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/09/17/rezn
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
and they are hilarious, well done, and much different from what anyone would think of as a PowerPoint presentation.
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.
(Switch to new slide, each word appears one by one with a
I'm
An
Ordinary
Guy
(Fly in from the sides, gigantic font in word art)
Burning Down The House
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I personally think the Talking Heads had far more than two good songs. Then, after the demise of the Talking Heads, David Byrne went on to produce many albums of his own, all of which I consider to be very good albums. David Byrne does not need to, "desperately [search] for relevance."
Your statement seems to indicate that your knowledge of David Byrne body of work is terribly limited and shallow. Perhaps it is you that is, "desperately searching for relevance," in this discussion?
Saying PowerPoint is bad because people give mindless presentations with it is like saying newspapers are bad because all you've read is the National Enquirer
Frank Zappa and Filemaker Pro. Not bad for someone who has been dead for 10 years.
Are you sure, I thought it was Kid Loco, A Grand Love Theme or something like that..
please correct me if I'm wrong...
music lover since 1969
This was in Wired magazine nearly a year ago. I'm glad to see that the worlds leading news agency can keep up so closely to a mid-budget tech magazine.
Brian Millar's excellent Executive summary of Hamlet in Powerpoint. It includes a handy SWOT analysis of the Danish royal family.
He's also got a PDF version.
http://www.geocities.jp/nchikada/pac/
Hmmm. That is funny, when I read Cerf's defense of Gore he specifically disclaimed credit for fathering the internet. Nor did it seem to me he was giving Gore more credit than he was due. He backed up what Gore actually said he had done. Gore said he "took initiative" in creating the internet. Gore is a legislator. Anyone who is prepared to be fair will interpret Gore's statement -- uttered during an interview, not in an article -- as being that Gore "took legislative initiative". I believe the record was clear. Gore authored bills to pay for the creation of the internet. Look it up.
This is what us foreigners hate most about US domestic politics -- the willingness of the more partisan Americans to lie and distort what their opponents say.
and MS has locked up the market in such a way that many people think:
"word processor" = MS Word
"spreadsheet" = Excel
"presentation software" = Powerpoint
"personal computer" = Any PC running Microsoft OS
Have you ever listened to a talking heads album?
Their music, lyrics, and presentation all were very inventive and creative. They've had a definitive influenced on what many considers the best popular music of the last couple years. (radiohead, primus, sigur ros, air, etc, etc).
I'm guessing you were thinking along the line of "it from the 80s, it must be bad!". Well, it's not (they formed in 1973, i believe) and it's good.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
This has got to be one of the lamest article submissions I've seen. Karma bonus unchecked accordingly.
"Sufferin' succotash."
The point is not that PowerPoint qua software is bad, and that we should seek clones of it to do the same job. Rather, the point is that PowerPoint-style presentations are (usually) stupid and stupifying, regardless of the software used to create them. Do the places in which you give lectures have a whiteboard? Or select some other means of giving a convincing presentation.
Radiohead is even named for a Talking Heads song.
One of the things I love about David Byrne is that you often don't know if he is poking fun of something or paying homage to it. The album and movie True Stories is a perfect example of this. This little stunt seems along the same lines.
"Microsoft spokesman Simon Marks wouldn't comment on whether PowerPoint has debased society but said in an e-mail, "PowerPoint continues to evolve to make it easier for customers to present their information in the style that best suits the content and the audience."
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.
Aha! It is called "Sofa Rockers" by the Sofa Surfers/Richard Dorfmeister. Number 2 on the 2nd CD. Whether it is a remix or an original track, I'm not sure.
--Residential Interior Design
"So PowerPoint doesn't make you stupid. It just makes it easier to show how stupid you are."
exactly.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wired News also covered this story, and has a great interview with Byrne. You can read it here.
I agree with a lot of your points. But I don't believe that in popular media, staying power is a mark of genius. Staying power in pop music is more like catering to the lowest common denominator. True genius usually just goes over the heads of most common people.
Much of what you say I can't argue with, if only because it's all subjective, but FWIW one of your apparent underlying assumptions (that David Byrne's career lasted a certain time and has since ended) is incorrect. Yeah, he was a member of a band that no longer performs together, but that was just one phase of his career. He's kept making music after leaving Talking Heads, and continues to make music to this day. Comparing just his Talking Heads work to Bob Dylan's entire career is meaningless; one might as well compare just Bob Dylan's Traveling Wilburys work to David Byrne's entire career. Comparing U2's duration to David Byrne's doesn't serve your case at all, since Byrne's (as opposed to Talking Heads's) is longer.
Oh, and just FWIW, David Byrne himself would be among the first to champion many of the other artists you cite. I'd also bet dollars to donuts many of those other artists you say are so much greater (more influential, longer-lasting, etc.) hold him in pretty high regard themselves.
An icon in art music? I never even heard of the guy until this article.
Sorry to tell you, but it's true. David Byrne is famous. The Talking Heads are famous too. Really, really famous. Whether you consider his music true Art, or just new wave pop, if you haven't heard if him you probably shouldn't be posting any comments to this article and you most definatly shouldn't be admitting to it in public.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
you forgot
. Profit!
What a long, strange trip it's been.
I've been through enough corporate presentations that were a hairsbreadth from Saturday Night Live skits that it's no surprise people won't see the point of a satire of them. Satire is becoming a dead form, anyway. We're in an age where the rantings of pundits on the Left and the Right are indistinguishable from satire. So it's no surprise that even people who RTFA'd missed Byrne's intent.
I think a lot of people have missed the point, including (unfortunately) those who see this as a Byrne vs. Tufte or whoever conflict.
David Byrne did not say that PowerPoint is good as a business tool. He said it was useful as an artistic medium. A guitar isn't useful as a business tool, either, but is tremendously useful as an artistic medium.
This sentence no verb.
The most Talking Heads-like pop single of this past year was a Justin Timberlake song
Which song is that? I really like the Talking Heads. I didn't really like N'Sync. I like some of Justin's singles. I really like "Rock Your Body", i like "Like I Love You" and "Senorita". "Cry Me a River" is awful. "I'm Loving It" is almost awful or might not be; but I really like the McDonald's song of the same name (and some of the girls in the commercials). (I haven't heard enough of the Justin song to know if the McDonald's is a cover of some sorts).