david byrne-i --heart---powerpoint

Let us imagine, then, that PowerPoint and its attendant softwares are actually a means to a positive emotional and philosophical end, a path towards a goal that is easy to reach and available to all. The billions of people who use it are on their way to happiness, contentment and a feeling of belonging to a society that thinks and feels the same way and shares their values.

"Rather than resist, I decided that I must surrender and learn to use this software myself, for, like everyone, I long to belong. I have a long way to go: my presentations are sometimes unclear and confusing. But I have made huge advances and I feel myself more at ease with each new presentation." - David Byrne

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David Byrne, best known as one of the Talking Heads, has been making visual art for more than 25 years and is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in NYC. He has been working with PowerPoint as an art medium for a number of years. What started off as a joke took on a life of its own as Byrne realized he could create moving pieces, despite the limitations of the medium. His new book of artwork done with PowerPoint is "Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information." http://www.davidbyrne.com

Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation

PORTLAND, OR—Project manager Ron Butler left behind a 48-slide PowerPoint presentation explaining his tragic decision to commit suicide, coworkers reported Tuesday.

"When I first heard that Ron had swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills, I was shocked," said Hector Benitez, Butler's friend and coworker at Williams+Kennedy Marketing Consultants. "But after the team went through Ron's final PowerPoint presentation, I had a solid working knowledge of the pain he was feeling, his attempts to cope, and the reasons for his ultimate decision."

"I just wish he would've shot me an e-mail asking for help," Benitez added...

Options One "To Be" || Option Two "Or Not To Be"

Cons:
slings
arrows

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm

I love modern technology! I am still stoked I can click a button and a lecture from Berkley comes up on my pc, instantly. Wow.

Hm. See, I think he learned to use it like everyone else does, and learned to use it in innovative ways because he thinks like an artist. Part of the art is the usual received knowledge that everyone has, or at least that everyone else has.

I really, really love David Byrne, btw.

and i think his slightly apparent nervousnous at times was kinda cute.

i found out about this broadcast half an hour before it happened, and i was in berkeley until 3:30 today, damnit. i could have been there(155 dwinelle, i took a spanish intensive course there). well, coulda woulda shoulda. i just saw the webcast my comfy room in el barrio mission, west of berkeley. good enough.

Why? It's easy and dull. That's kind of why he used it.

Most of us did not grow up with the internet, we came at it with old ways of communicating and with the hands we were given
56k = txt+ images pwn
dsl = mp3 pwn
cheap storage = avi pwn
... = ?

I guess the generation that will grow up with simple, effective, low-cost online hypermedia communication tools will be better at expressing themselves @ teh contemporary soc, network of networks, and have a better mastery of this fluid universe of communication.

Byrne distills everything down to its essence, even art, even his own function as an artist. To some degree, the function of all art is to shed new light on the banal, just like the function of all therapy is to acclimate you with the fact that you, too, are banal. But Byrne is an odd kind of purist.

I do not know what David Byrne thinks of other modern artists -- I'd be very interested to accompany him to a gallery sometime. It's a fantasy, and probably not true at all, but I can imagine him dismissing all other art as not banal enough. I think of the story about Sid Caesar, yelling at his writers for The Show of Shows. "NOT FUNNY ENOUGH!" he would scream, and throw the script across the table. Byrne could do that with art and banality. Nothing is banal enough for David Byrne. He is only fascinated by what is everyday, because only in that does he see the keys to the what we really are. I think he's definitely on to something.

The idea is that we all take certain things for granted, and what one takes for granted is the measure of the man (or woman, or whoever). It runs through all his lyrics and all his visual art. The only thing he thinks is not subject to the ordinary rules of banality is music. Music is special, because it reaches around what we think and touches us in ways we can't even begin to intellectualize or flatten. Everything else... well, that's what he must strive to make art of.