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A rock star aims his creative powers at, of all things, PowerPoint
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
D.K. ROW
He's sung songs about burning houses and psycho killers, but right now
David Byrne, the frontman of the legendary '80s band The Talking Heads,
is on the telephone talking in measured and thoughtful terms about . . .
PowerPoint.
"I started playing (with it) without any direction, which ended up being
a lot of fun," Byrne says about the slide-showlike presentation software
that's used by everyone from chief executives to NASA scientists. "And
not having to use it for what it was designed for, I realized you can
make these . . . little films that run by themselves. So I started
making them."
Thus began a spirited and sometimes critical exploration of PowerPoint's
-- and Western society's -- graphic universe, one that resulted in
Byrne's combination book/DVD, "Envisioning Emotional Epistemological
Information" (Steidl Publishing), published in 2003. On Friday, Byrne
will opine on all things PowerPoint at the Portland Art Museum in a
benefit lecture for the museum's Photography Council.
Sound boring? Then you don't know much about the gently zany,
52-year-old "Renaissance Man of Rock," who started toying with
PowerPoint a few years ago to give his lectures the tongue-in-cheek
feeling of a sales pitch. The modest, quiet-spoken Byrne, who has done
everything from scoring music for movies to exhibiting his own art since
The Talking Heads split in 1991, has some trenchant observations about a
mode of communication that has, in Byrne's opinion, become the message,
not the messenger.
You're clearly fascinated by PowerPoint and have written a book that, in
one sense, is an homage to it. But you're also deeply skeptical of its
purpose.
I probably have an innate bias (against) and skepticism towards business
culture in general, which is partly unfair. But I know it's there. So I
probably started out (with the intention of) poking fun at business
culture but then exhausted that idea and eventually just thought of this
as another creative medium with its own limitations, glitches and faults
that you could use to your own advantage.
So is your book a critique of PowerPoint?
No, I don't think so. Those critiques exist, but my book isn't that.
When my stuff first came out, it was mentioned in the same breath with a
pamphlet written by Edward Tufte (a professor emeritus at Yale
University). He does these beautiful books on how to present information
efficiently and accurately through graphic means. Just beautiful books.
Lately, he's been on his horse about PowerPoint. He put out a pamphlet
saying that PowerPoint is a very inefficient means of conveying
information yet it's somehow become ubiquitous.
He also thinks that PowerPoint is dangerous, that it's a good way to
hide or manipulate information.
He thinks it's dangerous because it conveys information in a slick,
simplified way. You know, it's like what's happened to TV news. It's
been dumbed down extremely.
The implication seems to be that society is engaged in a language of
nonsense.
Oh yes. There's a lot of jargon that communicates nothing. It's just
reassuring us that we're part of the same club -- but nothing's being
communicated.
Peter Norvig, an engineer at Google, said, ". . . PowerPoint doesn't
kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having
a loaded AK-47 on the table." Do you agree or is Norvig just being dramatic?
I agree with that. It's like saying guns don't kill people, people kill
people, but having a gun on the table means it's a lot more likely that
someone is going to use it. The same thing with PowerPoint: having it so
available means that it's a lot easier to use it than not to. Yes, you
can get a lot of dead, pointless meetings. The most famous example (of
how PowerPoint oversimplifies complex information) is the Columbia Space
Shuttle disaster.
Tell us about that. News stories after the crash revealed how NASA's
internal reports before the mission mentioned the shuttle's
vulnerabilities but they were presented in a PowerPoint language so
simplified that their conclusions were obscured.
Tufte goes into the details, but yes, the faults of the (defective)
O-rings were hinted at in a PowerPoint presentation. But because it was
buried in this format, it . . . phhttt . . . flew by. Well, you can't
blame PowerPoint for the death of astronauts, but people used it as one
more example of how little information gets communicated in this medium.
Communication has always been a central concern of yours. Just curious,
what books are you reading now?
Well, (laughs). . . . For my Australian touring needs (Byrne has just
arrived on the West Coast from the Australian leg of a music tour), I've
brought along William T. Vollmann's "Rising Up and Rising Down," a
meditation on violence. It's incredible. And I also brought along a
biography of Imelda Marcos. Somehow, I think these two are linked.
You're often described as the smart person's rock star.
That used to bother me. I think -- and accurately -- that it was not
meant as a compliment but as a criticism. The implication was that my
music was not sincere or heartfelt: It was cold, calculated. But I think
.. . . well, I think my music has changed quite a bit since then. It has
a lot more heart than it used to. I also think that that is part of a
misconception that artistic types are stupid. It's a willful
misconception. People like to think creative types are a ball of feeling
and aren't smart. That smart people work in think tanks. It's the other
way around.
What are your final conclusions about PowerPoint?
I think we communicate graphically, through icons and imagery much more
than we realize. And I think, for the most part, we are communicated to
graphically, whether in advertising or movies or on television. And
because it's not primarily text, and we don't have a grammar and
understanding of it, we've never learned to talk about images and icons
-- at least the general public hasn't learned. So it becomes one-way
communication: We're being talked at but we can't talk back. We can talk
back verbally but that's in a different language and it pushes different
buttons. That's part of what draws me to this and the other things I do:
I want to learn the language that is being spoken to me.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
D.K. ROW
He's sung songs about burning houses and psycho killers, but right now
David Byrne, the frontman of the legendary '80s band The Talking Heads,
is on the telephone talking in measured and thoughtful terms about . . .
PowerPoint.
"I started playing (with it) without any direction, which ended up being
a lot of fun," Byrne says about the slide-showlike presentation software
that's used by everyone from chief executives to NASA scientists. "And
not having to use it for what it was designed for, I realized you can
make these . . . little films that run by themselves. So I started
making them."
Thus began a spirited and sometimes critical exploration of PowerPoint's
-- and Western society's -- graphic universe, one that resulted in
Byrne's combination book/DVD, "Envisioning Emotional Epistemological
Information" (Steidl Publishing), published in 2003. On Friday, Byrne
will opine on all things PowerPoint at the Portland Art Museum in a
benefit lecture for the museum's Photography Council.
Sound boring? Then you don't know much about the gently zany,
52-year-old "Renaissance Man of Rock," who started toying with
PowerPoint a few years ago to give his lectures the tongue-in-cheek
feeling of a sales pitch. The modest, quiet-spoken Byrne, who has done
everything from scoring music for movies to exhibiting his own art since
The Talking Heads split in 1991, has some trenchant observations about a
mode of communication that has, in Byrne's opinion, become the message,
not the messenger.
You're clearly fascinated by PowerPoint and have written a book that, in
one sense, is an homage to it. But you're also deeply skeptical of its
purpose.
I probably have an innate bias (against) and skepticism towards business
culture in general, which is partly unfair. But I know it's there. So I
probably started out (with the intention of) poking fun at business
culture but then exhausted that idea and eventually just thought of this
as another creative medium with its own limitations, glitches and faults
that you could use to your own advantage.
So is your book a critique of PowerPoint?
No, I don't think so. Those critiques exist, but my book isn't that.
When my stuff first came out, it was mentioned in the same breath with a
pamphlet written by Edward Tufte (a professor emeritus at Yale
University). He does these beautiful books on how to present information
efficiently and accurately through graphic means. Just beautiful books.
Lately, he's been on his horse about PowerPoint. He put out a pamphlet
saying that PowerPoint is a very inefficient means of conveying
information yet it's somehow become ubiquitous.
He also thinks that PowerPoint is dangerous, that it's a good way to
hide or manipulate information.
He thinks it's dangerous because it conveys information in a slick,
simplified way. You know, it's like what's happened to TV news. It's
been dumbed down extremely.
The implication seems to be that society is engaged in a language of
nonsense.
Oh yes. There's a lot of jargon that communicates nothing. It's just
reassuring us that we're part of the same club -- but nothing's being
communicated.
Peter Norvig, an engineer at Google, said, ". . . PowerPoint doesn't
kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having
a loaded AK-47 on the table." Do you agree or is Norvig just being dramatic?
I agree with that. It's like saying guns don't kill people, people kill
people, but having a gun on the table means it's a lot more likely that
someone is going to use it. The same thing with PowerPoint: having it so
available means that it's a lot easier to use it than not to. Yes, you
can get a lot of dead, pointless meetings. The most famous example (of
how PowerPoint oversimplifies complex information) is the Columbia Space
Shuttle disaster.
Tell us about that. News stories after the crash revealed how NASA's
internal reports before the mission mentioned the shuttle's
vulnerabilities but they were presented in a PowerPoint language so
simplified that their conclusions were obscured.
Tufte goes into the details, but yes, the faults of the (defective)
O-rings were hinted at in a PowerPoint presentation. But because it was
buried in this format, it . . . phhttt . . . flew by. Well, you can't
blame PowerPoint for the death of astronauts, but people used it as one
more example of how little information gets communicated in this medium.
Communication has always been a central concern of yours. Just curious,
what books are you reading now?
Well, (laughs). . . . For my Australian touring needs (Byrne has just
arrived on the West Coast from the Australian leg of a music tour), I've
brought along William T. Vollmann's "Rising Up and Rising Down," a
meditation on violence. It's incredible. And I also brought along a
biography of Imelda Marcos. Somehow, I think these two are linked.
You're often described as the smart person's rock star.
That used to bother me. I think -- and accurately -- that it was not
meant as a compliment but as a criticism. The implication was that my
music was not sincere or heartfelt: It was cold, calculated. But I think
.. . . well, I think my music has changed quite a bit since then. It has
a lot more heart than it used to. I also think that that is part of a
misconception that artistic types are stupid. It's a willful
misconception. People like to think creative types are a ball of feeling
and aren't smart. That smart people work in think tanks. It's the other
way around.
What are your final conclusions about PowerPoint?
I think we communicate graphically, through icons and imagery much more
than we realize. And I think, for the most part, we are communicated to
graphically, whether in advertising or movies or on television. And
because it's not primarily text, and we don't have a grammar and
understanding of it, we've never learned to talk about images and icons
-- at least the general public hasn't learned. So it becomes one-way
communication: We're being talked at but we can't talk back. We can talk
back verbally but that's in a different language and it pushes different
buttons. That's part of what draws me to this and the other things I do:
I want to learn the language that is being spoken to me.