David Byrne's Alternate PowerPoint Universe By VERONIQUE VIENNE
POWERPOINT, the ubiquitous Microsoft business application, is not meant to be looked at too closely. People aren't supposed to notice its simplified graphics, ready-made templates, pie charts, arrows and icons; they're only supposed to notice the ideas that these features help organize. What's not hard to notice, however, is that in addition to organizing ideas, the software has a tendency to homogenize them, translating a Babel of voices into a single, droning voice of corporate culture. [...]
With his newest project, David Byrne has tried not only to see it anew, but also to use it in the least likely of all applications: a medium for creative expression. "Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information" (Steidl and PaceMcGill Gallery, 2003) is a boxed set containing a 96-page book and a DVD featuring 20 minutes of animation. In both mediums, Mr. Byrne, who is best known as a musician but who was trained as an artist, subjects PowerPoint's characterless graphic templates to a radical metamorphosis. Arrows that curve out of their trajectory and into psychedelic rainbow-colored curlicues, surreal charts that satirize postmodern posturing, typographical compositions that present absurd abstractions with straight-faced conviction and deadpan photographs of the most humdrum of everyday objects all morph into one another with the steady pacing of a corporate sales conference.
You can feel the medium resisting the invisible hand of the artist. Designed for easy digestion when projected on a screen, PowerPoint reveals its true identity when forced to perform without its well-rehearsed scripts. On the pages of the book, what you see is brute force, elemental verve, joyful savagery. Viewed on DVD, however, with the addition of music and movement, the same layouts become less threatening, less ruthless, even soothing at times. [...]
To view the medium creatively, he says, "You have to try to think like the guy in Redmond or Silicon Valley. You feel that your mind is suddenly molded by the thinking of some unknown programmer. It's a collaboration, but it's not reciprocal."
Starting with parody, he adds, even incompetent imitations, is a legitimate first step. Eventually, if you persevere, the obsessive nature of the process yields unexpectedly beautiful results. For him, then, the challenge became "taking a form that's purportedly logic and rational and making it poetic."
Yet one suspects that there is another agenda behind his attempt to subvert the global uniformity of PowerPoint. "Corporate culture," he says wistfully. "What if I could set it free?"
[...]
Yada, yada, yada. I've seen this work of Byrne's show up in a lot of places, like Wired, and the NY Times, and I can't understand what the fuss is all about. It looks like the usual sort of non-sequitur combinations of mundane pictures and objects and words, not much beyond Barbara Kruger's hackwork. Only here's Certified artist David Byrne, and he's using Powerpoint! How _witty_!
For all the chatter about how this work comments on Powerpoint-- the "corporate" look of the software, versus Byrne's "liberating" use of the tool, I just can't see any _reason_ for it. From what I can tell, Byrne could have used _any_ graphics software to create the very same images-- but if he did, I doubt that anyone'd say that he was "commenting" on the nature of Adobe Photoshop or Corel Draw or Macromedia Flash.