atc @ ucb : david byrne, mar 7, 7:30pm

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
of UC Berkeley's Center for New Media Presents:

I [heart] PowerPoint
David Byrne, Artist, Musician, NYC

Mon, 7 March, 7:30-9pm
All ATC Lectures are free and open to the public
** Please note special location and Ticket info below **
=====================================================

PowerPoint, the software application developed by engineers at
Microsoft Corporation, has become the ubiquitous standard for
presentations on topics ranging from business to academia to charity
fund-raising.

The structure and features of PowerPoint were designed assuming a
specific world view. The software, by making certain actions easier
and more convenient than others tells you how to think as it helps you
accomplish your task. Not in an obvious way or in an obnoxious way or
even in a scheming way. The biases are almost unintentional; they are
natural and well integrated. It is possible that the engineers and
designers have no intention of guiding and straightening out your
thinking; they simply feel that the assumptions upon which they base
their design decisions are the most natural and practical. You are
thus subtly indoctrinated into a manner of being and behaving,
assuming and acting, that grows on you as you use the program.

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

=====================================================
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

=====================================================
** Special Location and Ticket info:

This presentation will be in 155 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

Tickets cannot be purchased or reserved. Open seating tickets will be
distributed, one per person in order of arrival, outside Dwinelle Hall
starting at 6pm that evening and continuing until we run out. Doors
will open at 7pm only to those who have obtained tickets. We regret
that we have only approximately 300 tickets to distribute and are not
sure how long they will last!

This presentation will be webcast live, see
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/events/
=====================================================

The ATC is sponsored by UC Berkeley's: Center for New Media, Office of
the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, College of Engineering
Interdisciplinary Studies Program, Center for Information Technology
in the Interest of Society, Consortium for the Arts, BAM/PFA, Townsend
Center for the Humanities, and the Intel Corporation. David Byrne's
presentation is supported, in part, by the UC Berkeley Art Museum and
Pacific Film Archive.

ATC Director: Ken Goldberg
ATC Associate Director: Greg Niemeyer
ATC Executive Assistant: Irene Chien
Curated with the ATC Advisory Board

Full F04-S05 series schedule and video archive:
http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/

For press inquiries, please contact Kathleen Maclay <[email protected]>

Tickets: (see above, we regret that tickets cannot be reserved for
this event)

This info online:
http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/byrne/





—————————————-
You are subscribed to this list as [email protected]. To unsubscribe, send email to unsubscribe.25811.22144719.121770538664336189-list_rhizome.org@en.groundspring.org.

Our postal address is
685 Carolina Street
San Francisco, California 94107
United States