The 2004 Wired Rave Awards:

Art: David Byrne

For bending our minds with PowerPoint Slides

Wired Magazine, Issue 12.04 : April 2004

Photo by F. Scott Schafer

PowerPoint is best known for mind-numbing presentations that transform bumbling salespeople into confident, corporate warriors. But David Byrne used the software to produce evocative — and controversial — art. Here are a few bullet points, as told to Blaise Zerega, about Byrne's PowerPoint conversion and his book/DVD Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information:

• A big part of American culture is business culture. I owe it to myself to acknowledge it, to say, OK, this is part of my life, part of my work, part of the world I live in.

• PowerPoint can make almost anything appear good and look professional. Quite frankly, I find that a little bit frightening.

• Slickness is not always something that is desired. It's just trying to knock you over, trying to hype you up. That's a danger if there's actually nothing there.

• Sometimes when you put on the mask or the clothes of a character, you take on some of the aspects of the character. I guess that's what happened to me. I found that I was enjoying it.

• In one of my favorite images, lots of overlapping words are tightly layered on top of each other. One of the few recognizable words is overwhelmed.

• Galleries are my obvious venue, but I find that my presentations work very well in public, non-art spaces, places where people who work in offices can interact with it. They gasp and say, "Oh my god, that's done with PowerPoint!"

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