Kudos to the Akron Public Library and the Akron Art Museum for working together to bring David Byrne to Northeast Ohio. If you're not familiar with David Byrne, he became famous in the '80s as lead singer of the Talking Heads. After his stint with that group, he launched a solo career; but this tour isn't about Byrne's music, it's about his compositions using PowerPoint, presentation software from Microsoft. PowerPoint presentations are standard fare for businesses and academia, and if I had my druthers, the first time you tried to use the program, you'd have to watch one of Byrne's presentations. Why? Because Byrne understands what Marshall McLuhan said before Whitfield Diffle used a computer to print the first overhead transparency - "The medium is the message." Byrne illustrated this subtly and not so subtly showing examples of other people's PowerPoint presentations, such as Peter Norvig's version of The Gettysburg Address, Daniel Radosh's version of Hamlet and Lolita, and examples from ebibleteacher.com, and then citing the root cause of the Challenger Accident and a recent PowerPoint presentation calling for the invasion of Saudi Arabia.

The content of this Modern Masters Series lecture was one thing, the process was another. There were 450+ people in the library's new auditorium. Byrne, who attended the Rhode Island School of Design before he became a performer, engaged the crowd immediately, making them laugh at his amateur-looking presentation and his joking, "I learned the word 'deliverables' for the first time this year...and I've never used it in conversation". But don't let Byrne's lampooning fool you. One look at his work Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information reveals an artistic mastery of the medium that elevates the technical use of bullet points and clip art to an aesthetic of sophisticated multi-channel communication.

After seeing Byrne's work and hearing him speak on the concepts of PowerPoint as part of our culture of pageantry - where lots of stuff is flying by, but little is communicated - it should be treated as traditional Asian theater: everything that's happening is in plain sight, not hidden so the viewer can't understand. I'll never be able to casually watch a PowerPoint presentation the same way again, and my hope is that Byrne's work continues to penetrate into our corporate culture. Maybe then we won't have to suffer through boring presentations that cause serious misunderstandings or accidents. From Cool Cleveland Information Officer George Nemeth george@coolcleveland.com

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