This Saturday, August 1 join e-tba (Emerging Tampa Bay Architects) for the third installment of Pecha Kucha. For those not familiar with the event, designers, activists, artists, advocates and generally creative people are given 20 slides shown for 20 seconds a piece to present an idea, theme, cause, or project.
Pecha Kucha originated in Japan and takes place in over 200 cities worldwide. It was invented by Tokyo-based architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Kleins who turned PowerPoint, fixture of monotonous cubicle life, into both art form and competitive sport. Their innovation, dubbed Pecha Kucha (Japanese for "chatter"), applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That's it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down. The result, in the hands of masters of this art form, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.
This article appears in Jul 22-28, 2009.