Ordinary Gweilo

Following on from my mention of Powerpoint, I found this:

In his book and DVD compilation, “Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information,” David Byrne twists PowerPoint from a marketing tool into a multimedia canvas, pontificating that the software’s charts, graphs, bullet points and arrows have changed communication styles.

The 96-page compilation, which debuted in September for $80, is best described as a coffee table book for nerds. The initial printing run of 1,500 copies sold out by mid-December.

The book includes mostly lucid musings on how PowerPoint has ushered in “the end of reason,” with pictures of bar charts gone hideously astray, fields of curved arrows that point at nothing, disturbing close-ups of wax hands and eyebrows, and a photo of Dolly the cloned sheep enclosed by punctuation brackets.

The 20-minute DVD, encased in the navy blue hardback cover, features the same abstractions in motion. Byrne wrote most of the music.

Is this clever or pretentious?

[via Slashdot]