PowerPoint, in one way or another, directly influences the lives of almost everybody who lives and works in the ‘West’. Anyone who is caught up in the circuits of an increasingly global, post-Fordist system of goods and capital will have suffered through a terrible PowerPoint or delivered one. It has become something of a rite of passage. To go online and search ‘PowerPoint’ is to discover a whole world of white-collar middle managers and self-proclaimed zen masters; each providing tips on how to keep your audience awake during your mid-morning meet-up and what animated transition best fits your presentations needs.
Yet PowerPoints are different to presentations, they are PowerPoints. The branded nature of delivering words and thoughts very neatly reflects the software’s entanglement with a consumerist model of thinking and speaking; and the wording of the brand itself – Power Point (with its trademark ‘Bullet Point’) – very neatly reflects it’s complex associations with both the military and the military industrial complex. Yet these associations are nuanced by PowerPoint’s absolute hegemony, the very fact that PowerPoint is a virtually omnipresent entity also serves to reflect the software’s potential for flexibility. Not every PowerPoint is used to deliver a more competitive business model, a more thorough intelligence briefing or a more profitable product. In fact a great deal of PowerPoint’s use is directed, not towards the production of profit at all, but rather the production of knowledge.
Therefore this book exists as a site on which to explore two seemingly opposed uses of Microsoft’s infamous presentation software; it’s uses in both the American military and in contemporary systems of education in order to trace the culture that both of these uses create. Through an investigation into PowerPoint’s prosaic appearance in the ‘Global Inteligence Files’ leak of 2012; the ‘aesthetic logic’ of presentations in art history and beyond; and the effects that PowerPoint’s defaults, presets and templates have on the language and discourse it facilitates, Death By PowerPoint seeks to reveal the strange world within PowerPoint and the stranger world that PowerPoint creates.
[1]. Introduction available here
[2]. Details here
[3]. See his 2009 paper Critique of Computational Reason in the Natural Sciences.
[4]. Space and Time in the Foundations of Mathematics, or some challenges in the interactions with other sciences
[5].Paper available here.
Jack Clarke is a designer/artist and researcher/writer oscillating between London and Rotterdam – cities where he both studies and works on projects he probably doesn't understand yet – under the guise of ifsohow.co.uk