Artist Process - David Byrne

One avenue of David Byrne’s artistic pursuit has been the use of PowerPoint software, an idea of his that I chose to look at for this assignment. This endeavor illustrates an artist researching a tool not usually used for art, and creating expressive works with it. Over the past few years, Byrne has been exploring the use of PowerPoint, and the idea came to him while working with the program to give presentations.

He found that the media tool actually had a negative effect on communicating his ideas instead of aiding him, and it was this very opposition that he found inspiration. After experimenting, with different uses of the program including some heavily satirical presentations making fun of PowerPoint itself, he was able to form his main idea for a new project: Take the rational forms and structures of this business tool, and use them in an irrational way.

Byrne studied corporate culture to find his pallet, and began to compile cliché images and jargon commonly used. “I love to use clichéd phrases, and cut them loose from what they are associated with”, he says, “…use them as free-floating poetic elements.”

For example, he took a look at phrases like “economic indicator” and “global initiative” and searched for a dialogue between these bits of jargon with more emotional phrases like “let yourself go” and “feeling really good”. In trying to discover any emotional connection between the two types of speech, he started arranging them on slides and presenting them graphically.

Using his collection of bar graphs and charts as reference, he began creating his own set of data visualization that was totally nonsensical – global trends modeled by arrows pointing and curving in chaotic directions, layers of corporate jargon phrases in bold fonts spread over the page, and emotionless corporate portraits of well-dressed people, distorted with shapes and discoloration.

Byrne presented this work in a book, a DVD, and a gallery exhibit displaying his slides on multiple screens throughout the room. For the DVD presentation, Byrne composed three electronic scores for the images, giving the piece an extra dimension for the experience. He used melodies that were mechanical, but have a bubbly, happy feel to them to create the contrast between a rigid corporate aesthetic and an emotional aesthetic. For the production of the book presentation, he collaborated with an artist on design. Byrne has built several pseudo PowerPoint presentations that he also performs across the country.