Power Point Chart Art

Powerpoint presentations have been described as the means
of communication with the highest noise to signal ratio known to man.  In
their defense, they are not really designed to communicate anything;
rather, they exist as calming eye candy to channel and focus attention
as the speaker tries to communicate using the tried and true tools of
oral persuasion.

At least this is the charitable view. The uncharitable view is that these visual aides serve as a sort of academic prestidigitation, diverting the audiences attention from an almost complete lack of coherence or scientific rigor in the presentation itself.

The Dowbrigade likes to keep this in mind at times like the present,
when we are preparing an important Power Point (actually Keynote) presentation
for the 38th Annual
TESOL Conference next week in Long Beach, CA (nothing
like leaving the prep til the last minute).

Considering this lack of content communication inherant in Power Point,
we are quite pleased to find that at least one academic presenter has
branched
out
into creating
Power Point artwork, completely devoid of communicative content, other
than artsy commentary on the absurdities of the thinking life in Cambridge.

The artist in question is Michael Lewy,
whose day job is at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
at MIT. He has just published a book
of his Power Point art, consisting mainly of angst-encumbered charts, titled
"Chart Sensation"
(J &L Books). Below are a few of our favorites:

"Every
single one of these images is a protest against the brute fact that I have
to work for a living"

Quote and images from "Chart Sensations"