Spartan Holiday Meets Pecha Kucha
It's been a busy year, to say the least, and my blogging output has suffered as a result. Here in the last few weeks of December I hope to remedy that, at least in part, by circling back to things I meant to report on at the time.
Last April, after publishing "The Five Pagodas," Spartan Holiday No. 2, Scott Gericke and I gave a Pecha Kucha talk at Mad Art Gallery in St. Louis. For the uninitiated, Pecha Kucha (pronounced pehKOO-kaCHA) is a sort of powerpoint-meets-performance-art format created in Japan.You create 20 slides for projection, each of which appears for 20 seconds.
Within those parameters, you construct a streamlined presentation designed to tell a focused story. In 400 seconds, or 6 minutes and 20 seconds. You stand up front, they click play, and off it goes. It's a little nerve-wracking, but it's a hoot, too. We had fun.
Scott and I created a presentation to introduce the magazine to a new audience and also to tell the story of our ongoing collaboration on the publication. I don't seem to be able to embed the video here, so click on this link to access the YouTube file.
My painting of a painted box turtle from the MySci project (2005-06) meets Glenn Beck. (The rhetorical set-up.)
The timing is a little off, as the intro title slate with our names was up as we began to speak.
Our talk was a more formal than many such presentations, but given the amount of content it made sense to write the copy in advance.
We were the first act of the night. It felt great to be done so soon! All downhill from there. It was really a great evening. (That's my lovely and talented wife Lori on the left.)
The St. Louis Pecha Kucha group has done a great job recruiting presenters and building an audience for these events. Ours was event #11, and a twelfth has occurred since.
All the (excellent) event photos are by Jarred Gastreich. You can see other presenters here.
