Using PowerPoint, Artists Ask How Performative Presentations Shape Our Thinking
via Art in America
The software that emerged as “Presenter” more than thirty years ago, then became PowerPoint and its brethren, has transformed the way we teach and hold meetings and manage relationships and worship.¹ It has turned the vertical surfaces of our built world into substrates for an unending flow of dynamic, didactic messages. And for nearly as long as it has been in existence, slide presentation software has been under attack. In 2003, visualization shaman and statistician Edward Tufte critiqued the program for impoverishing the art of rhetoric, normalizing the slickly presented non sequitur, and condoning the proliferation of painful graphic design.