PowerPoint Poetics

PowerPoint is slow, simple, boring, dull, beautiful, ugly, chaotic and evil. I love PowerPoint. I hate PowerPoint. I am obsessed with this strange piece of software. I use it to make and design GIFs, PDFs, and printed books. It's clunky and difficult to create in this program, but the constraints produce interesting materials, revealing the strange logic of the PowerPoint software. It was in this context, cultivating practices of bending and extending the potential of PowerPoint in creative and artistic misuse, that I first encountered the work of Tan Lin. 

Lin's work sprawls across media forms, constantly injecting and repurposing fragments of his and others' texts. Multiple versions of these texts proliferate through video, PDF, webpage, codex, GIF, PPT, and so on. The shifts that emerge from the texts' appearance across each form produce new modes of reading, even while often being themselves readings of other texts, enhancing or degrading previous versions and copies. Thus, while PowerPoint only comprises a small portion of Lin's work, it exemplifies his poetics of remixing, of drawing attention to the process of endless multi-mediation. PowerPoint continually remediates, iterates, and sequences what it is used to present, and in doing all of this, it makes everything a bit more boring.

PowerPoint is an oddly ubiquitous software. It was created in 1987 under the name Presenter, although the more familiar virtual slideshow has only been around since 1992. With each subsequent version, new features like animation, video, and AutoContent were added. In 2003, PowerPoint became part of the Microsoft Office suite, a critical part of an integrated software system. At this point, it had near-total dominance as presentation software, operating in a wide range of contexts from business meetings to classrooms to churches to graduations to government presentations. Despite its ubiquity, however, PowerPoint remains mostly unnoticed as a medium that shapes, constrains, and controls information — it goes beyond mere presentation, in other words. In their article, "One Damn Slide After Another," Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson write, "Despite extraordinary claims about the total domination of algorithms, protocols, the digital, bits, and information, the material conditions of mundane software use go largely under-recognized as key sites for cultural work. They see this as a "failure to enact an everyday turn" in our analysis of information flow, causing us to miss out on the boring structures that proliferate around us all the time.1

One of the reasons for its neglect is that PowerPoint occupies what Joanna Drucker and Patrik Svensson call middleware. Middleware is a "set of mediating and remediating protocols." They argue that "middleware tends to disappear . . . not because it is transparent, but because it sits in an in-between space, between content and consumption as a black box of procedures and organizational operations invisible to view."2

While analyses of PowerPoint as a medium are largely absent in literary and artistic criticism, artists have long been using the platform to investigate distribution, mediation, transfer, and contextualization. The artist and singer David Bryne has taken advantage of PowerPoint's excessive, clunky word art and pre-loaded graphics to convert the space of the info slide into an evacuated yet colorful shell. Daniel Eatock and Timothy Evans highlight the software's transition animations, using them to strip down their works to a series of slowly morphing black and white shapescapes. Tony Cokes's slideshows, in pairing sampled text from newspapers, music, and other common public sources with textured backgrounds and poppy soundtracks, uses the flatness of the slideshow to juxtapose a kind of minimalism with informational excess.

While many of these artists capture their PowerPoint performances and convert them into video art, Seth Cosmini's Leavesof.ppt remains available as a .ppt file. The slide show moves between sprawling poetic texts, embedded audio files, and a rushed clipart and meme gallery full of minions. The text moves through hilarious critiques of academic analysis and art discourse, and the all too familiar form of the TEDtalk presentation. The critique extends beyond the rhetorical structures and features of the PowerPoint to interrogate whiteness and reveal how white supremacy persists through the power structures and institutions of academia and the art world.

Across these examples, what is stressed is the simultaneous visibility and obfuscation that PowerPoint seems ideally designed to facilitate. As Shannon Mattern notes, the form "renders sampled texts newly visible, projected in the efficient, urgent, and didactic visual language of subway signs and quarterly reports. Their substrate, the humble slide deck, ultimately shows itself and its secret rhetorical power, too. Its wipes and fades reveal the performativity of rhetoric in an age of PowerPointed persuasion."3 The standardized form and smooth transfer of information, along with the mediation of attention, is part of the surface texture, obscuring and flattening every bit of text included. The viewer oscillates between the slides and the speaker, the fixed text and flowing speech. This movement between modes of transfer facilitate particular forms of distributing information: endless redundancy and bullet-pointed messaging.

The unwieldly aesthetics of PowerPoint came under scrutiny in 2013 when NSA's mass surveillance program, PRISM, had its slides leaked across the internet. The documents revealed unprecedented forms of mass surveillance and the cooperation and participation of large tech corporations like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and others. While some articles focused on the invasion of privacy and collaboration between these different tech companies and their networks, there was also a significant portion of articles that focused in on how shitty the slides looked. PowerPoint, by simultaneously flattening and organizing information in a hierarchy, can dull and trivialize even the most expansive invasions of privacy and exploitations of public trust. It obscures and softens information, hiding it through brevity, jargon, and bullet points. PowerPoint makes hypervisible the technical features of its form, while the actual material and substance discussed becomes abstracted and decontextualized through the very same process. This is the deep tension underlying the modes of ambience and awkwardness in PowerPoint. Smoothness is never free from clunkiness, and in fact, the more seemingly seamless its effects and displays, the more PowerPoint draws attention to itself.

In Lin's Bibliographic Sound Track (2012), the slides start with bibliographic information, often fragmented into separate lines and bullet-pointed lists. There are lists of figures and images, references to land art and academic articles. There are also fragments of text from other online sources, including tumblr sites like Chris Sylvester's sisteract.tumblr.com. But while the PowerPoint fully uses the various transition features and formats offered by the software, Lin also pushes the form beyond its supposed effectiveness. Each slide takes longer than anticipated, dragging out the experience and reminding you of the sequential nature of a project that refuses to move forward quickly. At the beginning of the recording, you can see the slideshow is 87 slides, a visible counteracting of PowerPoint's projection of synthesis and condensation. 

The PowerPoint facilitates a data flow, or more precisely, it slows down a data flow to avoid a data flood. It offers a controlled attention to the movement of information rather than an actually useful or efficient means of communication. Thus, while Lin's PowerPoint can be seen as a form of slow video art or a morphing digital painting, it is also a moderated reading experience. PowerPoint is a digital codex that breaks the static conventions of the page, while also reinscribing them in a more rigid structure. In "Why Power Point?", Lin describes this as "diffus[ing] the book into a general operating system."4 Lin is not of thinking of the book as separate and distinct from digital systems, but instead imagines a diffusion, a transcoding of the codex. In Bibliographic Sound Track, reading happens at a predetermined speed, letters slowly appearing and fading in sequence. The slowness produces a particular type of boredom, one that is common in any PowerPoint, but here, it feels deliberate. Lin writes, "People complain about PPT hell, but I wanted something slow, porous and meditational. Of course, during a PPT presentation, people do get up and walk out. People want to control their own attention. But I think it's more interesting to give oneself over to something."5

Take, for instance, the fact that the words not only take up a particular amount of visual space, but also occupy an exact amount of reading time. At times, the words appear sequentially, in lines that appear and then disappear. At other points, disappearance is withheld or delayed, with words appearing ordered and sequential at the top of the slide and remaining so as more lines accumulate from top to bottom. In other slides, the text appears in grids and/or with new lines forming above or filling gaps, shifting and distorting the original readings. In such moments, the continuous progression of the Powerpoint is undermined by the revisionary reading that becomes possible. Six minutes into the slideshow, a white rectangle appears in the middle of the slide, and the text begins fading into focus from the bottom of the rectangle:

The text continues to fade in a word a time, climbing up the page, slowly accumulating. As additional lines appear, it becomes unclear in which direction the language is to be read, as well as how the fragments relate to one another. New lines sometimes modify the lines that appeared before, new words even adjusting as the line fades in. The stanzas split ideas and connect. Do you read from the bottom up? Do you read as lines and words appear or wait for the full page? Do you read down the page? All these possibilities open up and are refused by the continuous momentum and pace of the automated erasures and appearances of text.

The language accumulates, but it rarely delivers any stable meaning or significance. It operates as junk data, informational excess. Just more textual material and digital matter sliding across the field of vision. As Edward Tufte writes, "Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships."6

In The Ph.D Sound (2012), Lin uses a soundtrack by dj Mosco. The contrast of the flat PowerPoint with the fast-paced, energetic soundtrack creates a strong dissonance between the sensory experience and the actual content. The slides and bibliographic details become abstract shapes and sprawling lines coming into and out of sync with the music. On the one hand, the work heightens our awareness of the dullness of academic work, epitomized in the endless listing of unformatted sources, an excruciatingly overloaded bibliography often consisting of fragments, partial links, inactive hyperlinks, etc. Each slide has a background of solid color, and often a text that dissolves in or appear one letter at a time, only to reveal a chaotic wall of fragments. On the other hand, the color contrast blurs the actual specifics of the content. The soundtrack and light animation seems to inject new life into these forms.

Typically, a PowerPoint functions as a way to tune out the speaker, allowing us to access the most important points, which have been condensed into fragments organized in a series of bullet points. With Lin's The Ph.D Sound, however, we begin to leave behind the presented content and slip into the flow of music. Or, more accurately, ideas and concepts give way to the materiality of the PowerPoint, the blocks of color, the individual letters that make up words, the "cut and paste" mode of the text.

Reversing PowerPoint's attempt to make presentations more "engaging," Lin's work encourages the audience to disengage, to let the work flow or wash over without looking too closely. Ironically, this is done by pushing to an extreme the already fraught question of reading and non-reading that is inherent to the platform. In many ways, PowerPoints invite the refusal of most traditional forms of reading, moving toward a more passive conveying of information, a gestural acknowledgement of words on a screen. Within The Ph.D Sound, this is taken into overdrive as forms of animation and movement overtake the text. We are made aware of the presentation software underlying the performance, as the fades, dissolves, animations, and other forms of visual transition mark the slow slide changes, tracing out the familiar edges of PowerPoint.

PowerPoint transforms an artistic creator into a software user. Within the program, the organizational scaffolding is preset, the structures of arguments rarely surprise, often following known formulations and predictable moves While the possibilities of the software include long lists of animations, slide changes, and formatting options, the end results tend to look nearly identical, falling into somewhat fungible forms. It becomes largely a repetition of the same. On the receptive end, viewing/experiencing the final PowerPoint presentation is shaped by a predetermined form of engagement, or at least the presenter's intention. The types of practices for interpretation and extracting information are formulaic. Not only is the content flattened, but so are these different roles, redistributing the mechanism of power and control, making it less clear and more ambient in form.

As the human experience becomes increasingly automated, people become susceptible to the kinds of errors enabled by the drudgery of mindless bureaucratic proceduralism, such as workplaces where PowerPoints circulate the most. To emphasize this point, weird formatting and transcoding errors appear in Lin's work, and the final slides of The PhD Sound are just walls of symbols and unreadable text.

As a viewer, this is actually not entirely different from rest of the slides with the completely decontextualized indexes, bibliographies, pasted text, singular words. The ability to read or parse the information is just pushed further: what becomes completely incomprehensible to us is completely comprehensible to the computer. The PowerPoint carries on without concern or regard for the viewer or participant. While viewers of slides are often expected to pay close attention to these repetitive displays of bullet points and buzzwords, Lin's hypertrophic PowerPoint poetics releases the reader from the responsibilities of extractive reading.

In a strange convergence, Lin describes 1970s disco in a similar fashion. Both PowerPoint and disco are cultural practices known for their "formulaic nature, predictability, shallowness, anonymity, licentiousness, and, above all, lack of content." They both are methods of mediation, where "the idea of medium-specificity and discrete mediums such as painting, photography, music, literature, and video are being supplanted by the idea of a more general operating system or generic culture of software whose purpose is to continually redistribute a range of materials across a single platform."7

Lin nearly links disco and PowerPoint when talking about Microsoft Word: "What you are now reading, originally produced in Microsoft Word, is invisible because it is built into the software and automates the writing of the text in the same way that disco automates the human."8 PowerPoint has a similar automatic quality. It progresses in a clear form, limiting information, making the movements seamless. Lin goes on to identify this formulaic aspect of disco: "disco is not, as is mistakenly thought, an explosion of sound onto the dance floor but an implosion of pre-programmed dance moves into a head."9

This programming can be seen as deadening or flattening out existence, but it also offers up new ways of navigating the fields of information we wade through.

PowerPoint, like Lin writes of disco, "provides impetus for new modes of being and nonbeing involved in the writing and in particular the nonwriting of poetry and art." It is a place "where nonreading, relaxation, and boredom could be the essential components of a text."10 When we accept the terms of PowerPoint and allow it to move us through its digital environment, we can see our methods of reading screens play out before us, presented as and through the act of reading itself. Lin overloads the PowerPoint, filling it with fragmented text, maxing out PowerPoint's transitional features, and leaving us to navigate these informational walls. He makes visible the act of reading as it occurs within complex environments, filtering out and focusing your attention, always drifting between. Read the text or let the machine read it for you. You can just stare into the screen as the text fades.

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Jake Reber (@artificialbl1ss) is an artist and writer living in Buffalo, New York, where he co-curates hystericallyreal.com. He is the author of Leech (11:11 Press, 2023) and Zer000 Excess (11:11 press, 2020). 

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