David Byrne: Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information

For more than a year, David Byrne has been employing the ubiquitous sales and presentation program PowerPoint as an art medium. E.E.E.I (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information) is a book of images and essays, plus a DVD which plays 5 of his PowerPoint presentations accompanied by original music. The book component contains a dozen new exploratory texts and a whole lot of bold, graphic images created with the help of PowerPoint’s built-in tools and visuals–not to mention the fun of plastic overlays and nifty foldout pages. And you may ask yourself, what is the meaning of this? And you may ask yourself, what is this about? It is about taking subjective, even emotional, information and presenting it in a familiar audiovisual form–using a medium in a way that is different, and possibly better, than what was intended. It is about appropriating a contemporary, corporate staple and making something critical, beautiful and humorous with it.