RTFA: http://www.sadlerswells.com/whats_on/2005_2006/pecha.asp

Sun 25 June 2006

World’s Biggest Pecha Kucha
in association with Icon Magazine

The final night of the second London Architecture Biennale, in which around a dozen people get a chance to show 20 slides each for 20 seconds, resulting in an exhilarating range of speakers and images over the course of the evening.

There is also eating, drinking, and the inevitable exchange of ideas that happens when you get so many architects, designers, artists and creators in the same place.

Everyone welcome.

Those taking part (in alphabetical order) are:

Will Alsop
Bernhard Steinerhoff
Nigel Coates
Tom Dixon
Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein
(Klein Dytham Architecture)
Ekow Eshun
FAT
Alison Jackson
Muf
Rem Koolhaas
Patrick Schumaker (Zaha Hadid Architects)
Thomas Heatherwick
Amanda Levete (Future Systems)
Troika

PLUS DJs, design installations, guerrilla happenings and additional surprises on the night.

Who is Bernhard Steinerhoff, and why is his presentation noteworthy? …the following video explains it all.

It seems like a really fun time: http://culturemaking.typepad.com/main/2007/03/pres…

Last year, around June time, I went along to a rather brilliant design presentation night at Sadlers Wells.

On the lineup was a guy called Bernhard Steinerhoff who was billed as an Austrian environmental design thinker. After a promising start, he randomly transformed into a human beatbox machine and delivered a bizzare yet outstandingly talented performance - I was truly blown away. Did anyone else see it by chance?

Anyway, found out the other day that he’s only the UK beatbox champion aka Beardyman.

What is Pecha Kucha? From Wikipedia:

Pecha Kucha (pronounced peh-cha ku-cha) was started in Tokyo, Japan in February 2003 by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham as a designers’ show and tell event to attract more people to SuperDeluxe, their multi-media experimental event space they had set up in Roppongi.[1]

The idea behind Pecha Kucha is to keep presentations concise, the interest level up and to have many presenters sharing their ideas within the course of one night. Therefore the 20×20 Pecha Kucha format was created: each presenter is allowed a slideshow of 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds. This results in a total presentation time of 6 minutes 40 seconds on a stage before the next presenter is up. Each event usually has 14 presenters. Presenters (and much of the audience) are usually from the design, architecture, photography, art and creative fields, but recently it has also stretched over to academia and the business world.

Pecha Kucha seems like a really cool format…

and Beardyman’s performance is totally great. Think about it: it’s perfect for the kind of thing he did. I’m assuming powerpoint has an auto-advance feature, so he could count on each slide to be pretty much 20 seconds. Then, he sets up a few slides about global warming, and uses the entire rest of the presentation to be the background for his beatboxing. Ha!

…related to this boingboing post.

RTFA: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howabou…

The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets.

With an estimated 13 million CCTV cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by.

They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in eighty locations around Manchester - including on a bus - and proceeded to play to the cameras.

This is a great way to externalize the cost of production.

RTFA: http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,159067…

The words “war on terror” will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country’s chief prosecutor said Dec. 27.

Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless “death cult.”
The Director of Public Prosecutions said: ‘We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language.”
London is not a battlefield, he said.
“The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,” Macdonald said. “They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.”

Interesting development.