The worldwide success of the Pecha Kucha event formula – each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – is pretty exemplary for our recently developed weakness, or urge, for information snacks. A happy crossbreed between elevator pitching and speed dating. Some professors have even started to require their students to deliver their lectures in the 6 minutes 40 seconds format. Speed and convenience are emphasized over detail and complexity. Pitch, pitch, pitch. Time is up.
Yesterday, I was a guest at one of the Pecha Kucha Brussels nights. Needless to say, I wasn’t very good at it, at least not in the storytelling aspect. I’m not even sure if I had a story to tell. Well, at least I had fun selecting the images. Here they are.
Etienne-Jules Marey (chronophotography)
Anton & Arturo Giulio Bragaglia, ‘The Slap’
Frank & Lilian Gilbreth (stereo chronocyclegraphy)
Pierre Bismuth, ‘Following The Right Hand of Doris Day In ‘Young Man With a Horn”
Harold Eugene Edgerton (Rapatronic photography)
Andy & Larry Wachowski, ‘The Matrix’ (Bullet Time effect)
Anthony McCall, ‘Line Describing a Cone’
Paul Sharits, ‘frozen film frames’
Ken Jacobs, Nervous Magic Lantern Performance
Jim Campbell, ‘Motion and Rest #2’
Rebecca Baron & Doug Goodwin, ‘Lossless’
Vuk Cosic, ‘ASCII History of Moving Images – Psycho’
Dietmar Offenhuber, ‘paths of g’
Richard Linklater & Bob Sabiston, ‘Waking Life’ (rotoscopy)
Kota Ezawa, ‘The Simpson Verdict’
Natalie Frigo, ‘November 22, 1963’
Ken Gonzales-Day, ‘Erased Lynching’
David King & Stephen F. Cohen, ‘The Commissar Vanishes: Falsification of Photographs and Art in the Soviet Union’