“All good work requires self-revelation.” — Sidney Lumet (25 Jun 1924 – 9 Apr 2011)
When Linda Dubin Garfield first emailed a prospectus a number of weeks ago about the possibility of the DaVinci Art Alliance hosting a 20×20 PechaKucha (chit-chat) Night (PKN), I was intrigued by the concept which was totally new to me, and signed up immediately. Originated by an architectural firm in Japan to limit the amount of time suppliers could schmooze about their products, it’s a brilliant way of compelling conciseness in a presentation, regardless of the content or the target audience: the presenter has 20 seconds to talk about each of 20 images selected. For more information on the phenomenon, check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PechaKucha
Contemplating the event a few weeks ago was an interesting process, in which my initial presentation ideas expanded into something much more comprehensive than originally envisioned: from 20 images, each focusing on a single work of
art, I expanded the presentation to include many visuals within a single image. Once I had decided on making the presentation a brief history of my artistic career – a Work in Progress – the rest was easy.
Although creating the set of images was a fun challenge that took longer than expected, the results were delightfully surprising and satisfying. Thinking about what I was going to say while the images were on screen was my next major
challenge. At first I intended to write a script which I hoped would be clever, guaranteed to entertain. But after some time spent on composing such a unifying story, I realized that brilliant as my tale might be as a script, I would never be able
to memorize it well enough to look or sound genuinely spontaneous. Therefore, I decided to wing it and simply extemporize, making it as informative, interesting and comic as possible without being totally goofy.
And that’s precisely what I did. More chit-chat about 20×20 PechaKucha Chit-Chat another time…
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