PowerPoint Karaoke @ Urban Future Poland

Eugene delivers a premiere to the Urban Future Congress, in Lodz, with PowerPoint Karaoke. This is an improvisational activity in which several participants must deliver presentations based on a set of slides they have never seen. Its name comes from Microsoft PowerPoint software, and the Japanese karaoke format, where non-singers perform selected songs with a pre-recorded backing track (though singing is rarely involved in PowerPoint karaoke). It provides surreal comedy, and is considered a form of improvisational theatre.

The presentation can either be a real slideshow on an obscure, boring or super-technical topic, or a set of real slides from different presentations that are nonsensical when assembled together, or slides that are nonsensical on their own (in some cases created by randomly downloading images from the internet and adding unrelated text). In some cases, the presenter is given a theme beforehand that they must attempt to tie all the slides into. In this sense, we find the experiment productive, since it should help our presenters adapt quickly and spontaneously to future challenging business decisions and lectures.

PowerPoint Karaoke originated in October 2005 in Karlsruhe, Germany, where engineering students would download a random slide deck, and present it during a party. It then spread to students of the Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, an art collective in Berlin. A variation of this game called That Talk's Today?! was invented by an improv troupe known as Senseless Death in 1995, where a performer was asked to leave the room, while an MC and the audience quickly constructed slides, including graphs and acronyms. The performer was then given a topic on which to speak, using the never-seen slides.

The term "PowerPoint karaoke" is also sometimes derisively used to refer to presenters who face the screen where their PowerPoint slides are being projected and proceed to read them, boring and ignoring their audience.

Part of the pleasure in PPK is the ability of presenters not to laugh - and keep their composure - while delivering clearly stupid or annoying slides. And those business bullshit cliches so beloved of executives deserve to be made fun of (we are looking at you, if you still use phrases like scalable, multilevel stakeholders and low-hanging fruit).

For many years now, we read that powerpoint is going out of fashion, or is ridiculous, and yet conferences, boardrooms and universities are still full of it. In this sense, it is both surreal and satisfying that Urban Future have accepted Eugene’s offer to make fun of the format, which will be so present at the rest of the Congress in Lodz.

Now we seek some presenters brave enough to show their skills in front of a lively audience, and earn our respect, and maybe even persuade us of their insider knowledge of subjects they know nothing about. Since we are staging the event at 4pm, they won’t even have the luxury of a drunken audience, or a glass of wine to steady their own nerves. And for anybody who applied to speak at UF, but was not successful, here is your inclusive, democratic moment to shine, on our platform. Eugene will interview each presenter, and find out who they are, and what sort of person wants to do this crazy exercise. Please email eugene@whoosh.wien to register.