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So plans are in place for the 18,000-item collection, which has not been accessible to the public since 2009, to move about eight miles south to downtown Chatham, where the firms Selldorf Architects and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects are working to transform an early 19th-century redbrick building—previously housing a sanitarium, a theater, a roller rink, a hotel, a furniture store, a knitting factory, and a car dealership—into the Shaker Museum’s new home. The 30,000-square-foot museum will include galleries for permanent and rotating exhibitions, conservation and storage facilities, and a gift shop.

The Shakers, or “Shaking Quakers,” as they were known for their exuberant movement during prayer, are a millenarian Protestant sect that emerged in England in the mid-18th century, arrived in the United States in 1774, and, in the 1780s, began building communities that eventually spread from Maine to Kentucky. Mount Lebanon, New York, about 15 minutes northeast of Chatham, was home to the Shakers’ Central Ministry for more than a century. Formally named the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, a reference to the notion that founding leader Ann Lee was Christ’s female counterpart, the group embraced gender equality, celibacy, racial inclusion, pacifism, and the communal ownership of property. These commitments contradicted prevailing social norms of the 18th century, requiring strict protocols and infrastructures to reinforce the community’s internal social order.

Those protocols took the form of the Millennial Laws, which codified myriad dimensions of daily life, including diet, dress, reading material, routine cleaning, and permissible paint colors for buildings and furnishings. (Meetinghouses, for example, were to be painted white; barns, dark blue; and bedsteads, green.) In turn, those laws—e­specially when enforced by both the Central Ministry and local elders in the various villages—helped shape a material environment that encouraged unity within the community and separation from the outside world. Shaker villages were planned around a large meetinghouse. Visitors frequently commented on the villages’ immaculate gardens and orchards, with their perfectly straight rows of trees. Sturdy stone or brick dwelling houses were designed to uphold a strict separation of the sexes, efficient division of labor, and ideals of neatness and cleanliness.

Inside Shaker residential, meeting, and work spaces, woodwork and other handicrafts served to bolster similar values. Wooden boxes held seeds and herbs and spools of thread, all central to the Shakers’ business with the outside world. Shaker furniture makers were known for crafting bespoke wooden counters and worktables to suit the needs of individual tailors, laundresses, and bookkeepers. Trestle tables structured the way Shakers sat together in the dining room and silently shared food, and benches ordered their bodies in worship. These artifacts, which exemplify the relationship between material order and social order within the Shaker community, are well represented in the museum collection.

Less amenable to museum acquisition are the massive built-in cabinets with cupboards and drawers set into the walls of Shaker retiring rooms (bedrooms), offices, dining rooms, hallways, and kitchens. The Shaker Museum has one such cabinet in its collection; several others remain in situ at various Shaker villages that have been preserved as historic sites. These embedded furnishings allowed residents to keep floors open—minimizing the need for mopping and dusting—and optimize leftover spaces, like the areas under stairwells. Because Shaker dwellings commonly housed 70 or 80 residents, their furnishings had to function on an institutional scale and meet communal needs. The Great Stone Dwelling in Enfield, New Hampshire, has more than 800 built-in drawers; another Shaker building, in Hancock, Massachusetts, has 369 drawers and 245 cupboard doors. Dwelling house attics frequently featured monumental built-in installations to store out-of-season bedding and clothes. Buildings were assigned letters, while rooms, closets, and drawers were assigned numbers, enabling Shaker Sisters to easily locate every blanket and bonnet, and transforming the houses into “large filing cabinets,” as architectural historian Julie Nicoletta has described them.

All those drawers and cabinets also facilitated discretion and modesty. The Shakers discouraged ostentatious material display—at least until the second half of the 19th century, when they relaxed many prohibitions and sought to modernize in order to attract more converts to replenish their declining population. Yet even if their walls were devoid of pictures and their buildings of ornamentation, “the tout ensemble of the Shaker villages often pleased visitors and passers-by,” art historian Joseph Manca writes in his 2019 book Shaker Vision: Seeing Beauty in Early America. The Shakers were conscious of how their settlements looked from the public roads; they cultivated an ordered beauty that was “meant to impress the world and also attract outsiders to the sect.”

It also provided many Shaker communities their livelihood. Their ladder-back chairs, flat brooms, and iconic swallowtail-jointed oval boxes sold widely, and inspired emulation among artists, entrepreneurs, and designers, from counterfeit furniture makers in the 19th century to Danish modernist designers to countless painters, choreographers, architects, and restaurateurs today. In the early 20th century, collectors, curators, and photographers fetishized the clarity and elegance of Shaker creations. As a result, many of their successors reduce the group’s craft to its aesthetic qualities, presenting it as a form of proto-minimalist art, or reading Shaker chairs and brooms as primary texts that tell a romantic story of purity and simplicity at odds with the more complex reality of life among the faithful.

Even as the community’s population has declined from over 6,000 in the mid-19th century to just three Believers today, Shaker material culture has continued to resonate. As historian William D. Moore describes in his 2020 book Shaker Fever: America’s Twentieth-Century Fascination with a Communitarian Sect, we’ve witnessed several waves of Shaker Fever during periods of national upheaval or redefinition. Shaker aesthetics are conveniently polysemous and contemplative. In the 1970s, Moore explains, enthusiasts “found in the constructed Shaker legacy a precedent for feminism, a rejection of materialism, and an intellectual balm for the stresses of deindustrialization, national economic stagnation, and the decades of the culture wars.” The Shaker ideal speaks to the same persistent dynamics today. The looming climate crisis also makes the community’s relative self-sufficiency and responsible land management seem particularly worthy of emulation.

Executive Director Schutz likewise explained that the Shaker Museum’s collection has widespread appeal, as “the values that underpin [the Shaker] aesthetic are so attractive to people right now: gender equality, racial equality, sustainability.” This contemporary wave of Shaker Fever is driven in part by widespread political disillusionment, social division, and ecological despair—and by the hope that a utopian community and its orderly environment might suggest strategies for our own salvation.

Yet rather than imagining the Shakers as a romantic ideal, it might be more valuable to acknowledge the community’s contradictions and compromises. The Shakers manifested their faith through both rapturous movement and rigorous order; they embraced both simplicity and technological progress; they espoused gender equality while upholding traditional gendered labor roles; they promoted social equality while governing their own community through what some apostates and critics regarded as a rather autocratic centralized authority. They were removed from the world yet regularly did business with it. As Brother Arnold Hadd of the Sabbathday Lake Shakers—the last remaining active Shaker community—said in a 2014 interview, “We are the ultimate capitalistic communists.” On a 2020 Shaker Museum panel discussion about the sect’s continuing relevance, religious scholar Ashon Crawley explained that the Shakers performed labor as a spiritual practice in order to sustain their community, while also knowingly interacting with a world market committed to exploitation and profit. This interaction required that they willingly compromise on their vow of separation. Especially as their commercial enterprises ramped up and their population declined, Shakers occasionally hired laborers from outside the community, relying on non-Believers to produce their divinely inspired wares.

In this age when museums, schools, and other cultural institutions are reckoning with their colonial and racial legacies, and political factionalism and authoritarianism are spreading, it is imperative that we eschew romanticization and engage with the complex realities undergirding the seeming simplicity of Shaker life. How can the Shaker Museum engage with the community’s compromises and contradictions? It has already begun to ask these questions through an interdisciplinary study group, public programs, ongoing partnerships with values-aligned local organizations, and a series of pop-up exhibitions exploring themes such as racial and gender equality and the ethics of entrepreneurship. This work sets the stage for future exhibitions and programming in the new space.

That space itself will be well suited to such purposefully “impure” investigations of Shaker history. The renovated 19th-century brick structure and the fiber-cement addition will be linked by a glass connector and supported by a structural system of timbers, embodying the mix of craft traditions and technological innovation that characterized Shaker practice. There are plans for a full-height casework in the museum lobby featuring Shaker wares for sale, and landscaping based around plants the Shakers once sold as herbal medicines, each exemplifying the Shakers’ pragmatic engagements with commerce and the outside world. In short, the museum campus productively blends the crafted and the engineered, the traditional and the progressive, the spiritual and the commercial, the then and the now, creating an ideal environment for public pedagogy.

And much like a Shaker meetinghouse, the museum facility is sited and structured in a manner intended to spark the curiosity of passersby—to draw them into the galleries, or to a public event where curators and community members can thoughtfully contextualize the collection. As the Shaker Museum is also home to a robust library and archive that includes the extensive records of the Central Ministry, such tools for critical contextualization are readily at hand.

Shaker objects, in their ordered beauty, lend themselves to exhibition on shelves and in vitrines. Yet there is the potential here to productively trouble order, which is both a defining, divine principle of Shaker life and central to museological conventions. By engaging with the environments in which the Shakers lived, and in which we live today, the Shaker Museum can help us imagine new models for ordering our relations with others, for grappling with complex ideological negotiations, and for furnishing a future world that embodies the values of compromise by which we want to live. 

Governor Andrew Cuomo during a COVID-19 press conference in the Capitol’s red room, Apr. 11, 2020.

These briefings take place in the Executive Chamber of the New York State Capitol Building in Albany. Behind the panel of speakers are the mahogany-paneled, gold leaf–ornamented walls of the so-called Red Room, designed by noted nineteenth-century architect Henry Hobson Richardson (namesake of the Richardson Romanesque style). Stained-glass arches crown Palladian windows, their heavy green and red curtains drawn tightly closed. Watching the briefings from our own modest couches and office chairs, we occasionally catch glimpses of the coffered oak ceiling and chandeliers that hang over the press corps’ heads. Cuomo centers himself between the state and national flags, just beneath a bronze relief of the New York State seal, in which two female figures, Liberty and Justice, flank a Hudson River scene. An eagle with spread wings is perched above them.

The room’s opulence is interrupted by two glaring blue screens displaying Cuomo’s slideshows. Yet this ungainly equipment also serves to connect our worlds to Albany, linking our own tiny blue screens to the two big ones in the Red Room. At the same time, Cuomo’s screens serve as portals to a different aesthetic universe, bridging Richardson’s stately grandeur and a new digital, managerial manifestation of institutional authority. At a time when national “leadership” is embodied by ill-fitting suits and garish Fox News graphics, Sharpie-edited maps and Mar-a-Lago chintz, Cuomo’s briefings and their centerpiece slides have captured national attention by cultivating an image of accountability, credibility, and empathy (even if, as the New York Times recently reported, New York’s leaders might have botched their response to the coronavirus crisis).

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Cuomo has long been known for his “bulldozer personality” and his tendency toward micromanagement, as evidenced in the notoriously exhaustive PowerPoints that have accompanied nearly all of his major speeches as governor. His briefings, delivered from the current epicenter of the viral crisis, now offer at least a simulacrum of competent leadership. At the same time, his presentations “capture an everyman’s emotional unease,” according to the New York Times. In another article, the paper’s media columnist called him “the control freak we need right now”—one who knows his way around the government and can translate public health and public policy into intelligible terms, yet also, like us, fears for his family’s safety and laments the inefficiencies of political process. Marshaling PowerPoint, that ubiquitous platform for urgent didactic and persuasive communication, his performance-lectures—“part briefing, part sermon, part inspirational talk,” per the Washington Post—are our primer, pep talk, and placation.

A blue-tinted stock or news photo—of gloved hands, hospital workers, or city scenes—typically serves as a muted substrate for the slides’ factual content. New York State branding guidelines stipulate that photography used in official communication be authentic, inspiring, dynamic, and compassionate. Cuomo’s photos deliver; they provide the underlying pathos, while the bullet-points and bar charts layered on top appeal to logic. Rudimentary tables and maps adhere conscientiously (if, at times, inelegantly) to best practices for information design, as well as the state’s official blue-and-gold color scheme. Yet the slideshows also occasionally incorporate whimsical clip art: cresting waves signal peak infection, for instance, while chunky arrows remind us that we want to “flatten the curve.”

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The slides’ body text appears in a no-nonsense white sans serif typeface—typically Arial, in accordance with the state’s graphic standards. Arial also happens to be a standard font for Microsoft, maker of PowerPoint, which might partly explain its prevalence. But when the Governor’s message is meant to be inspirational or profound, the typesetting is more dramatic—centered with lots of leading, or space between lines—and words often manifest in a friendlier, crisper font: Proxima Nova. Workaday Arial comes in only two flavors: bold and regular. Its graphic limitations compel Cuomo’s slidemakers to play with other expressive variables—specifically color. Key terms and takeaways—often chosen according to elusive criteria—are set in gold. That same gold color is used to highlight the alliterative imperatives in a footer at the bottom of most slides: “STAY HOME. STOP THE SPREAD. SAVE LIVES.”

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In spite of the purported bureaucratic blandness of PowerPoint’s bullet points, Cuomo manages to infuse his slide text with dad-like concern and (inadvertent) comedy. “Younger People Not Fully Complying” with social distancing guidelines, one slide declares: “YOU ARE WRONG.” He’s yelling at us. After noting flagrant violations by youngsters in New York City’s parks, the slide’s final bullet-point announces: “I am going there today.” Watch out, kids. Another slide displays a photo of vibrant socializing and commercial exchange at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket—a scene that, in normal times, would emblematize the best of Brooklyn. Yet here the scene is superimposed with a big red, all-caps, officiously Arial “MISTAKE.”

His slides mix impersonal factual delivery with second-person exhortations, first-person declarations, and philosophical introspection. One slide reminds us: “Today is Saturday,” with “Saturday” emblazoned in gold. This statement of truth is accidentally hilarious in its self-evidence. Another delivers a message to Cuomo’s fellow Democrats, whom, he says, are reluctant to criticize one another: “Baloney”—a spare declaration warranting its own bullet point. Yet another minimalist slide informs us that, whether we like it or not, “This will be a transformative experience.” Another headlined “What Happens” prompts Cuomo to note, in Proxima Nova, that the “Bigger Question to Me” is “WHAT DO WE LEARN ABOUT OURSELVES?”

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The lessons we might derive from such introspection are framed, in part, by the mix of civic symbols encountered in these briefings: Richardson’s excess and Microsoft’s functionalism, regal hues and high-contrast blue and gold, state flags and clip art, velvet curtains and polo shirts, chandeliers and LCD projectors. Cuomo deploys the aesthetics of authority old and new: he draws on the resonance of long-standing material symbols of civic strength and the tools of twenty-first century technocracy, as if to acknowledge the need for new emblems of trust and accountability in an age of digital transformation and political division. In contrast to the buffoonery masquerading as leadership in the White House at a moment that necessitates the full mobilization of the government, Cuomo’s slideshows project a reassuring image of managerial order—one that has arguably distracted from his missteps, such as the delay in implementing social distancing measures and closing non-essential businesses. Still, the motley aesthetic of Cuomo’s briefings mirrors our own confusion and disorientation—our uncertainty about how to spend our days trapped indoors, about which sources to trust, and about the proper role of the state and its institutions at a time when our immune systems, our public health infrastructures, our electoral politics, and capitalism itself reveal their terrifying precarity all at once. WHAT DO WE LEARN ABOUT OURSELVES, as individuals and as a nation, is still an open-ended question. But the bar charts and bullet points at least offer a provisional ground—stable, rational—from which we can continue our investigation.

Since long before the computation age, teachers, businesspeople, and military officers have been deploying pithy reports, wall charts, flipcharts, overhead transparencies, 35mm slides, and chalk-, cork-, and whiteboards to make their points.² Yet PowerPoint, much like desktop publishing platforms including PageMaker and QuarkXPress, democratized the making of persuasive media, enabling junior sales associates and high-school juniors to add a sheen of professionalism and credibility to their reports by using standardized templates and tools. As the software evolved, it began to offer more cinematic and multimedia features: dissolves, fades, embedded video, spinning word art, and soundtracks. The arrival of Apple’s Keynote (2003), Google’s Slides (2007), and Prezi (2009) have only increased the possibilities for expression and distribution.³   

Today, pitch decks filled with emotive stock photography and bold, sans-serif declarations—including Fyre Festival’s promise to “traverse the globe to find untouched lands, and convert them into unparalleled experiences”—are often all that stand between a team of ambitious, inexperienced entrepreneurs and millions of dollars in venture capital funding.⁴ One-page bullet-pointed security briefings are the sole means (or pretense) of orienting the US commander in chief. Recognizing the ubiquity and epistemic imperialism of the slide deck, many artists—including David Byrne, Tan Lin, Daniel Eatock, Timothy Evans, Michael Riedel, Linda Dong, Simon Denny, and Tony Cokes—have taken up the medium, adapting its modes of address to comment on contemporary managerialism, information labor, and media culture.

Linda Dong: Keynote Motion Graphic Experiment, 2015, video, 38 seconds.

As Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson argue in “One Damn Slide After Another,” analyzing and critiquing presentation software and the organizational culture surrounding it, as these artists do, reveals “the largely under-appreciated reliance on performative authority in knowledge production.” Slides “are not designed to provide audiences with evidence that speaks for itself”; they rely on “the orator’s talent . . . to create a sense that everything connects.”⁵  They’re props—boxes full of “content”—supporting a choreographed performance. But what happens when those slides are made to stand on their own—when they’re projected onto a gallery wall, played on a loop in an event space, or presented online—with no orator present to guide us? How does the slide deck function as a stand-alone medium, and what does it say about contemporary modes of communication?

Around the same time that Tufte launched his warning, in the early aughts, artist and musician David Byrne mined PowerPoint’s potential as an artistic medium. He told an interviewer in 2004:

I kind of love to use cliched phrases, and cut them loose from what they’re associated with, and use them as free-floating poetic elements that I can rearrange as if they’re blocks and make them mean something completely different or reveal them to be as absurd as they actually are.⁶

His presentations—packaged in a book and accompanying DVD (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, 2003) with decks accompanied by original music—are filled with arrows pointing to nothing in particular, contentless speech bubbles, gratuitous word art, and charts that Byrne selected because they “make no sense whatsoever. The form immediately makes you think that it’s conveying information. . . . [Yet] the more you look at it, the more you realize [that] the content . . . is just confusing you further.” The slides evoke rhetorical acts of meaning-making, but they communicate little more than their own pointlessness. When promoting the book on tour, however, Byrne gave performance-lectures that layered entertaining ekphrasis atop the inscrutable slides.

More recently, the poet Tan Lin utilized PowerPoint for his “Bibliographic Soundtrack” (2012) and “The Ph.D. Sound” (2012), two slide-poems comprising collaged excerpts from social media, indexes, bibliographies, and other non-literary sources. The paradoxically soundless, forty-minute-long “Soundtrack” features texts, mostly white letters on a black background, in a variety of columnar layouts. The fifteen-minute “The Ph.D. Sound” stretches haphazardly formatted single-column bibliographic citations across vibrantly colored backgrounds, and sets them in motion against a soundtrack mixed by DJ Mosco.

Daniel Eatock, with Timothy Evans: Transition, 2017, video, 1 minutes, 40 seconds.

Making full use of PowerPoint’s features, Lin experimented with the layout and length of texts; the juxtaposition of text sources and formats; the application of fades, wipes, and scrolls; and the layering of visuals and sound. As the artist explained to the poetry magazine Jacket2: “PPT allowed me to diffuse a book into a general operating system, in this case a specific and much maligned genre of office productivity software.”⁷ Rather than mimicking the rapidly advancing decks one might see at a tech or TED conference, Lin “wanted something slow, porous and meditational,” in order to produce the experience of “giv[ing] oneself over to something,” even if that “something” is a text designed for distracted reading.

Daniel Eatock, with Timothy Evans: Transition, 2017, video, 1 minutes, 40 seconds.

Myriad contemporary filmmakers, composers, and other creators of time-based works have likewise created durational pieces that ask the audience for viewing stamina. This work typically offers commentary on a culture whose temporality is characterized by the instantaneous status update, the quick refresh, the scrolling feed, the 30-second TikTok video, the PechaKucha—the last, a mode of presentation in which the slides auto-advance every 20 seconds, compelling presenters to perform at the program’s pace. Lin goes for the slow reveal, the painfully gradual fade, and he invites us to surrender ourselves to the performance, while also accepting our likely failure to commit. “We’d like you to keep your phones on for this,” he directed his audience at a 2014 screening at Harvard, granting us time and permission to peek at our text messages and status updates between fades and pans.

For Daniel Eatock and Timothy Evans, the reveals and fades themselves are the point. In their three-minute video “Transition” (2007), the artists’ creative palette consists of, well, PowerPoint’s transitions, rendered in black and white: the morphs, drapes, pushes, splits, cuts, curtains, fractures, shreds, ripples, ferris wheels, and orbits that stylize the shifts from one slide to the next—and thereby imply particular rhetorical shifts. The curtains effect—wherein the image onscreen softens into fabric, then pulls and sways toward the left and right margins, revealing the next slide—likely signifies a reveal, for instance, while a fade proposes a more gradual evolution. A fracture—wherein the screen-image shatters into dozens of pointy shards, which then fall to the bottom, making way for the next slide—implies an intentional, even violent negation or contradiction or counterpoint, whereas the peel-off—in which an invisible hand grasps the screen-image at its bottom-right corner and carefully peels it away, like a post-it note, toward the top-left corner—proposes that the second slide is merely an iteration or progression from the first. Working in a similar vein, Michael Riedel’s “PowerPoint” paintings (2011–) freeze the glitchy transitions between two slides, which are then materialized as large-scale silkscreens on linen, while designer Linda Dong’s video Keynote Motion Graphic Experiment (2015) mobilizes Keynote’s basic animations to create action sequences for geometric figures.

Views of Simon Denny’s installation Secret Power, 2015, at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.

While much of this work exploits PowerPoint’s formal and interactive qualities—its relentlessly linear sequence of slides, the affective and semantic dimensions of its transitions and animations, its charts and graphs—other PPT artists use the signature slide aesthetics of particular institutions or industries as fodder for their creations in other media. The aesthetics of management and military culture are an endless fount of inspiration for Berlin-based artist Simon Denny, who has appropriated the visual iconography and graphic style of US National Security Administration slides leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Denny found that the graphic and verbal style of these documents, while chaotic and gaudy, revealed subtle political discernment: slight variations signaled different degrees of confidentiality.⁸ Denny commissioned David Darchicourt, former NSA creative director and exhibition designer for the National Cryptologic Museum, to create new illustrations of screaming eagles and turtles in soldier uniforms—which art critic Chris Kraus describes as “heavy metal-infused gamer-cartooning”—for his New Zealand pavilion exhibition, “Secret Power,” at the 2015 Venice Biennale.⁹ 

Still from Tony Cokes’s video Fade to Black, 1990.

But what made Denny’s PPT-inspired posters especially potent was their performance in context: they were displayed in glass-fronted, LED-lit racks of servers—technological “black boxes”-turned-vitrines—in the sixteenth-century Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, a Renaissance marvel on Venice’s Piazza San Marco. In a monumental building that houses many of the early modern era’s great maps and printed books, as well as numerous pre-print forms, Denny positioned these PowerPoint slides as today’s electronically illuminated manuscripts, network diagrams as our contemporary portolan charts, and hackers as the new merchant-explorers. Visitors are left to wonder: are bureaucratic communications and security intelligence—with all their garish graphics and charmless prose—the apotheosis of the Renaissance’s pursuit of enlightenment, a pursuit embodied by the library and all that it safeguards?

American artist Tony Cokes combines a political sensibility akin to Denny’s, with a facility for textual appropriation and sonic attunement like Lin’s. For four decades, he has mined texts from newspapers and magazines, advertising, government documents, activist manifestos, and theoretical treatises. He describes many of his finds, because of their banality or ubiquity, as “hidden in plain sight.”¹⁰ Cokes pairs those passages with incongruous rock, pop, industrial, punk, and rap music, and edits the elements together into minimalist newsreel-style videos or slide shows. In his “Evil” series (2003–), he examines post-9/11 politics and media through, Cokes says, “a series of small ‘case studies’ framed around a particular article . . . that get[s] excerpted, sequenced, composed, and juxtaposed.” The “Evil” videos scroll through chopped-up texts set in default corporate typefaces (usually Helvetica and Times New Roman) and laid atop monochromatic backgrounds, some of which allude to the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded alert system. Cokes swipes and fades from one excerpt to the next at a moderate pace, which sometimes syncs and other times clashes with the accompanying soundtrack. These mismatches, he suggests, productively “deform” the text, complicating our reading.¹¹

Still from Tony Cokes’s video The Will & The Way . . . Fragment 1, 2019.

Across the series, small references amalgamate into extended commentary on foundational social structures and historical legacies, like capitalism, racism, and the institutions and conventions through which we create and uphold public truths. Evil.27: Selma (2011), quoting a text from the creative collective Our Literal Speed, reminds us that “the American Civil Rights Movement took hold in a society moving from radio to television—from a social collectivity dependent on imagination to one where everything is instantly visible.”¹²

We’ve now cultivated a mediascape in which everything can be faked or hacked, and public truths seem not only impossible but also undesirable. In this context, Cokes takes texts that are “hidden in plain sight” and positions them on a slide platform that is itself, because of its mundane ubiquity, likewise often hidden. He adds color, typographic formatting, and sound, which both give form to and deform those news articles, government reports, Kanye West lyrics, and passages from theoretical treatises. Cokes, like Lin and Byrne, renders sampled texts newly visible, projected in the efficient, urgent, and didactic visual language of subway signs and quarterly reports. Their substrate, the humble slide deck, ultimately shows itself and its secret rhetorical power, too. Its wipes and fades reveal the performativity of rhetoric in an age of PowerPointed persuasion.

¹ I’m grateful to the many generous folks on Twitter who contributed slide-art examples for use in the undergraduate Tools class I taught in the fall of 2019. See tools.wordsinspace.net
² See JoAnn Yates, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
³ In 2007, Google released a presentation program for Google Suite; it was relaunched as Slides in 2012.
⁴ Josh King, “Fyre Festival—The Pitch Deck,” SlideShare, Feb. 1, 2019, slideshare.net.
⁵ Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson, “One Damn Slide After Another: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech,” Computational Culture, 5, Jan. 15, 2016, computationalculture.net.
⁶ David Byrne, “David Byrne’s PowerPoint Art,” interview with Debra Schifrin, “Day to Day,” NPR, Jan. 14, 2004, npr.org.
⁷ Tan Lin interviewed by Kristen Gallagher, “Why Power Point?” Jacket2, Jan. 23, 2013, jacket2.org.
⁸ Shannon Mattern, “Furnishing Intelligence,” Perspecta, 51, 2018, pp. 299–314.
⁹ Chris Kraus, “Here Begins the Dark Sea,” in Simon Denny, Secret Power, Milan, Mousse Publishing, 2015, p. 23.
¹⁰ Jenelle Troxell, “Torture, Terrror, Digitality: A Conversation with Tony Cokes,” Afterimage 43, no. 3, 2015, p. 20.
¹¹ Ibid.
¹² Our Literal Speed, “About,” ourliteralspeed.com, accessed Nov. 14, 2019.

This article appears under the title “Auto-Advance: The Art of the Slide Deck” in the February 2020 issue, pp. 64–69.