Robin Ingenthron's "Pecha Kucha" presentation (2018)

 

For me, the rules of Pecha Kucha are a bit like Fight Club... I was so nervous after this 2018 presentation in Burlington, Vermont, that I have never told anyone about it, or mentioned that it's recorded online. I went home and resolved never to watch it.

But I just did... and really, it's not that bad.  *continued

The actual rules of PechaKucha are 20 slides presented in 20 seconds each. You have 8 minutes to tell a human story to a group of strangers.  At the first one I presented in Providence, Rhode Island in 2011, it was mostly about Retroworks de Mexico. The Rhode Island gathering was held at a bar, with a lot of very young, very hip, enthusiastic people. I was really encouraged by laughter and applause during the presentation.  

So when I saw that there were Pecha Kucha presentations happening in Burlington, Vermont, I figured I'd give it another go. But when I arrived that evening at the Fleming Museum in Burlington, it was a very different looking crowd. Much older, much better dressed.

There would be no laughter, and until I watched this today I remembered no applause. In my memory, there was a lot of pearl clutching.  My wife and daughter came and were politely supportive. But we didn't talk about it much on the drive home.

https://www.pechakucha.com/

PechaKucha

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Speaker at a PechaKucha Night event in Cluj-Napoca, Romania

PechaKucha (Japanese: ぺちゃくちゃ, IPA: [petɕa kɯ̥tɕa],^[1] chit-chat) is a storytelling format where a presenter shows 20 slides for 20 seconds of commentary each. At a PechaKucha Night, individuals gather at a venue to share personal presentations about their work. The PechaKucha format can be used, for example, in business presentations to clients or staff, as well as in education settings.

So without further ado, I tried to make an important point... that people have a habit of trying to photograph stereotypes in order to validate they really visited a place. I recognized I'd done that in Peace Corps, recognized it was the same thing everyone complained about in the Ozarks where I grew up... and I recognized it immediately during the great E-waste Hoax ("80% primitive") that people were talking pictures of city junk generated by Africans and Asians after decades of use to prove that their recycling competitors were evil.

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