Inventing the Future

Friday night Iain and I went to PechaKucha Night at Manuel's Tavern.  PechaKucha Nights, if you don't know, are locally organized events where people make short presentations in a particular style -- 20 slides, 20 seconds each, set on autoadvance so the talk is only 6 minutes and 40 seconds long. (I hear lots of talks at work that could benefit from rules this strict.)  With talks that short, you can fit a lot of them in an evening.  The first PechaKucha event was in Tokyo in 2003, hosted by an architecture firm, but now PechaKucha events are held in more than 600 cities.  It's an all-volunteer effort.  The PechaKucha format works well for art- and design-type presentations (Tom observed that it probably wasn't a good format for, say, a presentation on general relativity) and lots of presenters and participants in PechaKucha are from art, design, and architecture.

It was terrific.  There were presentations by artists and craftspeople who shared their work.  Dessa Lohrey presented her Bench Diary project, where a notebook is left on a bench in a public place for a day with an invitation for people to write something.  Kevin Byrd, an installation artist, shared ideas that didn't quite work out in the evening's funniest presentation.  There was a presentation on making handmade furniture by Kendrick Anderson.  There was a children's book-in-progress about previously unknown pirates from Karla Davis and James Abercrombie and there were murals by Peter Ferrari.  But it wasn't all about art.  There was a presentation on sustainable living by Joel Larsgaard ("What makes us happy are close friends, engaging community, and meaningful work." and "Prioritize doing over getting, people over things.") Jeff Shinabarger and Jen Soong gave back-to-back presentations about local social enterprises that provide jobs for refugees in the Atlanta area. Jeff's group recycles billboards into bags, and Jen's group makes pillows, handbags, and scarves. (I have made note for upcoming holiday shopping, and you should too.) 

A couple things were striking to me about the evening. The back bar at Manuel's Tavern was full of people from a different demographic than Iain and me (we were the youngest and oldest persons there, I think). I talked briefly to one of the organizers; she said that she'd gotten involved because she had stumbled across an earlier PechaKucha event and it had provided a great opportunity for people she knew to find collaborators for projects. The conversations that were going on were intense -- just as focused as a 20 x 20 presentation -- and I expect that there were friendships and projects and collaborations that came out of the evening for many of the attendees.

But that wasn't all. It also reminded me of Susan Booth's incredible talk from the recent colab summit, making the case for why art is so important in the life of city and its citizens. Aisha Bowden from the Atlanta Music Project talked about music can help children develop empathy, and how empathy is something that seems to be lacking in the lives many of us live. Filmmaker Kristin Wright talked about not how great films don't have to tell you everything; they leave part of the story not told, so everyone's experience of the work is a little different, and it makes us work to figure it out. A story in the New York Times last week made the same point, that reading literature (unlike popular fiction or serious nonfiction) makes us perform better at tasks measuring empathy and social perception.

And there was the final point from Aisha Bowden's presentation. The Atlanta Music Project provides music lessons to children from poor families in Atlanta, to help them not only learn to play and love music but to develop grit and persistence, to become the kind of people who -- if, when they grow up, they can't find a job -- "will invent their own job." It's a different world than the one I grew up in; it was college and professional school and it was all pretty secure. That's not the world younger people see now, and they are braver and far more creative than I ever was. They are figuring out ways to make their own future, over beer in the back bar at Manuel's Tavern. I'm glad I got to be there.