PowerPoint to the People
I went with Anirvan and friends to the PowerPoint to the People competition at UC Berkeley on Wednesday. It was a pretty good time. This was a project, inspired partly by things like Peter Norvig's Gettysburg Address PowerPoint presentation, in which artists competed to use PowerPoint in original, unusual, or entertaining ways.
Here's Charlie's discussion and the Wired News coverage of the event. The Wired News piece has a good discussion of the limitations of the competition entries, but it contains a particularly egregious error:
In Wednesday night's first piece, artists Greg Niemeyer and Monica Lam, with their piece "Single Origin" Outsourcing, lampooned what could have been a buttoned-down investment seminar or sales pitch by mixing Greek translations of The Lord's Prayer with carefully done slides that, on first glance, could well have been taken for genuine.
"Greek translations of The Lord's Prayer"? Um... Matthew 6:9-13, anybody?
This is exactly the same error that my high school alumni magazine made when it wrote about people singing "the Northfield Benediction, translated into Hebrew". (The Northfield Benediction is a musical setting by Lucy R. Meyer, a 19th-century alumna of my school, of the text "The Lord bless thee and keep thee, / The Lord make his face shine upon thee, / And be gracious unto thee, / The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, / And give thee peace.") The only trouble is that the Northfield Benediction is the King James Version's translation of Numbers 6:24-6, which was, of course, originally written in Hebrew, and which has been a part of Jewish liturgy for thousands of years. (It's called the birkat Kohanim or Priestly Blessing.)
Jewish prayers "translated into Hebrew"? Christian prayers in "Greek translation"? "And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?"
... as David Byrne said even before he discovered PowerPoint.
