Last Friday, me and about 150 other folks went to Denver’s first Pecha Kucha Night. Pronounced “P chalk-a-chaâ€, and Japanese for “Chit Chat”. Pecha Kucha’s are held in cities from Amsterdam and Auckland to Venice and Vienna. The event was organized by locally by Jaime Kopke, Angela Schwab (both of whom have great blogs that are in my feed-reader, are they in yours?), and Brian Colonna.
The rules of the night, as explained on the official Pecha Kucha website, are as such:
Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.
It’s a a way for architects, designers, artists, writers, and plain-old, ordinary, people to share their work in a concise and rapid fire format. It’s like show and tell for adults, with beer.
It was such a packed house lots of people had to sit on pillows on the floor. And the despite the overload of hipsters in the audience, the presenters were excellent – some of my favorites being Steve Silber’s “Greeting”, Claire Martin read a series of obituaries about interesting but unsung people, Kent Corbell displayed a knew audio frequency that is supposed to fuck with your chakras and make you all emotional (it kinda worked), Andrew Novick talked about his love for pi, and Scot Lefavor was a no-show, maybe next time.
Speaking of next times, the next Pecha Kucha night will be Monday, July 14th. If you want to share your creative project at the next event shoot an email over to pechakuchadenver@gmail.com
Wow, that sounds like a really neat concept. I don’t know what I’d present at an event like that. Maybe I’d play the flute for 6 minutes.
I agree with tea – fascinating concept, but I don’t know what I’d present. It sounds like it could be anything from an educational presentation on a subject, to art (poetry and photography would work well, I imagine, though I’d rather do a short story), to something like the infamous vacation slideshows of the late 70s, early 80s.
Anne, something about the building you are working on would be really cool.
I’d have to talk to my bosses about it. One of them is a bit enamoured of the spotlight, but they might let me do it. Hmm…
You are better than almost anyone at making me homesick. I wish I could go to the next one.
BTW: One of these days, you’re going to have to tell me what it is you DO, exactly. 🙂