Last night I was at Super Deluxe, a fantastic event space in Roppongi that has something different on nearly every night.
Events I've attended include Danny's CGM nights, Tokyo 2.0, live painting-a-wall-in-time-to-live-jazz, a sitar concert, and a virtual fight between two drummers whose drumkits were connected to a MacBook Pro so that their beats were turned into a space-invaders battle projected onto the wall - sounds crazy huh?!
Last night Super Deluxe hosted the monthly PechaKucha. It's basically a chance for designers, artists and architects to present their projects to a crowd of a couple of hundred people.
The format is a little different from your usual slideshow presentations though - at PechaKucha you have 20 slides, each displayed for just 20 seconds, before automatically advancing to the next.
This keeps the pace up: presenters have no choice but to keep to time. (It also means that creating PechaKucha presentations is quite challenging!)
The pechakucha format was a big hit with audiences who were tired of long powerpoint presentations - and it soon spread: it's now held in 276 cities worldwide (including one near you).
Last night's line-up was great: photographer / new media pro Craig Mod (pictured) presented a new kind of book that grows from Twitter, Michael Keferl of CScout presented about eco trends in Japan (I recently interviewed him for my Making it in Japan podcast), photographer friend Martin Holtkamp introduced some of his images, oh, and we at White Rabbit Press presented our new Akihabara audio tour :)
Last night there was a big announcement from the organisers - next month Pecha Kucha's will be held in all 276 cities on the same day, with the aim of raising one million dollars to help rebuild Haiti.
Last night's presentations will be on the PechaKucha site soon, and there's links to all the different presenters. Check out the site at
www.pecha-kucha.org/night/tokyo/68
So, with PechaKucha happening in 276 cities, chances are there's one near you - have you ever been?
Joseph
