Pecha Kucha 8 Report

I participated in last night's Pecha Kucha Night in Portsmouth, NH. It was great fun. I met interesting people and got to see some great presentations. When we arrived, we looked at the printed sheet listing the speakers for the evening. I was number 5, halfway through, and thought, "what a comfortable place to be." Imagine my surprise when they said they were getting ready to start and my name was on the screen. They like to mix it up and I was the first. But I took a deep breath, went to the front of the room, and got started. You introduce yourself, you say, "I'm ready," and it begins. As I mentioned in the last post, you show 20 images and have 20 seconds to talk about each. The images are sent ahead and they are timed. I had planned and practiced (tips to come in a later post) and I think it went well. One of the themes was spring and I showed Circles for the Seasons for spring. The colors were way off but people still seemed to appreciate the work. The good thing about going first was I could really focus on the other presentations. Here is what we saw and heard:

Pam Ikegami, UNH Professor of Japanese Language and Culture, did a presentation on connections between New Hampshire and Japan, interviewing people with the dual connection and asking them what they learned from the two cultures.

Stephanie Cornell, one of the organizers who has just returned to New England after four years of living in Asia, did a presentation Why I Love Japan with great photographs and insight into the Japanese people and the visual culture. She blogs about her experiences at littlemisstwig.com.

Documentary photographer Audrey Gottlieb showed a wonderful collection of photographs of Japan.

Poet Michael Chmielecki spoke about and read his moving poem about the tsunami.

Designer and illustrator Matt Talbot shared his love of robots. You can see his work at mattrobot.com.

Alfonso Fabrega, Art Director and Senior Visual Designer at PixelMEDIA chose high fiving as his topic and spoke about the trends in our culture towards expressions of approval with like in facebook as an example. He suggests that they do not foster the critical dialogue needed for improvement in our work. The talk was much lighter than this description sounds.

Illustrator Jim Roldan spoke about the creative reawakening that led him back to his childhood love of comics.

Lars Trodson shared his journey from journalist to public relations to novelist. His mystery, Eagles Fly Alone, will be publish in September.

Pecha Kucha 8 in Portsmouth was just one of many similar events taking place in cities around the world yesterday. In addition to an evening of fun and sharing, money was raised to send to Architecture for Humanity's Japan fund.