Military Powerpoint Karaoke: Improv Night | Richmond Dist.

Submitted by the Event Organizer

The Internet Archive presents the first ever Military Powerpoint Karaoke: a night of “Powerpoint Karaoke” using presentations in the Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex collection at archive.org that were thoughtfully extracted during the Internet Archive’s most recent end-of-term web crawl. The event will take place on Tuesday, March 6th at 7:30pm at Internet Archive headquarters in the Richmond District. The show will be preceded by a reception at 6:30 pm, when doors will also open.

Also known as “Battle Decks,” Powerpoint Karaoke is an improvisational and art event where audience members give a presentation using a set of Powerpoint slides that they’ve never seen before. There are three rules: 1) The presenter cannot see the slides before presenting; 2) The presenter delivers each slide in succession without skipping slides or going back; and 3) The presentation ends when all slides are presented, or after 5 minutes (whichever comes first). We’re thrilled to have Rick Prelinger, creator of Lost Landscapes and Prelinger Archive, and Avery Trufelman of 99% Invisible, joining us to deliver headlining Powerpoint decks. The rest of the presentations will be delivered by you — the audience members who sign up.

This event will use, as its source material, a curated collection of the Internet Archive’s Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex, a special project for the Internet Archive’s 20th Anniversary in which staff extracted all the Powerpoint files openly available from the government’s “.mil” web domain. This collection contains over 57,000 Powerpoint decks, each charged with material that ranges from the violent to the banal, featuring attack modes, leadership styles, harness types, and modes for requesting vacation days from the US Military. As a whole, this collection forms a unique snapshot into our government’s Military Industrial Complex.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.