Slide presentation first presented at Flowers for All Occasions. 2019.

“I spend half my life trying to dumb down my ideas to fit nicely in a 15 slide deck.” (@MissShellySays, Twitter)

What problem are you trying to solve?

Historical struggle?

Empires of sand?

The “pitch deck” is a sales practice in which speculative products are “pitched” (as in elevator) to an audience of venture capitalists using visual slides. We break this up into the ideological components of the avant-garde throught Futurism, Lettrism, the situationists and the red brigades in this compelling lecture performance about product performance produced by a product company— to unpack the breakthrough technology, PowerPoint.

We will sing the praises of the Suprematist project using slides of Kasmir Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ (unconventionally mounted on the ‘Z’ axis for its 1917 debut), counterposed with billboard shots of Apple’s ‘Messianic’ iPhone X. Released in 2020, the phone utilized ‘breakthrough’ display technology that encoded iOS’ user interface upon the surface of the device itself. Like SmallTalk, but Huge.

As the slides cycle, the audience is rocked into the state of suggestibility we call “informed consent”: what’s suggested is not one product in particular but the pattern language of persuasion as it pertains to late capital’s cycles of ideological production. As the talk crests into a hypnotic detenté (ala Chris Marker’s *Sans Soleil)—* delaying the possibility of a viable exit strategy— what’s exposed is an Oedipal versioning process in which the dialectic of ideology and technology never synthesizes and never fails to sell.

There’s a Situation at the bottom of every sales deck.