We are all in this together.

Following up on the success of Pecha Kucha Night #1 back in September, Calgary Arts Development is hosting Pecha Kucha Night #2 on Thursday, at The Uptown Stage and Screen.

PKN #1, which went down over at The Grand mid-September was a solid night where speakers and audience alike felt out the formula that PKN challenges us with. Each speaker must use 20 slides, and the slides auto-advance at 20 second intervals. For some speakers it became a bit of a slog to catch up with the all the thoughts they wanted to cram in on each slide, for others, one image could remain onscreen while they were almost silent, letting us drink it in. For the best, the 20 seconds framed thoughts from their stories perfectly and the energy in the room would shoot up.

As an audience member, it was enjoyable to have a fresh topic served up roughly every six minutes, with a few speakers getting honest laughs and genuinely inspiring me. I did have two slight complaints however. First, the break was a bit too short to really get any conversation in after waiting in line for drinks. Second, several of the speakers came across as so many vendors do at conferences, pimping their products and work as opposed to teaching and exchanging with us.

But it looks like CADA has learnt lessons for PKN #2. The biggest change will be the beer/wine equation. Almost like a hockey game, there will be two intermissions, and three periods of talks. This should give us more chances to fire up quick chats with other attendees before for full on chill time that follows PKN #2 in The Marquee Room.

As for the speakers, there is a solid line up to back up the theme of the night “How We Live Together”. The lineup includes not only people involved in urban design, but a wide range of people discussing different aspects of interactions that we all have together. A few names that stick out on the list for me would have to be John Frosst of Arbour Lake School (google it!), Quinton Rafuse (from CoworkYYC), Xstine Cook (Calgary Animated Objects Society) and Eric Moschopedis (Creator of Imaginary Ordinary Community Project).

Each speaker should be able to give us a taste of the options we have for living and working together, and hopefully their gestalt will give us inspiration and motivation to go forward in our own communities. It already feels less vendor and more “these are the people in your city”. [full list]

And the after party is at The Marquee room. I’m one of the people in your city you would have found there anyways.

Pecha Kucha Night #2
Thursday, 3 December 2021
7:00pm

Uptown Stage and Screen
612 - 8th Ave SW
[Tix]

Full Disclosure: Wil sits on the Community Advisory Board of Pecha Kucha Night Calgary.

Tags: Pecha Kucha

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Festivals & Fanfare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.