Slides
Untitled Presentation is our long-running collaborative online slide deck, where we collect and share thoughts and ideas each week. It is an experiment in thinking in public and working creatively with corporate software. Anyone is welcome to view and comment.
Recent slides from Untitled Presentation
About the project
We started Untitled Presentation in December 2018 as a way to record and share ideas that were more substantive than a tweet, but not (or not yet) significant enough for an article or blog post. The idea to use Google slides as a medium came to us via two 8 years olds, who used the free software to share pictures of cars with each other after school.
The slide deck has since become a substantive body of work, covering a huge range of topics.
We have produced over a hundred (mostly) weekly slides, which form both a series of snapshots of specific moments, and also a living text that builds on ideas over time.
In July 2021, novelist Pip Adam reviewed Untitled Presentation in her book review segment on New Zealand’s National Radio (RNZ), generously calling it “one of the most magnificent pieces of literature I think I’ve ever seen”.
Experiments, spinoffs, and collaborations
Through the process of creating Untitled Presentation, we have had opportunities to share what we’ve learned about creating collaborative documents, and have also learned from others:
In May 2020, we welcomed three guest editors to curate a slide for a week each. We feel lucky to have such engaging and diverse contributions documented for posterity in the shared slide deck. We wrote about the experience in our May 2020 newsletter.
We used slides to take notes during the Flat Earth Pedagogies panel discussion as part of the Flat Earthers art project. We also worked with a group of 4th year art students to make their own slides based on themes in the discussion.
To celebrate our 100th slide milestone, we held a Zoom party with over 25 participants from around the world, which included a participatory slide-making session. The results were great, and the conversation about the process and themes that emerged was generative and exciting.
We've also been thrilled to see some other people trying out the hacked Google Slide deck as a method for visual thinking and note taking. Check out Anne-Laure Le Cunff's Antistatic Garden and the Antistatic slides that AGWilsonn's students created as part of their coursework.