Powerpoint (0) – (1) Prezi

WHEN PETER ARVAI founded PREZI in 2009, he didn’t set out to topple PowerPoint. He just wanted to see better presentations. With the right tools, he figured, he could help people create visual aids that felt more engaging. Arvai was sick of sitting through slide decks containing walls of text and bullet-pointed lists, listening to the speaker ramble on while the audience squinted at the words on the screen.

So he, along with co-founders Péter Halácsy and Adam Somlai-Fischer, set out to build something that looked more like a digital poster board. You could pepper it with images and animations, then zoom in and out to focus on specific things at specific moments during a talk. The tool, which they named Prezi, uses what Arvai calls “a spatial metaphor” rather than simple paginated slides.

Prezi wants to bring audiences inside of a presentation using augmented reality.

That was eight years ago. The company has since grown to over 300 employees, split between Budapest and San Francisco, and its software product now counts 85 million users and holds a repository of over 325 million public presentations; pitch decks, lectures, and student projects. Last year, the company launched PREZI BUSINESS, a suite of tools designed for companies and teams; individuals can still use the basic Prezi tools for free, or pay for more premium features for a monthly subscription.

As high as Prezi has climbed, Microsoft PowerPoint is still the market leader. It has hundreds of millions of users—most of them creating the same boring slideshows Arvai has vowed to make extinct. So in order to take that next step and become the top name in presentation software, Prezi needs to evolve. How could Arvai and his team create tools to make presentations even more immersive, more exciting? The answer: bring audiences inside of the presentation using augmented reality.

Quite a Show

Arvai and his team have been watching the augmented reality takeover. It’s played out at Snapchat and Facebook, at Google and Apple. Companies are using AR to design cars, sell furnitures , make little digital sharks swim around your breakfast table. What if Prezi could apply that same technology to make better presentations?

The company had the tech to do it. The Prezi Business software was built on a completely new set of software tools called Prezi Next. “This technology stack is something we’ve developed that works across mobile phones, browsers, installed on your computer—and it allows us to do things like AR,” says Arvai. The question would be what exactly those AR presentations might look like.me bunny ears. Then he turned on his webcam, and the visuals appeared next to his face.

In a traditional presentation, Arvai says, you might be standing in a room with a screen behind you displaying all of your visual aids. But what if you’re presenting your pitch deck in a web conference, or a Zoom Room? Remote presentations lose all of the benefits of good visual design and practiced body language. “Either you have the video but you don’t have visuals, or you see visuals but you don’t see who’s talking,” Arvai says.

“We’re thinking about, OK, how can we actually enable human connections with the use of this technology, and enable people to be better understood?” Arvai says

Sharp Vision

As of right now, Arvai and his team are still trying to decide what exactly their AR software should do. The company debuted an early version in a recent TED Talk, where neurologist Robert Sapolsky used Prezi’s tools to give a talk about the biology behind the best and worst of human behavior. At one point in Sapolsky’s talk, he calls up an image of a man holding a hand gun, his finger on the trigger. It’s pointed right at Sapolsky. The effect is weirdly chilling, and somehow more lifelike in augmented reality. It makes that part of his talk hard to forget.

That, Arvai says, is the potential of what software like this could do. But the product isn’t ready for a public launch yet. Prezi has enlisted a select group of influencers to try out the AR tools and offer feedback before the company releases a beta version. He expects to have a better developed sense of the product in the coming months.

Arvai knows his role in the augmented reality future is a modest one, but he also believes deeply in the power of storytelling and communication tools. He showed me a couple of presentations people have made on Prezi, detailing new projects in engineering and medicine. One presentation, created by a journalist, uses visual aids to explain the conflict in Syria. Just imagine, Arvai says, if you could explain that with the aid of AR.

“We won’t put a woman on Mars, we won’t cure cancer, and we won’t make peace in Syria,” he says. “But when we do our jobs correctly, we contribute to all of this.”

Is healthgoth sub-culture highly “POLITICAL”?

The term health goth is an oxymoron by itself, beside this argument it is more specific about the  “Aesthetics” and its proto narrative of getting back to paradise by embracing mortality as a one-world consciousness and devotion to deliver us from late capitalism. Johny love who is considered to be an outcast by the health goth’s initial creators magic Fades works exactly in this form of aesthetical Branding and this is the way in which Accelerated Aesthetics work. Accelerated aesthetics is a phenomenon where it gets along with capitalism and works completely against it in the later stages, it is like a Trojan horse virus a good one indeed. The usage of 90’s Adidas brand and inverted nike are rhetoric examples of these which work completely against capitalism.

Health Goth invigorates the anti-nostalgic dystopian present which is more into the ethos of mythologizing the present technology and a new genre futuristic thinking . It depends on the visual physical aesthetics as they represent the futuristic cyborgian humanitarian semiotic.

[ To be edited and Continued Later ]

Health Goth – A visagial Dialogue

Speaking with the founders it was found what exactly were the visagial intentions of its creators about the ethos of mythological transmutation with the technological advancement.exactly was, And we give you what it was

Beyond the obvious what actually is Health Goth and when did you first get into it?
It’s a combination of things we’re interested in like sportswear, fetishisation of clothing and cleanliness, body enhancement technology, rendered environments, and dystopian advertisements. The original idea came from some edits where I was adding these darker elements to CGI renderings of gyms. It was around July of 2013, when I started joking with friends and sharing posts with no intention of it evolving into what it is now.

What’s the significance behind bringing together subcultural styles like goth and cyber punk and the mainstream world of sport?
It has to do with our history of net art obsession and fascination with the rise of trans-humanism. We want to create art that references evolution and relate it back to subcultures, things like bio-enhancement technology, anti-aging medication, and how it all feeds into this ideal of “pursuing perfection”. We embrace a lot of these futuristic fantasies but ultimately we all have our own fears and doubts about it. So we like to blur the edges between things that are transcendental and taboo just enough that it begs a discussion.

Were you always into goth?
We’ve never really been into just one thing. We love goths and things about being goth, but not everything about it. None of us are purists about anything, and none of us have any interest in being retro at all.

What is it about the darker side of sport ads that fascinates you?
It’s not necessarily that it fascinates us, but it was a starting point in some ways, being that we were seeing things in these ads that the company and others weren’t recognizing. There’s a lot to take inspiration from, trying to accentuate something that was understated by putting it in a different context.

Where did your interest in sport/healthy lifestyle come from?
For us, it’s more about full mind and body health than it is about sport. We want to encourage people to own the freakish parts of yourself that are typically suppressed. We’re also very interested in ultra-clean rendered environments, self-esteem, and general happiness. Whether you get that from exercise or some twisted fetish you have, so be it.

What’s the relationship between you version of Health Goth and Johnny Deathface’s 10 commandments?
Yeah, we have nothing to do with his site. He has said he did it just to piss us “nerds” off, but clearly he’s attention-starved and trying to make a quick buck selling shitty t-shirts. But no, we do not agree with any “commandments” and his representation of it is about as far off-base as you could get.

Is there a Health Goth community or place outside the web where it can congregate?
I mean there are countless people that exist out there sharing some of the same outlook, but they might not identify as or appear to be “health goth”. There are clubs in London, New York, LA, or here in Portland, where you’ll find people that are incorporating it into their personal style. But it’s all indebted to designers and streetwear movements that came before us so a lot of the fashion elements are really recognizable to people who have been following certain trends in music or net art. I don’t think any of these people would straight up say “I’m health goth”, I certainly wouldn’t. We reject the idea that it’s a lifestyle choice, it’s an aesthetic and you’re welcome to pick and choose whatever bits inspire you.

Is there a particular Health Goth sound?
We haven’t paired it much with specific sounds, because we’ve seen other aesthetics become less relevant when the music stopped progressing alongside it. There is a dystopian club sound though associated with labels like Liminal Sounds, PAN, Her Records, etc. and artists like Drippin, Dj New Jersey Drone, Sudanim, M.E.S.H., and others.

Have movements like Seapunk and other internet art affected your overall aesthetic
Absolutely. We are friends with many founders and leaders of movements like Vaporwave and Seapunk, and have been talking to them all along. We’re obviously indebted to the context they worked in, and we are obsessive supporters of artists like Kim Laughton, Gerg?’ Kovács and Chris Isbert at the Aesthetics groups, Jan-Peter Gieseking, etc. We are completely dumbfounded and inspired by their work.

You spoke about accelerationism in a pervious interview, how would you explain your belief in it and how does it relate to Health Goth?
Accelerationist aesthetics are really about how subcultures can develop in our “capitalist” society while acting destructively towards it by appropriating the visual elements used to perpetuate it. Occasionally people think we are trying to advertise brands on the page, but it’s an inherent part of the medium we work with.

What do you hope to achieve with Health Goth as a movement?
We aren’t trying to achieve anything. We want to keep posting images that are relevant to us and be mindful of what we are doing.

How would you feel about Health Goth going mainstream and what would you say to your critics if it did?
Well, we think a lot of the elements the community identifies with are already mainstream, even if they are towards the fringe. They’re connecting with bits and pieces of it that are already parts of their personality, lifestyle, or artistic interests. But if it’s a question of “selling out” or not, you can be sure there won’t be any clothing, events, or advertisements that are specifically branded “Health Goth” and marketed to people (except of course the clothing Johnny is selling without our blessing). That would be as absurd as an official Seapunk or Normcore campaign; it would obviously self-destruct. We’re artists and aesthetic junkies ourselves, any work we’re hired to do as creatives or designers is a personal venture and doesn’t speak for the thousands of people that embrace the movement and have made it their own. We have too much love for them to deliberately commodify and alienate them like that.

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credits

Based on the I-d.vice interview

Health Goth ” A R[A]T Culture “

Created by a band of four musical band people named Magic Fades, Mike Grabarek, Jeremy Scott, Chris Cantino @Portland, Oregon. It was initially started as a facebook group in the year 2013 before it went viral. It is a high tech and exotically specialised sportswear with a really sparse color palette.

” Gothic Aesthetic with Athletic Leisure movement “

The characters of being a health goth is to follow a solid set of rules as every single subculture has its own fixity, rules, norms and limits to be followed. Owing to the sparse color palette ” SLEEK BLACK ” is considered to be the dynasty that rules the place by provision of color blocking and having a great sports outfit which provides an industrial look.