Today I gave a talk at a conference, and decided that the talk would consist of demonstrating fifty of my Java applets, with nary a PowerPoint slide in sight. This ended up being an interesting choice, because each applet, as it turned out, connected to several others, and themes began emerging of which even I had not been fully aware.
The entire experience was fun, in the way that live performances are always fun. You never entirely know what will happen in a live performance — what might go right and what might go wrong — and this sense of heady danger creates a kind of bond between everyone in the room. As Bill Murray said so memorably about theatre in Tootsie, “These are people who are alive on the planet.”
I may just give up entirely on prepared slides!
I was in the audience and loved your talk. You gave a sense of how programming can be play.
I was particularly interested in the variant of the Pride and Prejudice reader that you showed last. If I remember correctly, it had a panel that allowed you to play with the code or colour parameters of the map (I was at the back and trying to take notes which means I didn’t follow as well as I should have.) Are you going to put that up or explain it? If not, do you share your code?