In an inspiring venue that partly works as a tube station daytime and nighttime transforms into a bar and lecture hall a packed solid Pecha Kucha took place in Brussels, 19th of September. The Pecha Kucha format is an interesting challenge to a presenter in terms of telling a story: being entertaining and pushing an agenda. 20 slides 20 seconds/slide, you basically don´t have time to finish a sentence, so keep the slides narrative and present crystal-clear thinking. Hm… Preparing for the Pecha Kucha I looked through a number of projects that I´ve been involved in at the Interactive Institute over the years and compared reflections from partners and people that have come across the projects. And one Pecha Kucha idea emerged: I found similarities between projects in neurology and sustainability research. While researching for a project called Brainball, a game where you compete in relaxation using EEG (Brainwaves) as input, we had a lot of contact with neurology researchers telling us a whole range of perspectives and solutions around the understanding of the human brain. What was very clear was the complexity in the question, but at the same time how we as human beings have a very intuitive understanding of ourselves and our brain. But it was also obviously painful to see that there was a gap between understanding ourselves and EEG-charts. I think that this gap is present in how we understand and act on questions within the sustainability discussion. How do you relate to numbers and figures that are presented to us from science? What does 2000 kg CO2 really means? What does this mean in the bigger perspective. Does my behavior have any impact in the bigger context?
We just see the little neuron transmitting to another neuron, but we don´t have clue what that neuron really does in the bigger context. It is very obvious that if you start to have problems on that level, you will quickly run into serious illness. We are all stuck in the system but on a intuitive level we all know that my little neuron transmission is important and if all the neurons work well together you might do a good presentation at a Pecha Kucha.

The exhibition, Visual Voltage is an attempt to visualize and open up discussions around behavior and understandings regarding energy consumption because everything starts or ends with all the small decisions made on this planet.