PowerPoint to the people

"EVERY SINGLE ONE of these images is a protest against the brute fact that I have to work for a living," explains Michael Lewy, a Jamaica Plain-based artist who spends his days as an administrative assistant at MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. While temping at Fidelity in 2000, Lewy recalls, he began idly generating PowerPoint charts that diagrammed his own malaise; he e-mailed these to friends, who assured him he was onto something important. Today, Lewy has achieved a certain renown for his workplace protest art, a selection of which has just been published under the title "Chart Sensation" by the edgy graphic-arts publisher J&L Books.

Ideas, who visited Lewy in his home studio last week, asked if he ever uses PowerPoint to kill time at MIT. "Never," Lewy insisted. "But I am inspired by the incredibly esoteric information-theory graphs that cross my desk. I find it endlessly amusing that I have no idea what they could possibly mean."