Check out this creative night At LAN Club / speakers have 20 slides and 20 seconds each to (6 minutes and 40 seconds, total) to sound off on fashion / My VISUALS there.

The space race is over. It was killed stone dead by the information age in a hostile takeover. After all, who cares about the moon when there’s a sale on at Banana Republic?

The rush to impart information in ever more digestible ways is now the holy grail of modernity. TV, internet, pop-up ads, RSS feeds, mobile updates, they all batter your corneas on a second-by-second basis.

But as any showman knows, it’s not the medium (or even in some cases the message) that matters, but the delivery. So let us introduce Pecha Kucha – the art world’s very own download to your brain.

Deriving its name from the Japanese term for ‘chit chat’, Pecha Kucha’s format is simple: take a vaguely partisan crowd, then add ten willing speakers; give each one a time limit of six minutes and 40 seconds, access to PowerPoint, a maximum of 20 slides, a rough theme and shove them towards a microphone.

It’s fast food for the lecture circuit, julienning a wide range of subjects into entertaining, easily devoured info-snacks for anyone with a passing interest in Beijing’s creative community.

The theme for this month’s edition is ‘fashion’, and while you’re unlikely to find anyone dressed like the Summer Palace, the lectures can be just as unpredictable.

The organisers vet the scripts, but have no control over the delivery, ‘that is the fun part of Pecha Kucha,’ says Sebastian.

The house lights go up, and as one digital slide replaces another, like bullets slipping into a revolver chamber, a steady game of Russian roulette plays out on stage, with each speaker sweating to keep pace with the projections and hold the audience’s attention.

The burden rests upon the ‘act’ to create something entertaining. Any former student knows the perils of lectures: staring, bored, at the benches in front of you etched with the sighs of your forebears, the sharp tang of Colgate still in your mouth as you blearily try to keep your eyes open.

Pecha Kucha is a different story, though. Naturally, the results can be hit and miss as photographers, artists, dilettantes, gurus, architects, designers and writers all throw their hats into the ring and dive off at tangents.

As for Pecha Kucha: the structure might not change – 10 speakers, six minutes and 40 seconds each – but within these restrictions lies the boundless potential for creativity, and, at the very least, you’ll learn something new.