Picks and shovels
Hello,
It’s been over a year since I last wrote you. Here’s why you might have subscribed many moons ago:
academic work on same (more on this below)
music I make solo or in the group Pale Ribbons Tossed into the Dark
I have news. I co-edited a book with Canadian media theorist Frédérik Lesage called Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production, published last month by Palgrave Macmillan. It is an interdisciplinary survey of how the tools, techniques, and practices used to make cultural artefacts have endured their transition into software such as DAWs, image editors, game engines, CADs, video editors, and so on; and how these condition the work and meaning of 'being creative.'
You may ask, why this, now, some fifty years since people started hand-wringing about computers destroying culture? A better question: why hadn’t this book been published yet? Why was an interdisciplinary entanglement of this phenomenon absent, while individual traditions had nuanced histories of critical engagement with their means of production? Music has a centuries-long lineage on this topic, and a distinct vocabulary—not tools, but instruments; not media theory, but organology. Historically, this specialisation has been quite insular, its theorists unwilling to exchange knowledge with other disciplines or making essentialist claims that music is just built different. I’d attempted to cross the disciplinary divide before through a comparison of DAW history and word processor history, but larger scale, systematically interdisciplinary analyses of the means of cultural production haven't been so forthcoming.
At the same time, too much interdisciplinary sentiment risks genericising the diversity of cultural forms and reducing disciplinary expertise to novel obscurity, if it is mentioned at all. Currently, most cultural production scholarship focuses on distribution platforms like Spotify, Amazon, and Netflix (e.g. Giblin & Doctorow's book Chokepoint Capitalism). These are necessary objects of critique, but one level dissociated from embodied creative practice. That's not a clean distinction—TikTok's video editor is as capable of making cultural artefacts as Premiere Pro despite their different capabilities—but the relative lack of study of the creative tools that artists and culture makers use every day is notable and consistent.
This unwittingly reinforces the notion that creativity in the traditional sense is mysterious, isolated, less socially constructed than the moment the public receives its artefacts. It also makes the honorific idea of creativity susceptible to co-optation by a ruling class who think of artists not as performing a socially valuable role, but as the model worker/serf: intensely driven, poorly paid, willing to take risks and bear the costs of their failures, steadfast in their illusory belief that they are autonomous. In other words, 'being creative' is becoming an index of subjugation imposed on a growing proportion of workers today. The tools explored in this book maintain these relations, materially and symbolically. The question, then, is how exactly? What are its effects?
In these pursuits, I found a comrade in Frédérik Lesage, whose research he calls a cultural biography of Photoshop. Frédérik is a much better academic than I am, who weaves post-McLuhan media theory, software studies, critique of the creative industries, and empirical research on arts and design workers' lived experience. He has developed very useful concepts, like his Middlebroware project and his analysis of software glut (an overabundance of features). I've learned much working with him. He also arranged for some funding from Simon Fraser University for my editorial work, which I'm extremely grateful for. My own two universities paid me $0, which speaks to the Australian university sector's pattern of exploitative and patronising behaviour towards casualised academics, but I digress.
Our introduction gives some theoretical background, responding to Lev Manovich’s neologism of softwarisation and the challenges of theorising the intersection of software studies, Silicon Valley ideology, and the creativity dispositif, the social forms that encourage us to be increasingly creative and entrepreneurial throughout our lives. We suggest major themes that this emerging field should consider, using the propensity of metaphors in software design as a guide. This ranges from software's resituating of space and place (having names like Suite, Studio, Workstation, etc.) to its redistribution of people and labour (many have generic names like editor, computer, and [word] processor, all of which used to be job titles, often held by women).
The other chapters are strong. Particularly brilliant chapters include Tom Livingstone’s chapter on Unreal Engine’s monopoly on in-camera visual effects and virtual production, Catherine Provenzano’s chapter on MIDI chord packs and the gendered/classed history of easy-playing instruments, and Frédérik’s and Alberto Lusoli’s chapter on young creatives disillusioned by the ‘grey media’ (Google Drive, Slack, Trello, etc.) that takes up most of their time. I’m also thrilled that Seth Scott-Deuchar (I love his music), Australia’s leading videogame theorist Brendan Keogh (his latest book is great and open-access), and Boorloo artist Sze Tsang all have great chapters here too.
I also wrote a chapter called “The expressive subject: prosumers, virtuosi, and digital musical control [PDF download].” In it, I analyse the world of MIDI controllers via a spinoff of the creativity dispositif, one which seeks to maximise all forms of individual expressivity in its subjects. This expressive subjectivity is connected to two other subjectivities: the prosumer (a portmanteau of producer and consumer), and the virtuoso/virtuosa, a similar but more scrupulous type of consumer. I apply this concept to two MIDI controllers by the company ROLI, the Seaboard and Blocks, which represent these two approaches to producing expressive subjects: one where instruments are built with a bespoke but normative, western classical idea of virtuosic expression in mind (the Seaboard); and one where the consumer’s choices are the expressive end in itself (Blocks, but could just as easily apply to modular synths, guitar pedals, and drum kits). In consumer cultures like amateur digital music production (and academic cultures like the NIME community), expressivity is figured as a technical problem with a technological solution, but it is really one social paradigm amongst many in the crapshoot of popular cultural production. I conclude by considering the history of the TR-808 and TB-303, two instruments that were considered inexpressive by industry media for many years until Black musicians made innovative music that exceeded their ‘intended’ use, a racialised division of the aesthetic labour required to render an instrument expressive that continues today with creative software like Auto-Tune.
Boorloo/Perth folks, I’m pleased to say that there’ll be a free launch event with provocations from contributor Sze Tsang, music software developer Skot Mcdonald, and artist/writer Paul Boyé as part of the Audible Edge Night School series at the State Library of Western Australia, Thursday April 11 at 6pm. I’ll be speaking more polemically on the creativity dispositif and techno-feudalism, as well as to the themes of the book. The book is more about diagnosis than suggesting better futures, so the talk will take some shots at what a left project that takes leave from creative subjectivity might be like. It will be recorded and I’ll publish the transcript of my talk to this newsletter. Please come if this interests you!
Email me if you'd like to read the book but don't have institutional access.
My deepest thanks to the contributors to this book, to Frédérik for taking a chance on me (whom Reviewer #1 described as a "junior, untried figure"), and to buddies who've been victim to me fumbling my way through the ideas here.
This Buttondown newsletter is my primary website for the time being, TinyLetter having been euthanised by Intuit Mailchimp. My newsletter archive has ported over too. I plan to write more letters this year, e.g. writing up some of my lectures on Australian Music History, Aesthetics and Compositional Practice, and Electronic Music History. These classes were recently axed, by the same university that shortly afterward changed its brand motto to "Creative Thinkers Made Here." I like to think this encapsulates the creativity dispositif: a sleight-of-hand that twists the historical, relational, restitutional, radical work of critical cultural production into—pardon this phrase—the proletarianisation of grindset. A new feudalism of subjects who feel liberated by the idea of being individually creative and expressive in their working lives, who have never worked so hard to feel so alienated. Adobe's CEO Shantanu Narayen said in 2019, "we are living in the golden age of creativity!" But there's another Californian proverb from another Californian golden age that says what he really means: In a gold rush, don't mine for gold; sell picks and shovels.