Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production (Creative Working Lives) [1st ed. 2024] 3031456920, 9783031456923

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Refiguring the Digital Tools of Cultural Production
Soft-Ware-Ize-Ation
Digital Metaphors of Cultural Production
Tool, Instrument, Engine: Reauthoring Agency, Skill, and Discipline
Suite, Studio, Workstation: Resituating Space and Place
Editor, Computer, Processor: Redistributing People and Labour
Product, Service, Licence: Re-expropriating the Worker
User, Pro, Community: Refiguring the Cultural Producer and Their Creations
The Chapters in This Collection
References
Part I: Frameworks for Studying Softwarization and Cultural Production
Chapter 2: TikTok as a Platform Tool: Surveying Disciplinary Perspectives on Platforms and Cultural Production
Introduction
Three Fields of Study and Their Perspectives on Platform Tools
Platform Studies: Datafication, Platformization, and Infrastructuralization
Business Studies: Multi-sided Markets and Platform Boundaries
Information Systems: Boundary Resources
Analyzing Platform Tools: Objects of Study and Methods
Platform Studies
Business and Information Systems Studies
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: The Spatial Languages of Virtual Production: Critiquing Softwarization with Aesthetic Analysis
Introduction
Introducing Virtual Production and In-Camera VFX
Analysing Virtual Production and In-Camera VFX
References
Chapter 4: Generative AI and the Technological Imaginary of Game Design
Introduction
(Re-)Defining Game Design
Methodological Remarks
How AI Tools Shape Technological Imaginaries of Game-Making
Imagined Functionality
Imagined Implications for the Digital Games Industry
Imagined Implications on Game Genres
Reimagining Game-Making
What Comes Next?
References
Part II: Studies of Cultural Subjectivities After Softwarization
Chapter 5: Autoharps, Chord Organs, and MIDI Packs: Easy-Playing Instruments, Gender, and Classes of Musical Participation
The Arc of the Autoharp and the Chord Organ at Home
MIDI Packs and Progress
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Figurations of the Tool Agnostic
Introduction
The Tool Agnostic as Figuration
A New Bauhaus for New Media
The Dark Arts of the Polyglot Manager
There Is No Soft Skill
What Is a Writer?
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: The Expressive Subject: Prosumers, Virtuosi, and Digital Musical Control
Creative, Prosumer, and Expressive Subjects
Digital Musical Control, ROLI, and Its Expressive Subjects
Contextualising the Emergence of Digital Musical Controllers and ROLI
Producing Prosumers-by-accumulation
Producing Virtuosi
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Artist and Agency: Technologies for Exploring Self and Place
Introduction
Agency Within Technology
Embracing Imperfections
Re-establishing Place
The Lost: A Case Study
Conclusion
References
Part III: Socialities of Softwarized Cultural Production
Chapter 9: Alternative Gamemaking Tools as Grassroots Platforms
Introduction
The Platformization of Videogame Production
Alternative Gamemaking Tools
Grassroots Platforms and Platform Socialism
Community Self and Platform Governance
Social Ownership Over Digital Assets
More Equitable Distribution of the Social and Economic Benefits of Digital Technology
An Emancipatory Movement that Combats Power Inequalities; and the Fostering of a Culture of Collaboration, Solidarity and Hope, and the Harnessing of Innovation Towards Socially Useful Ends
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: Bypassing Defaults in Data Visualization Design Processes: A Tableau Case Study
Introduction
Establishing Theoretical (and Practical) Roots
Setting up the Scene
What Are Sankey Diagrams and How Are They Usually Created?
What About Tableau? “Imagination Is Your Only Limit”
Tableau Zen Masters/Visionaries
Unfolding of the Tableau Sankey Diagram Hack
The “Aha!” Moment
Parametric Equations
Fine-Tuning
Going Beyond the Default
Tracing Similar Beyond-the-Default Narratives
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 11: The Creative Appropriation of a Scientific Software: The FITS Liberator, a Case Study
Liberating FITS
FITS in Use
The FITS Format
The FITS Liberator
Learning a Workflow
Using FITS in a Workflow
Sharing the Workflow
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 12: Dolby Atmos Music and the Production of Risk
Dolby Atmos Music: Overview and History
Making Music with Dolby Atmos
Dolby Atmos Music and Risk
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

CREATIVE WORKING LIVES

Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production Edited by Frédérik Lesage · Michael Terren

Creative Working Lives Series Editors

Susan Luckman University of South Australia Adelaide, SA, Australia Stephanie Taylor Faculty of Social Sciences The Open University Milton Keynes, UK

This series explores worker experience and working lives in the global sector of the cultural and creative industries. There are rising numbers of aspirants to creative work and rising numbers of graduates and trainees, yet the available employment is increasingly precarious and complex. To address this complexity, the Creative Working Lives series presents original research from across multiple disciplines, including media and cultural studies, gender studies, social psychology and sociology, politics, labour studies, cultural policy studies, anthropology, art and design, and interdisciplinary research. The series provides insights on urgent global and national issues around contemporary cultural and creative working lives, addressing academics, practitioners, students, policy-makers and general readers with an interest in cultural and creative worker experience in a changing world.

Frédérik Lesage  •  Michael Terren Editors

Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production

Editors Frédérik Lesage School of Communication Simon Fraser University Vancouver, BC, Canada

Michael Terren Edith Cowan University Perth, WA, Australia University of Western Australia Perth, WA, Australia

ISSN 2662-415X     ISSN 2662-4168 (electronic) Creative Working Lives ISBN 978-3-031-45692-3    ISBN 978-3-031-45693-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45693-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Oleksandra Korobova / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

The book project for Creative Tools and The Softwarization of Cultural Production draws on research supported by a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant (430-201800964) which was also used to support the fieldwork for the research presented in Chap. 6. Some aspects of the book project were developed during a workshop for the Global Perspectives on Platforms and Cultural Production conference in Amsterdam in the summer of 2022. We would like to thank all the participants in that workshop. Thanks to Sophia Han for her assistance with an initial copy edit of all the chapters. We would like to thank the editors of the series for Creative Working Lives, Stephanie Taylor and Susan Luckman, whose support made this publication possible. We would also like to thank the team at Palgrave Macmillan including Lauriane Piette, Kishor Kannan Ramesh, and Nobuko Kamikawa. Frédérik Lesage would like to thank his colleagues in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University for their help and guidance in developing the project. Michael Terren would like to thank the staff at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University who supported the project.

v

Contents

1 Introduction:  Refiguring the Digital Tools of Cultural Production  1 Frédérik Lesage and Michael Terren Part I Frameworks for Studying Softwarization and Cultural Production  21 2 TikTok  as a Platform Tool: Surveying Disciplinary Perspectives on Platforms and Cultural Production 23 Kaushar Mahetaji and David B. Nieborg 3 The  Spatial Languages of Virtual Production: Critiquing Softwarization with Aesthetic Analysis 47 Tom Livingstone 4 Generative  AI and the Technological Imaginary of Game Design 67 Stefan Werning

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Contents

Part II Studies of Cultural Subjectivities After Softwarization  91 5 Autoharps,  Chord Organs, and MIDI Packs: Easy-Playing Instruments, Gender, and Classes of Musical Participation 93 Catherine Provenzano 6 Figurations  of the Tool Agnostic115 Frédérik Lesage and Alberto Lusoli 7 The  Expressive Subject: Prosumers, Virtuosi, and Digital Musical Control135 Michael Terren 8 Artist  and Agency: Technologies for Exploring Self and Place155 Sze Tsang Part III Socialities of Softwarized Cultural Production 173 9 Alternative  Gamemaking Tools as Grassroots Platforms177 Brendan Keogh 10 Bypassing  Defaults in Data Visualization Design Processes: A Tableau Case Study197 Maria-Nicoleta Petrescu 11 The  Creative Appropriation of a Scientific Software: The FITS Liberator, a Case Study219 Maxime Harvey 12 Dolby  Atmos Music and the Production of Risk243 Seth Scott-Deuchar Index263

Notes on Contributors

Maxime  Harvey  is a PhD candidate in Communication studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He obtained a BA and an MA in Film studies at the Université de Montréal. His research interests centre on visual practices and the uses of digital technologies. For his doctoral research, he investigates the appropriation of the Hubble Space Telescope’s data by amateur astronomers who produce and share pretty pictures on the Web. In addition to lecturing in Film Studies, he is a research assistant for a project investigating the datafication of society and a project on the development and uses of the Akeley Camera. Brendan  Keogh  is a chief investigator of the Digital Media Research Centre and a senior lecturer of the School of Communication at Queensland University of Technology. His research investigates videogame production and play cultures with a focus on issues of labour and creativity. He is the author of The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist (MIT Press, 2023) and A Play of Bodies (MIT Press, 2018), and co-author with Benjamin Nicoll of The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software (Palgrave, 2019). Frédérik Lesage  is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where he teaches digital media theory and research methodology. His work focuses on the intersections between digital culture and cultural production. Lesage is cofounder of the Imaginative Methods Lab. His work can be found in academic journals like Convergence, Fibreculture, New Media & Society, and the International Journal of Communication. ix

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Tom Livingstone  is a research fellow at The University of the West of England (UWE) working within MyWorld, a creative R&D programme driving industry expansion and innovation in the south west of England. His research focuses on emergent media with a particular interest in the impact of game engines on visual culture. He has written widely on film and digital media and his first book Hybrid Images and the Vanishing Point of Digital Visual Effects will be published by Edinburgh University Press. Alberto  Lusoli  is Deputy Director and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser University. His research develops at the intersection of media studies, science and technology studies, and critical management studies. Through his work, he analyses how the diffusion of digital means of production is reshaping organizations and how such transformation is, in turn, constituting new professional cultures. Kaushar  Mahetaji  is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. Her research interests include platform governance, digital tools for cultural production, information systems frameworks, and the creator economy. Her work has been published in the Journal of Academic Librarianship, the Canadian Journal of Sociology, and the Canadian Medical Education Journal. David  B.  Nieborg is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto. He has written on the game industry, app and platform economics, and game journalism in academic outlets such as New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Internet Policy Review, and Media, Culture and Society. He held visiting and fellowship appointments with MIT, the University of Amsterdam, the Queensland University of Technology, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the coauthor of Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2021) and Mainstreaming and Game Journalism (MIT Press, 2023). Maria-Nicoleta  Petrescu is a PhD student at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (University of Warwick, UK) working under the supervision of Greg McInerny and João Porto de Albuquerque (University of Glasgow). She comes from a multidisciplinary background in Computer Science, International Relations, and Critical Data Studies. Her doctoral research, residing at the intersection between (Critical) Data Visualization, Human-Computer Interaction and Media Studies, is

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preoccupied with the negotiations at play in visualization design processes and with following the moments when visualization practitioners choose to stray from predefined workflows, to appropriate software tools and extend their functionality. Catherine Provenzano  is Assistant Professor of Musicology and Music Industry in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Her research focuses on voice, instrumentality, labour, and technology as they intersect class, race, and gender in US popular culture. She is writing a monograph entitled Emotional Signals, a cultural history and ethnography of pitch correction softwares (Auto-Tune, Melodyne) and conceptions of voiced emotion in US pop and hip-hop. Other research includes the political economy of sound, media, and software in megachurch worship spaces and the production of AI voices. She writes and performs music under the name Kenniston. Seth  Scott-Deuchar  is a sound designer, composer, and researcher, whose work centres on the politics of sound and music. His work has been performed and exhibited in venues across the UK, including the Barbican Centre, Serpentine Gallery, Bloomberg Space, and BBC Maida Vale. He works regularly with visual and mixed-media artists, producing sound and music for films and installations which have been shown in galleries and film festivals worldwide. In 2015, he joined the Electronic and Produced Music Department of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where he is Lead Professor of Postgraduate Programmes & Technical Development. Michael  Terren  is a musician and sessional academic at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University, and the University of Western Australia, both in Boorloo/Perth, Australia. His research focuses on the cultural politics of digital music production, and he teaches composition, production, history, and aesthetics. Sze Tsang  is a researcher and artist residing on Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia, focusing on the relationships between self and place through audio-visual works, and their experience as a practitioner-researcher. Sze performs under the name samarobryn. Stefan Werning  is Associate Professor for New Media and Game Studies at Utrecht University, where he founded the Utrecht Game Lab and organizes the annual Ecogames summer school. He previously worked as an

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assistant professor at the universities of Bayreuth and Bonn. While completing his PhD dissertation, Stefan has worked in the digital games industry, most notably at Nintendo of Europe and Codemasters (2006–2009). Stefan has been a visiting scholar and fellow at the Center for Comparative Media Studies at MIT and his latest book, Making Games (2021), was published in the Playful Thinking series at MIT Press.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1

Sample AI games available at Latitude Voyage; https:// voyageplay.ai/home79 Fig. 5.1 Thumbnails of home-made videos with accompanying teaser quotes104 Fig. 5.2 Producer SweetScale in the preamble of his Niko’s MIDI Pack demo video, in his home studio (Observe the way SweetScale tags this video: “Make money online, how to make money online selling beats, how to sell beats, how to make passive income,” and so on) 107 Fig. 8.1 Still frame from The Lost (2021), showing the map of the former Perth wetlands being rendered in IanniX. (Image by author)165 Fig. 10.1 A horizontal multi-level Sankey diagram example (Flerlage, 2019). (Reproduced from “The Flerlage Twins” blog by Maria-Nicoleta Petrescu with permission from Kenneth Flerlage)202 Fig. 10.2 Timeline of the Sankey diagram “creative hack” as derived from Ken Flerlage’s blog posts 207 Fig. 10.3 Chris DeMartini’s alternative functions for the Sankey diagram curves (presented as an interactive Tableau output embedded in a blog post). (Reproduced from the blog post “More options for your Tableau Sankey Diagram” by Maria-­Nicoleta Petrescu with permission from Chris DeMartini) 209 Fig. 10.4 The solution for equal-width Sankey diagrams, as explained by Ken Flerlage (Flerlage, 2020). Reproduced from “The Flerlage Twins” blog by Maria-­Nicoleta Petrescu with permission from Kenneth Flerlage 210 xiii

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List of Figures

Fig. 10.5 Distorted Sankey diagram polygon (bottom-left side) (Flerlage, 2020). (Reproduced from “The Flerlage Twins” blog by Maria-Nicoleta Petrescu with permission from Kenneth Flerlage) 211 Fig. 10.6 Sankey diagram polygon drawn with perpendicular lines starting from the middle (Flerlage, 2020). (Reproduced from “The Flerlage Twins” blog by Maria-Nicoleta Petrescu with permission from Kenneth Flerlage) 212 Fig. 11.1 Screenshot of the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator. (Image courtesy of ESA. Source: https://sci.esa. int/s/W3eMXdA)225 Fig. 11.2 Depiction of the Planetary Nebula NGC 5979. (Image courtesy of ESA. Source: https://sci.esa.int/s/w0epX5W) 226 Fig. 11.3 Illustration of “F,” the FITS Liberator. (Image courtesy of ESA. Source: https://sci.esa.int/s/A1e0N9A) 227 Fig. 11.4 Screenshot of the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. (Data credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)) 233 Fig. 11.5 Screenshot of the FITS Liberator. (Data credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)) 233 Fig. 11.6 Screenshot of GIMP. (Data credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)) 234

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Refiguring the Digital Tools of Cultural Production Frédérik Lesage and Michael Terren

Soft-Ware-Ize-Ation Despite the fact that software has now been a part of producing, disseminating, and appreciating culture for more than a generation, defining what software means remains difficult (Fuller, 2008; Chun, 2011). Adding the suffixes -ize and -ation make its muddled meaning even more tortured; turning software from a noun into a verb and back again as though to emphasize some convoluted mediation. In a way, shifting from software to softwarization merely serves as a reminder that digital applications are so heavily entangled and remixed into every aspect of culture that it is difficult to trace how these developments have taken place or where they are

F. Lesage (*) School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] M. Terren Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA, Australia University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 F. Lesage, M. Terren (eds.), Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production, Creative Working Lives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45693-0_1

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headed. Sifting software out of everyday life now constitutes a creative political act unto itself (Syvertsen, 2020). Adding the suffix “-ization” at the end of a noun has been used to describe a host of different social upheavals and transformations; mechanization, industrialization, globalization, to name only a few. Like softwarization, these terms are processual in that they describe different social changes whose logics or origins are hinted at in the original noun and whose developments take place over time. As a methodological device for describing and analysing social transformation, how one goes about conducting a processual analysis rests on one’s theories about a state of origin, what forces shape the transformation, how quickly or how slowly it unfolds over time, who or what affect these changes as much as who or what are affected by them. In sum, how one describes a phenomenon like softwarization depends on one’s conception of power. In his book Software Takes Command, Lev Manovich (2013) makes a case for softwarization as a radical technological transformation in media and culture, whose origins he traces back to the 1960s and 1970s, and which is brought about by innovations developed by computer science and by the computer industry. For Manovich, this moment in history constitutes a momentous aesthetic break: Like the post-modernism of the 1980s and the web revolution of the 1990s, the “softwarization” of media (the transfer of techniques and interfaces of all previously existing media technologies to software) has flattened history—in this case, the history of modern media. (Ibid., p. 180)

Although he attributes softwarization’s origins to many early innovations by various computer pioneers, one important focus is on the development of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and Alan Kay’s work at Xerox PARC in the 1970s and early 1980s (Ibid., pp. 53–106). Kay and his team set out to develop a new kind of dynamic medium which they called the Dynabook and a programming language called SmallTalk, which they believed would turn computer software into the future of creative expression: The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited. It is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot

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exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. (Kay, 1984, p. 59)

In an earlier piece, Kay and his collaborator Adele Goldberg (1977) coin the term “metamedium” to describe their vision for this new Object-­ Oriented approach to computing. Their repeated allusions in the text to aphorisms associated with Marshall McLuhan (2001)  imply that they attributed considerable importance to media as human perceptual extensions and explains their hyperbolic claims that this metamedium “can be all other media if the embedding and viewing methods are sufficiently provided” (Kay & Goldberg, 1977, p. 31). By focusing on this vision for computing, Manovich rightly identifies a key shift in cultural production wherein the computer became a “remediation machine” (Manovich, 2013, p. 61). He mostly draws attention to the aesthetic implications of this transformation as software begins to “replace” incumbent media as the technological base for cultural production. Softwarization-as-metamedium can therefore be understood as a technological innovation that is initiated by cutting edge technological research only to be reappropriated by artists and subsequently become dominant across multiple domains of cultural production. This argument aligns with Manovich’s earlier explorations of cultural technics spanning the twentieth century whereby artists—from Eisenstein (Manovich 1994) and Vertov (Manovich 2001) to those using software like Flash at the turn of the millennium (Manovich 2002)—appropriate scientific and engineering innovations. Rather than a convergence of forms, Manovich argues that softwarization represents a stage of greater media “hybridity” (Manovich, 2013, p. 176). In many ways, this processual description of softwarization aligns with theories of cultural production that consistently conceptualize technology as an exogenous force, an autonomous domain that affects cultural production from the outside (White & White, 1965; Peterson & Anand, 2004). It also aligns with a long tradition of cross-fertilizations between artists and various engineering disciplines (Arvatov, 1926/2017; Beck & Bishop, 2020, McCray, 2020). Even from a broader historical perspective of the period, softwarization was largely made possible by technological innovations defined by the computer industry. From the 1970s and into the 1980s, computer hardware production reached sufficient levels of infrastructural standardization to allow for the emergence of communities of practice that focused

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exclusively on designing software for these hardware products. These software producers were no longer working to accommodate stand-alone, customized hardware. Instead they turned to designing and marketing their wares for more interoperable products (Kelty, 2008, pp. 145–152) and the growing personal computing industry. The implications of this shift in the computing industry were not only economic, but also epistemological and methodological (Kātz, 2015). Software engineering had already started to develop into its own discipline in the 1960s and 1970s (Ensmenger, 2012; Campbell-Kelly et al., 2013; Frabetti, 2015) followed by the emergence of disciplines like Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-­Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) (Grudin, 2017). Softwarization as described above is based on a kind of “production of cultural production” where technologists invent a metamedium, which artists, non-artists, and even (gasp!) engineers then design into various software tools for creative practice. This techno-artistic understanding of softwarization has its value, but it also risks overlooking other socio-­ historical and ideological conditions that enable softwarization to thrive. There is the fact that this account betrays a certain bias towards visual media (other artists, including poets and musicians, had been working with computational technologies since the mid-1950s in very different ways (Taylor, 2014, p. 26)). What also remains only briefly discussed in Manovich’s (2013, p. 97) account of how Kay and his team invented “a dynamic medium for creative thought” (Kay & Goldberg, 1977, p. 31) are the domains that inspired the “creativity” informing their designs. “Creativity” is not a transcendental category that technologists or artists can bestow to their designs. Instead, it is something that is interpreted and translated (Sack, 2019; Latour, 2005) from one disciplinary domain to another. While an influential part of the history of creativity is linked to Art institutions rooted in European Enlightenment and its subsequent movements, like Romanticism and the Avant Garde, the history of creativity is far richer and more complex than what one can glean from examining the traditional cannon of Art history. Scholars like Angela McRobbie (2016) and Andreas Reckwitz (2017) argue that creativity should be understood as a dispositif; a heterogenous collection of techniques and knowledge practices through which power is exercised in a range of different domains that include Art, but also economics, psychology, policy, education, to name only a few. To illustrate what this means for a processual understanding of softwarization, we will briefly demonstrate how Kay and Goldberg’s

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McLuhan-inspired invention of a dynamic medium is steeped in a conception of creativity whose origins have more to do with education and political geography than with Art. Already by the late nineteenth century, education and creativity were becoming deeply entangled. American pragmatists like John Dewey (1917/2010) spread their conception of creativity as part of a broader democratizing project whose main thrust was pedagogical and embedded in an ongoing expansion of American teaching colleges (Strauss, 1991, p. 6). As the Cold War started, the United States witnessed another explosion of research into creativity, particularly in the disciplines of psychology (Guilford, 1950, Gruber et al., 1962, Gross (1964/2023)) and education (Bruner (1960, 1962); Williams (1966); Flanagan (1967)). One of the dimensions explored extensively as part of this disciplinary research involved understanding how new media like video could be incorporated into the learning process to foster creativity. In the 1950s, American psychologists and linguists had started using computers as analogies for demonstrating humanity’s inherent creativity (Cohen-Cole, 2014, pp. 157–162). It was no accident then that the team Kay and Goldberg were working in at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center was called the Learning Research Group. The promise of computer-assisted instruction was receiving considerable attention and funding. Both Kay and Goldberg’s backgrounds drew inspiration from scholars deeply interested in the intersections of creativity and education like Jerome Bruner and Seymour Papert (for example, see Kay, 1990; Goldberg, 1973, pp. 18–19, 28; see also Barnes, 2007, Lesage & André, 2017). By drawing from Bruner’s conception of scaffolding mentalities to design the original GUI (Manovich, 2013, pp.  98–101), the team was not only creating a new metamedium, they were also aligning themselves to a broader, well-established, and growing pedagogical epistemic project—a dispositif—in which creativity constituted a faculty available to everyone, that could be nutured given the proper conditions, and that could be used to unlock an individual’s learning potential. In addition to education, the second important aspect of the creativity dispositif required to better understand the early developments in softwarization relates to the specific historical and material conditions of the design culture in which it was developed. Barbrook and Cameron (1996) use the hyperbolic “California Ideology” to describe the “schizophrenic existence” that characterized

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the strange mix of counterculture experimentation, free market entrepreneurialism, and military funding in Silicon Valley in the mid to late twentieth century. It was a unique time and place where people who worked at the cutting edge of technology tried to reconcile not being able to “challenge the primacy of the marketplace over their lives” with their resentment of “attempts by those in authority to encroach on their individual autonomy” (p.  10). A fundamental aspect of this design culture was to treat the computer as a tool for personal liberation (McGuirk & McGetrick, 2017). Evangelists of this do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos like Stuart Brand promoted their lifestyle through publications like the Whole Earth Catalogue (Turner, 2006) while the next generation of computer enthusiasts were raised on a mix of pop culture images and BASIC instructions in magazines like Creative Computing and BYTE. Between the late 1970s and early 1990s, some of the computer-enthusiasts-turned-entrepreneurs who thrived in this design culture, including Ed Catmull (co-founder of Pixar), John Warnock (co-founder of Adobe Systems), and Steve Jobs (co-­ founder of Apple), set out to design (Gaboury, 2021) and, just as importantly, commoditize these tools for personal liberation for a large enough market to be profitable. It is impossible to fully grasp the conception of creativity that informed the birth of softwarization without considering this complex and contradictory Silicon Valley design culture. When recalling her own time at Xerox PARC, Lucy Suchman described the research conditions as being “conflicted”: “caught between a commitment to openness and flow on one hand, and an investment in objects with definite and fixed boundaries separable from their surroundings, on the other” (Suchman, 2011, p. 13). We can only assume that similar conditions existed within the Learning Research Group. Pursuing his pedagogical crusade after leaving  Xerox PARC, Kay would go on to direct Atari Systems Research Labs where similarly conflicted conditions were in place: It was precisely Atari’s consumer orientation, however, that appealed to Kay’s populist vision of transparent interfaces and $1,000 computers that were simple enough to be used by children […]. (Kātz, 2015, p. 100)

Despite this opportunity, Kay would later express frustration at these same commercial imperatives for how they limited the broader social benefits of his team’s work at Xerox PARC:

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Perhaps it was commercialization in the 1980s that killed off the next expected new thing. Our plan and our hope was that the next generation of kids would come along and do something better than Smalltalk around 1984 or so. […] One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects. (Alan Kay interviewed in Feldman (2004, p. 23))

By positing this historical “what if?” and by emphasizing a generation’s squandered creative potential, Kay sustains the discourse of a conflicted design culture while further entrenching the creativity dispositif as the key to softwarization’s transformational potential. We do not introduce these two caveats to discount Manovich’s original analysis of the near-limitless transmediations enabled by softwarization. Rather, we include these historical contextualizations to help us investigate why and how its potential has been realized in historically and materially specific ways. Softwarization-­ as-­metamedium constitutes a technological imagination (Flichy, 2007; see also Stefan Werning’s chapter in this volume) that is entangled with a range of different domains of which computer science and the computing industry are just two among many. This insight is not only an important corrective to the more narrow formal/technology-focused analyses of cultural production. It is also a reminder that there are many different competing and, in some cases, incompatible interpretations of what constitutes creativity (Taylor, 2019) which in turn have significant implications for how creative tools are designed (Bardzell, 2007). It is for this reason that we believe that an analysis of creative tools is key to a better understanding of softwarization: it allows us to examine the complex and contradictory ways in which it has shaped, and been shaped by, dynamic cultures of cultural production.

Digital Metaphors of Cultural Production If softwarization draws attention to a process wherein software has become the quintessential contemporary creative form, then by focusing on the softwarization of cultural production we hope to expand its original formal analytical scope to include the political, economic, cultural, and phenomenological aspects of this process in relation to cultural practices and creative industries. Software interface design since the 1980s has leaned heavily on visual and semantic metaphors to help new users transition into

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softwarized practice (Gittins, 1986, Carroll et  al., 1988, Laurel, 1993). These metaphors can be read as historical attempts to conform to, and/or transform, the traditions and material specificities of creative practices through software design. If “metaphor is one of our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what cannot be comprehended totally” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p.  193), then they are situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988) that can reveal shared challenges and opportunities posed by softwarization, without compromising the diversity and breadth of creative and cultural practice. In the subsections below, we draw from the many metaphors embedded in cultural production software to delineate five key themes and review literature that addresses them in more detail. Tool, Instrument, Engine: Reauthoring Agency, Skill, and Discipline The metaphor of the computer and/or software as tools have been used by a number of key figures in early computational culture (Engelbart, 1988; Kay, 1984; Rheingold, 1985). Figuring digital computation as tool is arguably to use one of the most pernicious of digital metaphors. Science and technology studies can serve as a helpful guide for understanding its application. In their discussion on the expression “the right tool for the job,” Clark and Fujimura explain: In brief, our perspective is that “tools,” “jobs,” and the “rightness” of the tools for the jobs are each and all situationally constructed. That is, they are co-constructed, mutually articulated through interactions among all the elements in the situation. (Clarke & Fujimura, 1992, p. 5)

“Tool” can therefore be understood as a situated category to the extent that an object’s suitability as tool is not inherent, but instead depends on who is using it and for what purpose. In other words, it is relational in that, and with apologies to Susan Leigh Star (2002), one person’s tool can be “another person’s brickwall, or in some cases, one person’s brick wall is another’s object of demolition.” Scholarship in HCI and CSCW have used the tool metaphor to explore and design for situated creative practices (McCullough, 1996; Forsler & Velkova, 2018) and imagine an intended user (Grudin, 2017). A “creative tool” should not, therefore, be understood as being in-and-of-itself creative so much as being application software designed by people with a

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specific idea of the situation in which it is expected to be used creatively by a specific idea of a creative user. From this perspective, one can argue that domains that set out to design hardware and software as tools share some traits with other, more traditionally recognized, domains of cultural production. Some even make a case for tool-making as an act of authorship (Rieder et al., 2022) and with this new-found authorship status so comes its critique (van Es et al., 2018). The nuances of the tool metaphor become all the more complicated when we consider how various domains of cultural production have distinctive ways of understanding “the right tool for the job.” Instrument, for example, is used especially in music. The distinction between instruments and tools is contentious, with Magnusson suggesting that “there is a universal agreement that for nuanced expression we use the term ‘instrument.’ Instruments are tools for delicate work or precise perception” (Magnusson, 2019, p. 18). This sentiment, popular in musicology, reproduces a binary that continues to organize cultural production: the “talent” versus the “technician,” the talent expressively playing their instruments and the technician diligently working their tools. Calling software an instrument bestows credibility, drawing from a widespread cultural perception of musical instruments as special, auratic tools. There is a centuries-­ long tradition of the critical histories and analyses of instruments, a field known as organology that has recently been revived to address the analytical challenges of software instruments (Tresch & Dolan, 2013). The concept of instrumentality has also recently emerged in music studies to understand the stakes in delineating these tools (Alperson, 2008; Hardjowirogo, 2017). Meanwhile, the term engine denotes a more complex assemblage of machines, processes, disciplines, and distributed authorship. The engine metaphor alludes to Fordist modes of industrial production and its divisions of labour, contrasting with the more individualist connotations of tools and instruments. Their meaning, however, is “radically contextual” depending on the specialized work enacted within it and to what ends it is used (Nicoll & Keogh, 2019, pp. 9–12). Two commercial game engines, Unity and Unreal, have come to dominate the area and, alongside the growing list of specialized middleware and changing political economies of videogame production, are at the forefront of cultural production studies today. In this volume, Brendan Keogh, Stefan Werning, and Tom Livingstone each address game engines and cultural production in contrasting ways, highlighting the complexity of this category of tool.

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Suite, Studio, Workstation: Resituating Space and Place Another complex metaphor for materializing creativity is through space. The Centre Pompidou’s exact reconstruction of the early twentieth-­ century Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși’s atelier in 1997 stands as an example of how the space in which creative practice takes place is continually fetishized. Given this importance, it should come as no surprise that a recurring trope of creative software is to frame itself as a replacement for the spaces, architectures, or rooms that conform it to the contemporary creative workplace. Presenting software as a studio, for example, evokes the aura of studio spaces as advanced in visual arts, video arts, music recording, and other disciplines. This nominal sleight-of-hand is enacted under the pretense of liberating the creative from the confines of typical, corporate workplaces to use them whenever inspiration strikes. One effect of this is the erosion of traditional safeguards for cultural work, enmeshed in complex social forms such as increasing work from home, the erosion of work-life balance, increased expectation of owning your own means of production, among many others. But creative software is often used in dedicated spaces where it is not possible to work on a laptop at a cafe. The term digital audio workstation (DAW) tends to only refer to the software itself, but in professional and amateur settings it is used in dedicated and customized spaces with a range of treatments such as hardware interfaces, monitor speakers, and acoustic treatment. The names of suite, studio, and workstation are in this sense reverse synecdoches, a nominal whole that is in reality only one part. Of course, software isn’t place-less either. A growing body of literature that considers the planetary implications of software’s infrastructures (Crawford, 2021; Devine, 2019; Parks & Starosielski, 2015) is a welcome rejoinder to this construction. For every creative software download required, a data server is required, and not only might that server be situated on stolen land if it’s on a colonial country, but its components are also filled with lithium and rare earth metals mined by processes of colonial and imperial dispossession, while the toxic tailings from processing their ore are permanent blights on Indigenous and Native land. Colonialism in and decolonization of cultural software is an under-acknowledged area of study, but researchers like Khyam Allami (Chattopadhyay, 2022, pp. 157–186) and Joshua D. Miner (2021) are leading the way. Sze Tsang, in this volume, also reckons with the issues of representing entanglements of (colonized) place through music software that is usually figured as place-less.

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Editor, Computer, Processor: Redistributing People and Labour The softwarization of cultural production has had myriad effects on the cultural and creative industries’ labour and workforce. At one end, software such as DAWs essentially combine several jobs associated with recorded music production, such as recording, mixing, and mastering, into a single craft conducted by one individual at their laptop, effectively deregulating and atomizing what was once a more clear-cut, Fordist distribution of labour (Terren, 2021). On the other hand, applications like Slack (Salesforce), Google Workspace (Alphabet), Figma (proposed acquisition by Adobe in 2022), SharePoint (Microsoft), to name only a few, are vying for our collective attention as the place for sharing our work with others and organizing workforces at a global scale. One of the long-­ standing strengths of studies of cultural production has been to draw attention to this extensive network of “support personnel” (Becker, 1982, pp. 77–92) whose collective work is essential for any creative undertaking. While there has justifiably been considerable attention paid to how softwarization impacts the authoring subject, there needs to be greater attention paid to how supporting roles in cultural production are affected and redistributed by these transformations. Studying the support personnel of cultural production and their ever-­ shifting redistribution is a gendered, racialized, and disabilitized issue. As Chun writes, “computer” was not always an object, but a profession of mostly women performing computations by hand or with hardware computers (Chun, 2011, pp. 29–34). “Word processor” was also an occupation title for secretarial work in corporate settings, again mostly women, which required maintaining and typing on a word processor like the MT/ ST; many of the earliest literary interventions into word processing were by women (Kirschenbaum, 2016, p. 141). Likewise, film editors, earlier known as “cutters,” were initially mostly women (Friedrich, 2019). In the western culture industries, these technical professions are also disproportionately held by white and able-bodied people (Hesmondhalgh & Saha, 2013), with accessible software often relegated to a niche concern (Saha & Piper, 2020). Product, Service, Licence: Re-expropriating the Worker In a blog post on Adobe’s website titled “Creativity: A Business Imperative,” CEO Shantanu Narayen is quoted as saying “we are entering

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the Golden Age of Creativity” (Egan, 2020). It recalls an old proverb, often misattributed to Mark Twain: during a gold rush, it’s good to be in the pick and shovel business. The “pick and shovel business” of cultural production boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic’s initial years that limited cultural work to homes and software. In doing so, the means of cultural production have become increasingly intertwined in the circuits of capital. Over the course of 2020 and 2021, stock prices for Adobe, Autodesk, Avid, Focusrite (a music production company), and the Big Five technology companies all saw massive gains. These gains have slightly receded as of 2023, but the capitalization on cultural workers’ need to (further) softwarize their practice continues to affect their working lives and raises important questions regarding the role played by financialization in contemporary cultural production. One of the initial alluring qualities of the softwarization of creative tools was its supposed accessibility. The DIY ethos of the 1970s through to the celebration of participatory culture in the 2000s motivated many to buy their own means of production, which promised bypassing the traditional and formal industries around cultural production, as seen, for example, in the desktop publishing “revolution” of the 1980s (Gitelman, 2014, p. 122). This trend has been conflated with the “democratization” of cultural production (Leyshon, 2009), a contested term that too often neglects gendered and racialized aspects of culture industry participation (Chun, 2004, pp. 30–33). It presupposes that democracy exists through a type of individual liberty that is free of institutions and traditional work structures and that requires lowering all barriers to entry such as removing upfront financial costs for software or only paying for its use once the product is commercialized. But this view of a democratized cultural production comes with its own tradeoffs and tacit costs, such as data extraction and monthly fees in the form of software-as-a-service (SaaS), not to mention the purchase and upkeep of computers and peripheral products for running the software effectively. While free and open-source alternatives such as Blender or GIMP seem like a more equitable path forward, the promises that they would free creative practitioners from struggles over the politics of access to material resources and their distribution have been greatly exaggerated (Velkova, 2016). The spectres of platformization (Poell et  al., 2022), surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), and chokepoint capitalism (Giblin & Doctorow, 2022) haunt cultural production software today.

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A set of institutions that should not be exempt from the above political economic critique of softwarization are institutions of higher learning. The circuits of culture (du Gay et al., 1997, p. 3; Nicoll & Keogh, 2019, p.  7) have always had a tenuous relationship with formal education, as tertiary institutions slowly build new courses with up-to-date workflows for contemporary cultural work. A trend that warrants greater consideration is the growing division between what, on the one hand, constitutes technical communication or skills-based education and, on the other hand, the more traditional, holistic forms of cultural production education. Such divisions are not new, but the growing availability of the former through commercial digital ecologies of expertise (Ashton & Conor, 2016) like YouTube (Lesage, 2022), Twitch, LinkedIn Learning, or Coursera may exacerbate these divisions in new and pernicious ways. User, Pro, Community: Refiguring the Cultural Producer and Their Creations Finally, what of the user? The subject at the heart of the creativity dispositif is constantly refigured through software and the power structures it materializes. What interpretive possibilities exist for artworks and cultural artefacts made with this category of software? One reason cultural software has received little attention compared to other media of cultural distribution like social media is that the act of completion necessarily obscures these means and methods of production from their publics. Although “photoshop” is now a genericized term, not all creative media have the same kind of widespread social awareness of how they work. It leads to imaginative speculation that is less understood by the general public. The way an architect might speculate that a room they’ve just entered was designed in AutoCAD, that same perceptual ability is deliberately inaccessible to a wider audience. Adorno describes “the occultation of production” as a technique, drawn from Marx’s metaphor of phantasmagoria, that gives commodities more mystique and aura by concealing the labour and process used in their making (Adorno, 1985, p. 74). This process of deliberate obfuscation and fetishization of the process of production is well documented in music studios (Meintjes, 2003), visual arts studios (Ivins, 1969), and others. When artists divulge their means and processes of production, especially if it deviates from the norm, we tend to assign it aesthetic value.

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When George R.R. Martin proudly boasted on late-night TV of writing his A Song of Ice and Fire series (on which the Game of Thrones TV series is based) on a Kaypro II running WordStar 4.0, it became a viral sensation (Kirschenbaum, 2016, pp. 1–13). Similar stories that mythologize the artist because of their idiosyncratic relationship with their means of production abound in many disciplines. Cultural production studies necessarily centre on cultural producers and creatives, however, artistic research methods that foreground the situated knowledges of creative practice through software are still relatively marginal. Practice-led research methods (Barrett & Bolt, 2010) and the growing use of creative methods in social sciences (Kara, 2015) can bring artistic and aesthetic sensitivities into the orbit of research. Moreover, new artistic analytical methods, such as in Tom Livingstone’s chapter in this collection, can offer new insights into the material conditions of cultural production and their significance to aesthetics.

The Chapters in This Collection One important challenge for this edited collection is that softwarization intersects with cultural practices and disciplines in myriad ways. While each discipline may share similar struggles and successes with softwarization, each discipline has stepped up to its challenges in its own way, with its own vocabularies, frameworks, and ways of knowing and being-in-the-world manifested from a deep well of disciplinary tradition and history. The above metaphorical groupings were developed as something of a partial, preliminary lexicon for this growing area of research. Throughout this book, we find these groupings helpful for considering how symbolic and material elements of these disciplines are increasingly entangled with software without presuming that these metaphors have a definite meaning or function across all disciplines. A second challenge is that, too often, the propensity for emphasizing novelty and innovation in computational industries and artistic disciplines are uncritically replicated in academic discourse on softwarization. This discourse not only limits the scope of investigations into softwarization to the most recent technological innovation, but also reinforces the perception that the value of such research has a limited “shelflife” which is tied to the innovation’s status as “cutting edge” or “ubiquitous.” Drawing on various theoretical and methodological traditions, the contributors to this book remind us that insights drawn from an analysis of creative tools and

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their  ties to softwarization extend beyond an understanding of their newness. The chapters in this book are collected into three sections, each of which touches on a key aspect of future research in the field: frameworks for studying softwarization and cultural production, studies of cultural subjectivities after softwarization, and studies of the socialities of softwarized cultural production. We provide a short introduction to each section to give the reader a sense of the thematic threads we used to tie the chapters together. The reader may notice that we have not organized the chapters according to specific media or industries or  according to a shared theoretical or methodological approach. This decision was based on a conscious effort to push against traditional research silos that, we believe, have impeded critical efforts to investigate cultural production. Our goal for this edited collection is not to present the softwarization of cultural production as a unified or straightforwardly homogenizing process. Nor is our goal to argue that creative tools are mere straightforward functional extensions of cultural producers’ intentions or needs. Instead, through their careful analysis of creative tools, the people who design and use them, as well as their institutional and/or historical contexts, the chapters in this volume together raise important questions about softwarization’s uneven and variegated intersections with other social processes ranging from perennial commodification to the more recent platformization. The constant that cuts across all of these works is that softwarization and the tools that have been developed as part of this process constitute an important aspect of contemporary cultural practices and what it means to be creative today.

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Engelbart, D. (1988). The augmented knowledge workshop. In A history of personal workstations (pp. 185–248). Association for Computing Machinery. Ensmenger, N. L. (2012). The Computer Boys take over: Computers, programmers, and the Politics of technical expertise. The MIT Press. Feldman, S. (2004). A conversation with Alan Kay. Queue, 2(9), 20–30. Flanagan, H. M. (1967). Instructional media and creativity. The proceedings of the sixth Utah creativity research conference held at Torrey pines inn, La Jolla. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 113(496), 346–347. https://doi. org/10.1192/bjp.113.496.346-­c Flichy, P. (2007). The internet imaginaire (L. Carey-Libbrecht, Trans.). MIT Press. Forsler, I., & Velkova, J. (2018). Efficient worker or reflective practitioner? Competing technical rationalities of media software tools. In P.  Bilić, J.  Primorac, & B.  Valtýsson (Eds.), Technologies of Labour and the politics of contradiction (pp. 99–119). Springer International Publishing. Frabetti, F. (2015). Software theory: A cultural and philosophical study. Rowman & Littlefield International. Friedrich, S. (2019). Edited by: Women film editors. http://womenfilmeditors. princeton.edu/“>