Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production

This book explores how creativity is increasingly designed, marketed, and produced with digital products and services ― a process referred to as softwarization. If ‘being creative’ has developed into one of the paradigmatic architectures of power for framing the contemporary subject, then an essential component of this architecture involves its material and symbolic configuration through tools. From image editors to digital audio workstations, video editors to game engines, these modern tools are used by creatives every day, and mastering these increasingly complex technologies is now a near-compulsory pathway to creative work. Despite their ubiquity in cultural production, few have sought to theorize them in aggregate and with interdisciplinary breadth.

By bringing disparate creative and methodological traditions in one volume, this book provides a comprehensive overview of approaches for understanding this complex, emerging, and dynamic field that speaks beyond the disciplinary categories of ‘tool,’ ‘instrument,’ and/or ‘software’. It makes a unique intervention in the fields of cultural production and the cultural and creative industries.

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Frédérik Lesage has been teaching and researching at the intersection of cultural production and digital culture for more than a decade in the UK (London School of Economics and Political Science, King’s College London, Cambridge) and North America (Cornell, Simon Fraser University). His research on the cultural biography of Photoshop has been published widely in academic journals and edited books.

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.