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Palgrave Macmillan

Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production

  • Book
  • © 2024

Overview

  • Investigates how creativity is increasingly designed, marketed, and produced with digital products and service
  • Analyzes image, text and video editors, digital audio workstations, game engines and 3D modelling software
  • Brings together multidisiplinary creative and methodological traditions in one volume

Part of the book series: Creative Working Lives (CWL)

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Table of contents (12 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

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.

Editors and Affiliations

  • School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada

    Frédérik Lesage

  • Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia

    Michael Terren

About the editors

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.


Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production

  • Editors: Frédérik Lesage, Michael Terren

  • Series Title: Creative Working Lives

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45693-0

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-45692-3Published: 18 January 2024

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-45695-4Due: 18 February 2024

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-45693-0Published: 17 January 2024

  • Series ISSN: 2662-415X

  • Series E-ISSN: 2662-4168

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XIV, 269

  • Number of Illustrations: 16 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Digital/New Media, Cultural Theory

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