Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production

This chapter provides an overview of how three different fields of study—platform studies, business studies, and information systems—can help us understand the shift in cultural production from cultural tools to platform tools and its impacts on cultural producers. “Platform tools” refer to the combined set of software-based resources that are infrastructurally integrated with data-driven platform companies. They are distinct from “cultural tools” and “software tools.” We differentiate between various types of tools by first engaging in definitional work. Then, we discuss the relevance of each discipline to study platform tools and their evolution. First, platform studies establishes platform tools as valuable entry points for interrogating “datafication,” “platformization,” and “infrastructuralization.” These processes are affected by the decisions platform companies make about their platform tools. These tool-related decisions are not made in a vacuum, but rather formed by interactions between various groups or “sides” of the platform (e.g., cultural producers, developers, and end-users). Second, interactions among users are managed by platform companies, who facilitate what business studies theorizes as “multi-sided markets.” To manage these markets, platforms make decisions about the boundaries or resources they provide. Third, information systems theory describes boundary decisions at the level of platform tools, considering how platform tools shape and are shaped by platform company decisions around access and control. These three disciplinary foci are useful not only for their conceptual contributions but also because of their methodological approaches. Platform studies offers platform historiography, business studies traces platform strategies, and information systems supplies the theoretical framework of boundary resources. We advocate that these three fields be brought into conversation to widen the study of tools to include end-users and user-generated content; reimagine tools as dynamic processes; and attend to the materiality, historicity, technicity, and relationality of platform tools.

The chapter analyses the emergent practice of virtual production and the generation of in-camera visual effects (ICVFX), a process currently dominated by Unreal Engine. It argues that the software functionality of Unreal Engine and the logistics of virtual production have aesthetic correlates within the images they produce, specifically in the form of a stylised spatial language.

Adopting the periodising framework laid out by Scott Higgins in his work on Technicolor (2007), this chapter compares the brief history of virtual production with the aesthetic evolution of Technicolor and draws parallels between the relationship between emergent colour film technology and its aesthetic affordances and the way in which virtual production and ICVFX afford a particular stylisation of space on screen.

Adopting a broad perspective and comparative methodology develops a granular picture of the relationship between Unreal Engine’s management of multiple spaces (3D, physical, cinematographic) and the spatial aesthetics of the images it produces. It draws on the media-epistemological work of Vilem Flusser and Wendy H. K. Chun to establish the stakes of such an analysis and point towards the epistemic ramifications implicit in softwarisation. Specifically, the naturalisation of the aesthetic languages associated with creative software (such as the spatial language of Unreal-enabled ICVFX) leads to the embedding of the software’s technical defaults and functional parameters within creative practice and visual experience more broadly. Teasing out the aesthetic through-lines of a range of ICVFX-reliant productions, the chapter highlights how the cross-sector integration of VP entails an inflection of the spatial languages of screen culture. The chapter closes with a call to establish more avenues wherein a critique of softwarisation and its wider ramifications can proceed via aesthetic analysis.

The chapter explores the emergence of AI-driven tools within the digital game industry, investigating the shift from experimental applications like NVIDIA’s GameGAN to production-ready tools like Ludo AI and its impact on the contemporary ‘technological imaginary’ of digital gaming. Game-making, particularly the creation of procedural complexity from a few, simple rules, has repeatedly been characterized as a magic trick, which is not fully rationalizable; the work of Jennifer Whitson shows how even game designers often view their software tools as ‘agential,’ ‘so complex as to be fully unknowable,’ and thus, ‘magical.’ The infusion of machine learning into these tools, from pre-production over asset creation to playtesting, is transforming both practitioners’ and players’ assumptions regarding game design, raising questions of authorship and neoliberally informed conceptions of creativity, changing workflows, and equitable working conditions that can be inferred from the already-observable cultural and aesthetic implications of AI in visual design work. The chapter analyzes these hopes, fears, and expectations as part of a broader ‘technological imaginary’ of game-making through a diachronic framing analysis incorporating academic and industry publications as well as ‘software affordances’ of available tools. The material corpus comprises early academic visions of AI in game design and first attempts at standardization but also grassroots experiments using general-purpose tools like GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT to create games and develop game development literacy. The analysis investigates the framing of AI-based tools in game design as a socio-technical process, foregrounding the interplay between human and non-human agents/actants and the potential risk, which only few industry practitioners currently caution against, that AI-driven tools might make game design too ‘frictionless’ and might require more playful ‘tinkering’ with or repurposing of the rapidly evolving AI tools to see beyond their ‘readiness-to-hand’ moving forward.

This chapter focuses on the category within audio software of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) chord and loop packs—software instruments largely marketed to amateur producers and engineers working in the genres of pop, hip hop, and R&B—to examine the politics of amateurism, skill-building, and masculinity in digital music production environments. Instead of treating these software as completely novel musical tools, the chapter situates software chord packs as part of a history of “ease-of-use” chord-creating instruments that can be traced through the autoharp, which was patented in the U.S. in 1882 and came into prominence in the late 1940s; and the chord organ, introduced as an easy-playing electronic home organ by the Hammond Company in 1950. They, too, offered their own pathways to musical participation. Over the last century, however, the dreams of active musical leisure that the autoharp and chord organ marketed have given way to fantasies of professionalized “progress.” I argue that each instrument, in its historical moment, makes promises of creativity and ease that act as surreptitious promises of class mobility and inclusion, but that the easy-playing software instruments push the logic into twenty-first-century economies of production: with it, the user might transcend the professional and epistemic barrier of “music theory” to create music on one’s own time, but still sound like, and even possibly become, a professional. In fact, the manufacturers claim, by simply working in the software environment to begin with, the user is already on his way. The chapter makes a case for listening closely to amateur musical practices and instruments to hear logics of musical value and valued labor, and suggests that instruments made to ease work invite us to productively reconsider instrumental ontologies.

In this chapter, we sketch the outlines of the tool agnostic as figuration, a cultural trope for techno-social agency, that is particularly suited to contemporary cultural production. We develop this sketch through an analysis based on fieldwork of a graduate digital media training program. After a brief introduction, we begin the chapter by discussing our conceptual framework for the tool agnostic as figuration. We argue that it affords its actors with the ability to circumvent the antinomy between formalism and its critique as technological determinism by presenting the creative subject as perennially ambivalent—both lured and skeptic—toward the affordances and possibilities of softwarization. It gives the subject a sense of creative control through software by striving to be free from any commitment to software.

The empirical investigation provides a historical background for programs like the one encountered in the fieldwork, demonstrating how these institutions impart creative practice as something that is interdisciplinary, industry-oriented, and organizationally flexible. We then relate three vignettes of encounters with the tool agnostic over the course of the 16 months of fieldwork. We conclude by comparing the tool agnostic with another figure of contemporary creative practice, the craftsperson, and ask whether some traits of the former might present the contemporary creative subject with a suitable alternative to the latter’s nostalgic alignment with autonomous technical mastery.

This chapter proposes expressive subjectivity as a framework to describe relations between the creativity dispositif, prosumer culture, and digital musical controllers, also known as MIDI controllers. Drawing on a Foucaultian biopolitical framework, expressive subjectivity is understood as a partially self-constituted enactment that evokes the maximisation of expression as an aesthetic strategy, a pleasureful activity, and a more virtuous type of consumption. It intersects with the creative subject, described by Angela McRobbie and Andreas Reckwitz, and the prosumer subject, described widely in consumer studies. The softwarization of music production forced a re-evaluation of the role of expression in music performance, as the tactile gestures afforded by conventionally expressive musical instruments do not necessarily translate to the technical or aesthetic needs of electronic musicians. Digital musical controllers seek to bridge this gap, bringing tactile interfaces to electronic music production beyond the mouse and keyboard. This ongoing discourse has long been connected with consumerism and technology start-ups. To elaborate on expressive subjectivity and its evocation through the historical lens of the softwarization of cultural production, two families of products by the music technology start-up ROLI are examined: Blocks, and the Seaboard. In the former case, a modular, proprietary platform with diverse kinds of musical expression is “bought into,” creating an instrument that is never formally complete and always open to expansion and a steady cycle of increasing prosumerism-by-accumulation. In the latter, the company cultivates a longer-lasting commitment from users to generate long-term aesthetic value to that instrument, thereby creating a new category of virtuosic cultural producer: the Seaboardist. These categories provide nuance to descriptions of creativity and consumer behaviour in electronic music, and the shifting roles and forms of musical expression after softwarization.

This chapter explores how software-based compositional processes can be used to explore relationships between self and place. The process of creating these works—such as the ways in which sound can be edited and manipulated through digital means and how visual material can be rendered—offers commentary for critically assessing relationships between artists and creative software. Creativity can be stifled by software if intuition and individual innovation become subsumed by an over-emphasis on how a tool ought to be used. This is the paradox of greater knowledge: with understanding comes assumptions, and with these assumptions comes constraints. Technology can be used to disembody sounds and images from its origins, resulting in sounds that seemingly emerge from a void. On the other hand, technology can also be used as a tool to reconnect sound and images with personal experiences and with the cultural and historical experiences of place. This chapter will focus on creating soundscape compositions and audio-visual work and how approaching music-making and technology with an open-minded, experimental approach can open new possibilities in reconnecting with place and self. As an example, the author will discuss how one of their works, The Lost—an audio-visual, digital piece—was composed using a combination of sound editing software and a graphical sequencer—and how these tools helped in creating a work combining the history of place (through the use of historical maps and references to cultural history) with the author’s personal history of grief and loss.

Videogame production provides a unique site to consider dominant and alternative logics of platformisation. Despite the well-understood modes of value extraction that platformisation normalises, the tools of videogame production are also nonetheless more accessible than ever before. Whereas once gamemaking required extensive technical skills and custom-made software, a vast ecosystem of commercial and non-commercial gamemaking tools have emerged over the past 15 years that provide alternative and contested notions of videogame development skillsets and aesthetics. This chapter contrasts the logics of dominant commercial game engines and alternative gamemaking tools to suggest the notion of grassroots platforms as a way to speculate other forms of platform governance of cultural production beyond the dominant models of platform capitalism.

Starting from a case study of going beyond data visualisation software tool Tableau’s default features and developing a visualisation creative hack, this chapter looks at the communities of practice that have facilitated this process. It interrogates the roles undertaken by the developers of the hack, and it traces their key moments, interactions, and sources of inspiration. Then, by bringing into discussion similar acts as conducted with other software tools, it also brings into discussion echoes of a “beyond-the-defaults” narrative in data visualisation. In its engagement with data visualisation as cultural production, it aims to provide an account of collective creative endeavours in the field and it advocates their relevance.

To create astronomical “pretty pictures” with data acquired in professional observatories such as the James Webb and the Hubble space telescopes, scientists, image processors, and other users of this type of data need to master their idiosyncratic file format, the Flexible Image Transport System, or FITS format. For nearly 20 years, one software has aligned many of the actors who create the images we see everywhere online, on television, and in the newspapers: the FITS Liberator. The user-friendly FITS Liberator software was designed to free the data from its closed accessibility in the FITS format and allow a wider public to use astronomical data to visualize outer space in a creative fashion. Among other users, a network of amateur astronomers have creatively appropriated this tool to produce beautiful colour images they share online. Amateurs collectively negotiate the norms of their practices of production and sharing of astronomical pretty pictures made with FITS data through their use of specialized digital tools. FITS Liberator offers an insightful view of the social ordering of amateurs’ practices because of its development as a means of communication of professional data for non-professionals, but also because its use was mediated by amateur astronomers. This chapter shows that the integration of the use of the software in amateurs’ workflows to create their images and the transmission of the knowledge they acquired through their experimentation with the tool—alongside the distribution of their pictures—contributed to the success of the software as an actor in the democratization of professional astronomical data.

The launch of Dolby Atmos in 2012 marked a significant development in commercial surround sound, allowing for audio to be positioned above as well as around the listener and for a single surround sound mix to be played back on a variety of loudspeaker configurations. This chapter traces the expansion of the platform from the cinema into recorded music and examines its potential impacts on the working lives of recording artists, producers, and engineers working within the industry. I situate the technology as part of a broader shift towards individualisation and atomisation in music production and argue that a significant side-effect of its rapid growth has been an increase in risk for those working in recorded music. I demonstrate how the rise of Dolby Atmos Music has compelled individual music creators to speculate on the future of the format by choosing whether or not to invest the time and resources required to adopt it. I argue that the mutable nature of the software platform, Dolby’s ambitious expansion strategy, and challenging economic conditions in the music industry at large render these investments highly precarious. I contend that the associated risks fall disproportionately on those with fewest resources and that this dynamic threatens to exacerbate existing inequalities within the music industry.