As part of Audible Edge, presented with the State Library of Western Australia.
For this event, I joined Michael Terren, Paul Boyé, and Skot McDonald in a round-table discussion
Edited by Frédérik Lesage and Michael Terren, Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production explores how creativity is increasingly designed, marketed, and produced through digital products and services which, the editors argue, are not politically, economically or culturally neutral.
For this Night School session Michael Terren will lead a discussion building off of ideas expressed in the book. This will explore how artistic praxis has been co-opted by the service economy, rebranding it as the ‘creative industries’. It will explore the consequences of this co-opting: insecure work as the norm, erosion of work-life balance, erosion of unions, and so on. Terren will invite us to discuss how artists might seize the means of cultural production in our techno-feudalist setting, and the need for artists to critically re-assess “creativity” and “artistic expression” without becoming blueprints for global capital to co-opt.