Creative Control by Michael L. Siciliano

Author:Michael L. Siciliano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

THE DESIRED POTENTIAL OF PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES

If the platform provides a way to imagine a future through its interface and advice, then production technologies provide a means to enact that future. Creators often enjoyed acquiring and using tools, getting lost in their creative process, developing a feel for machines—and, in some cases, developing machine-like feelings. Some, like Fred, a product reviewer and vlogger, actively desired equipment and dedicated himself to demonstrating and reviewing production technologies. Equipment, he said, was “the only way to keep things interesting.” Fred might seem extreme, but his statement reveals something about other aesthetically enrolled workers. Like Fred, they perceived potentials for agency as immanent to objects, usually technology. “The tools don’t make the artist,” he conceded, but he wanted to make his content “look the best that it can be,” which, he often thought, required technological upgrades. Several DSLRs and a “fantastic” microphone helped. Likewise, Bobby described a process of learning to improve image quality and color as an effort “to just try, to just be better.” After some simple Google searches, he downloaded some presets for correcting color in his videos, hoping to improve visual quality and, with any luck, earnings.

Fred and Bobby linked creativity—their most enjoyed part of work—to equipment, which both afforded the deployment of new skills and improved their control over image and sound quality. Like the recording engineers in earlier chapters, creators were excited about technology because it extended their aesthetic agency, an embodied capacity of living labor. In doing so, technology augmented the body, further highlighting creative labor as an assemblage of humans and nonhumans. As Bobby said,

I get so excited. I am so excited about this GoPro [camera]. I have no idea how to use it! I’m excited to figure it out. What it’s going to do, it will allow. You know what it is? We have five senses. Imagine that there’s a sixth sense out there. If you could acquire it, you wouldn’t necessarily know how to use it, but once you learned about it, it would give you a whole new dimension to work in that other people don’t have or that you didn’t have before. So, it’s like, I don’t know what impact the GoPro will have on my content, but once I learn about it, I know it’s going to make my content better. All of these tricks, coloring, whatever it is, once I learn it, it’s going to make everything better.

In Marx’s discussion of the “general intellect,” he claimed that “the science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery … acts upon [workers] through the machine as an alien power.”35 This seems distant from Bobby’s experience. His GoPro camera was not “alien” at all, seeming instead like a new sense organ, extending his capacity for creative labor, a hybrid of technology (dead labor, fixed capital) and living, embodied labor. To borrow again from the anthropologist Alfred Gell, technology appears as a “prosthesis, a bodily organ acquired via manufacture and exchange rather than by biological growth.

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