Preprogrammed

How Electronic Presets Changed Music and Media

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

How much of your life is preprogrammed? Presets, or default settings on technology, can be found everywhere, from predictive text and Instagram filters to microwave popcorn buttons and morning alarms. But while presets facilitate the completion of tasks and the production of art, they also reinforce—or sometimes challenge—economic, political, and social norms. In Preprogrammed, interdisciplinary scholar Amy Skjerseth turns to modern music and media to explore what presets allow and deny. Using capitalist, queer, and feminist critique, she shows how, from the popularization of the push-button car radio in the 1930s to the Auto-Tune era and the advent of AI, artists have co-opted preset technologies to reconfigure ways of seeing and hearing and develop new forms of artistic and cultural expression. An urgent reconsideration of the cultural and political systems we often take for granted, this elegantly theorized and paradigm-shifting book invites us to rethink the profundity of the everyday.

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