1. Introduction: Refiguring the digital tools of creative work and cultural production -- Part 1: Frameworks for studying softwarization and cultural production -- 2.TikTok as a platform tool: Surveying disciplinary perspectives on platforms and cultural production -- 3.The Spatial Languages of Virtual Production: Critiquing Softwarization with Aesthetic Analysis -- 4.Generative AI and the Technological Imaginary of Game Design -- Part 2: Studies of cultural subjectivities after softwarization -- 5.Autoharps, Chord Organs, and MIDI Packs: Easy-Playing Instruments, Gender, and Classes of Musical Participation -- 6.Figurations of the Tool Agnostic -- 7.The expressive subject: prosumers, virtuosi, and digital musical control -- 8.Artist and Agency: Technologies for Exploring Self and Place -- Part 3: Socialities of softwarized cultural production -- 9.Alternative gamemaking tools as grassroots platforms -- 10.Bypassing defaults in data visualisation design processes: a Tableau case study -- 11.The Creative Appropriation of a Scientific Software: The FITS Liberator, a Case Study -- 12.Dolby Atmos Music and the Production of Risk.

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.