Software Democracy and the Quiet Revolution of Practice
Murray McKeich, Vincent Leon Dziekan · 2005
The revolution in new media has not been its cultural product, but the far less heralded transformation of creative practice. While the past century of art commentary, theory and criticism has primarily focussed on cultural products and their conceptual genealogies, less attention has been paid to creative practice. New media technologies have democratised the economics and skilled knowledge required of practice. The computer has replaced a plethora of specialised physical infrastructure and software tools encapsulated expert formal knowledge. Digital media has substantively virtualised the toolsets of traditional practice and is now encapsulating and democratising a form of its own specialised expert knowledge - code-based programming. The studio-based research presented in this paper evidences the growing scope of software tools individually tailored for personal creative use to further democratise expert formal knowledge beyond that of traditional toolsets and subsequently transform creative practice.