Defying Defaults in Technology and Culture

Amy Skjerseth
Music
UC Riverside

What do Duchamp’s readymades, microwave popcorn settings, synthesizer sounds, and colonial Pacific Ocean maps have in common? They are all presets, or default settings in art and commodities that facilitate ready-to-hand use. When we use presets, we consent to norms designed for “standard” users; from AI content generators to Photoshop editing filters, presets on technology often replicate cultural biases of whiteness, sexism, ableism, and Western privilege. But artists can also recontextualize presets to interrogate entrenched conventions–otherwise known as cultural presets. In this working group, UC scholars and practitioners study and play with constraints across art and art history, media and cultural studies, English, music, philosophy, and environmental humanities. Sessions will range from roundtables to public workshops on DJing and the “exquisite corpse” collaborative game for artists, musicians, and writers that manipulates presets. A public-facing symposium will yield an open-access edited volume. Across these forums, participants will question: How have linguistic, technological, and cultural presets driven colonialism, capitalism, and state sovereignty? When climate disaster and political extremism threaten how we typically engage with our environments, can we program new presets? How can critics and creators produce multimodal forms of knowledge to disentangle presets from their deep-seated norms?

Image Credit: Jessica DiFilippo