These stories speak to the current conflicted state of many artists’ relationship with technology — we sense the incredible potential of technology, and yet we also sense a failure to live up to that potential, because the technology and the supporting infrastructure isn’t really being built with all of us in mind. Discourse around technology possibilities for artists alternatively gravitates toward the utopic — tech will solve everything and bring about a democratized cultural landscape — and the dystopic — technology will ruin everything, dumb down our audiences, and steal our lunch money! Both of these narratives are misleading because they focus on supposed innate capacities of technology itself, rather than the power relations that determine which technologies are developed and adopted, and how they are deployed.

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