Artistic Presets: Technology, Labor, and Innovation

This panel explores presets—default configurations embedded in tools, platforms, and cultural forms—that shape contemporary art while raising critical questions about labor, originality, and automation. Originally technical features "set or adjusted beforehand to facilitate use," (OED), presets have evolved from photography and music production shortcuts into pervasive aesthetic and ideological defaults across media: from synthesizer patches and Instagram filters to narrative tropes and user interfaces.

Beyond technological settings, presets encompass cultural defaults including gender normativity and Western privilege. These often invisible norms shape artistic production within today's technological networks, establishing constraints that artists variously adopt, modify, or subvert. We are asking: what kinds of agency exist within pre-coded environments? Can presets be thought beyond a poverty of expression to become sites of aesthetic and political experimentation?

We invite papers that address presets in any medium. Topics could include: the politics of AI-generated imagery; race, gender and accessibility in default design; musical or sonic sampling; exploitation of aesthetic defaults in photography and screen-based art; algorithmic technologies; and cultural trope remixing in performance and media art. Particularly welcome are investigations of how marginalized artists rework technological presets to circulate new meaning and expose latent power structures.