Frédérik LesageSimon Fraser University · School of Communication
Frédérik Lesage
BA, DESS, MA, PhD
About
44
Publications
10,940
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158
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
My research consists of critical examining the intersections and disjunctions between cultures of production and digital media.
Additional affiliations
September 2011 - present
September 2010 - August 2011
January 2010 - September 2010
Education
September 2005 - September 2009
September 2004 - September 2005
September 2001 - September 2002
Publications
Publications (44)
By combining elements from theories of media practice, genre, and mediatization, I argue that perceiving, performing, and organizing skills are interwoven with media, and such interweaving has important implications for the practical politics of contemporary media practices. In the first section, I outline a conceptual framework for investigating m...
This is a call for chapters for a book project titled: Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production
Edited by Frédérik Lesage and Michael Terren
As part of Palgrave Macmillan’s “Creative Working Lives” series (edited by Susan Luckman and Stephanie Taylor)
Building on previous ethnographic approaches, we propose a framework to describe and analyze how media ethnographers are themselves constituted in relation to processes of mediatization. Drawing from mediatization theory, we advance a twofold conception of the media ethnographer as being composed by interweaving processes of embodiment and mediatio...
Background This article tackles the concern that meaningful collective experiences of large-scale media events are no longer possible because contemporary hybrid digital media systems disrupt the temporal coordinating function, or formatting, traditionally performed by broadcast media.
Background This article tackles the concern that meaningful collective experiences of large-scale media events are no longer possible because contemporary hybrid digital media systems disrupt the temporal coordinating function, or formatting, traditionally performed by broadcast media.
Analysis Drawing from media events literature, this article put...
In this paper we interrogate how different research assemblages act as affect-enhancing devices for elections by drawing from the 2015 Canadian Federal election. The paper uses scholarship from media events traditions to devise an ontological framework for analysing the mediatization of elections and to show how research assemblages propagate a myt...
Recent approaches to media change have convincingly shown that distinctions between old and new media are inadequate to describe the complexity of present and past technological configurations. Yet, oldness and newness remain powerful ways to describe and understand media change and continue to direct present-day perceptions and interactions with a...
While artistic practices have been central to political movements throughout the 20th century, much analysis treats these modes of expression as distinct or separate from more traditional forms of civic practices and everyday political participation. Building on discussions of the cultural turn in civic agency (Dahlgren, 2008) and the shortcoming o...
This chapter builds on theories of the ‘creativity dispositif’ to analyse how it mediates, and is mediated by, software for creating, editing, and sharing media content. In particular, the chapter introduces the concept of ‘glut’ as a software inscription strategy and then develops a case study of media software that exemplifies the qualities of gl...
This paper is an exploratory investigation into how social constructivist pedagogical theories shaped the development of personal computing in the mid to late 20th century. There are two main objectives for such an investigation. The first is to highlight the contingent historical nature of the application of these pedagogical theories in the devel...
Scholars, educators, regulators, pundits, and other observers are advocating for regulation and oversight of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomic testing. As a result, the technology has been subject of highly visible public and regulatory controversy. In this article, we explore the nature and the shape of the sentiment of public discourse about the D...
This paper is an exploratory investigation into how social constructivist pedagogical theories shaped the development of personal computing in the mid to late 20th century. There are two main objectives for such an investigation. The first is to highlight the contingent historical nature of the application of these pedagogical theories in the devel...
(cover: Piotr Kowalski, Mesures à prendre (Measure to be taken), 1969 Courtesy of Andrea Kowalski)
How are we to understand works of art that are realized with viewers’ physical involvement? How are we to analyze a relationship between a work of art and its audience that is rooted in an experience both aesthetic and physical when “user experience” is a central concern of a society held in the grip of omnipresent interactivity? Between two seemin...
Affect is so powerful and represents such ripe territory for study that, in its infancy, conventions of research need to be established that attend to its particular motion and shape. Masamune’s Blade: A Proposition for Dialectic Affect Research outlines an original research method for the study of affect known as affect probes, and proposes the es...
In a blog post from 2012, Michael Lopp compares the Valve-designed videogame Portal to Adobe Systems’ digital-imaging application software Photoshop. While both appear to be very different kinds of digital media objects, Lopp argues that they share certain characteristics in terms of user experience and that because of these shared traits designers...
Software for creating, editing and organising media content occupies a significant place in the contemporary production of culture. Through a combination of scholarship from traditions in science and technology studies, media studies, and the sociology of art, I develop a framework for understanding the symbolic ordering of such software based on t...
Software for creating, editing and organising media content occupies a significant place in the contemporary production of culture. Through a combination of scholarship from traditions in science and technology studies, media studies, and the sociology of art, I develop a framework for understanding the symbolic ordering of such software based on t...
This exploratory paper sets out a conceptual model for investigating how media imaginaries of the Web shape its design and use over time. We draw from the work of scholars who have devised models for the study of techno-social imaginaries of information and communication technologies, including Patrice Flichy and Robin Mansell. Based on these works...
Research on cultural industries suggests that the constant and rapid change to digital technologies used by creative practitioners requires that they continually upgrade their skills in order to remain relevant in their occupations. In this article, we present the results of an investigation into the mediation of Photoshop, focusing on how this dig...
This article provides an analysis of the application software Photoshop with a specific focus on how reviews serve as sites for mediating its cultural subjectivities. The first sections develop a conceptual framework for the research based on mediation theory followed by a more detailed discussion of how tracing Photoshop’s cultural biography can b...
Although it has been nearly four decades since Raymond Williams’ book Television: technology and cultural form (Williams, 2003/1975) was first published, I find it helpful to return to this seminal work with a view of reflecting on the future of public media in Canada. Television is often remembered for Williams’ critique of technological determini...
A number of recent high profile news events have emphasised the importance of data as a journalistic resource. But with no definitive definition for what constitutes data in journalism, it is difficult to determine what the implications of collecting, analysing, and disseminating data are for journalism, particularly in terms of objectivity in jour...
A number of recent high profile news events have emphasised the importance of data as a journalistic resource. But with no definitive definition for what constitutes data in journalism, it is difficult to determine what the implications of collecting, analysing, and disseminating data are for journalism, particularly in terms of objectivity in jour...
A number of recent high profile news events have emphasised the importance of data as a journalistic resource. But with no definitive definition for what constitutes data in journalism, it is difficult to determine what the implications of collecting, analysing, and disseminating data are for journalism, particularly in terms of objectivity in jour...
Artists engaged in collective experiments with new information and communication technologies (ICTs) in collaboration with engineers and other computer scientists face a particular challenge: how to maintain 'creative control' over the collective process of experimentation without the technical and procedural expertise familiar to computing experts...
This article reviews and compares historical approaches to the study of digital media. Its focus is an examination of how biographical methods for the study of media and the research tradition known as media archaeology can be usefully combined as part of a research methodology for the study of media software. After introducing Igor Kopytoff's conc...
In the following paper I will examine what insights the information visualisation community could draw from studying how artists and other creative practitioners use visualisation as part of their work. After a brief overview of Viégas and Wattenberg’s analysis of artistic experiments with visual methods and tools, the paper attempts to resolve som...
This article critically examines Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's concept of remediation, specifically as it pertains to their conceptualisation of transparency, through a detailed analysis of a series of telematic artworks. Their problematic definition of remediation leads to an understanding of telepresence as a medium that denies transparen...
Is a collaboration between EDS and leading LSE academics from a range of disciplines researching the determinants of innovation, technology, creativity and productivity and the policies needed to foster them.
Sensory Threads is a pair of interlinked experiences, which explore the way in which sensing can give us insight into how our bodies are a part of their wider environment. Sensory Threads seeks to investigate what happens when wearables move beyond being technologies designed for individuals and are transformed into tools of ‘collective sensing. It...
We perceive just a tiny proportion of the phenomena that surround us everyday. Sensory Threads is a technologically mediated collective sensing expedition which allows people to explore imperceptible phenomena in the world around them. We present a description of the technical system and reflect on our design decisions. Key questions we are concern...
The principle objective of this study is to examine the culture of networks that are implicated
in the production of culture, specifically as it pertains to artists' design and use of digitally
networked information and communication technologies (ICTs) for the production of artworks.
The analysis in this study seeks to reveal a better understandin...
Is a collaboration between EDS and leading LSE academics from a range of disciplines researching the determinants of innovation, technology, creativity and productivity and the policies needed to foster them.
The following paper investigates the cultural practices related to inter-disciplinary collaborations between artists and computer research communities. It is divided into four sections. The first section sets out a conceptual framework for understanding artists' engagement with ICT infrastructure by arguing that designer/user oppositions employed i...
The objective of this paper is to briefly give an overview of a research project dealing with the social construction of use of information communication technologies among new media artists interested in online collaboration. It will outline the theoretical and methodological tools applied to the case study of the MARCEL Network.
Projects
Projects (6)
All cultural practices involve creative technicities; assemblages of devices, skills, and techniques for creating cultural artefacts. Traditionally, these technicities have (at best) been conflated with the formal qualities of specific cultural formations or (at worst) as mere tools or stylistic accessories involved in content creation. Our objective in Photoshop Inscriptions was to conduct an infrastructural inversion (Bowker & Star 2000) that treated the inscription and dissemination of creative technicities as a cultural practice in and of itself, namely how people create and share photoshopping videos on YouTube.
Our goal was to show how Photoshop was more than digital code or a software tool. Its features and functions have become constituent parts of a whole range of work and leisure practices that include journalism, graphic design, illustration, and entertainment. Rather than assuming that all of these videos constituted ‘technical communication’—informational inscriptions about Photoshop for instrumental purposes—we chose instead to treat them as figurations —as normative patterns of action with Photoshop that render expectations for how certain cultural practices are to be performed (see Couldry & Hepp (2016) for more details).
This website gives you access to the entire corpus of videos collected as part of the investigation as well as some of the metadata and analysis generated from the research.
Special Issue of CONVERGENCE: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
Special Issue CFP
Frederik Lesage (Simon Fraser University, Canada) and Simone Natale (Loughborough University, UK)
