Chronicling the vernacular and the middlebrow in post-digital culture.

Middlebroware is a research project initiated by Dr. Frederik Lesage, an associate professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Digital media and creative practice are now inextricably entwined with the contemporary collective imagination. The goal of this project is to better understand this imagination and how it manifests itself as a new material and symbolic order. Specifically, we investigate how the design, marketisation, and use of digital tools — from Photoshop to PowerPoint, from Unity to the Google search engine — reify creativity.
Aug 29, 2023
Frederik Lesage
skills

Empirical research can be complicated! Covid 19 made this reality all-too clear by making fieldwork next to impossible. Fortunately for the team working on "Searching for Tasks", we were able to collect most of our data just prior to the lockdowns. The subsequent process of analysing and publishing the results took an inordinate amount of time but the outcome — a new set of methods for visualizing the performance of digital skills — has been amazing.

Sep 30, 2022
Frederik Lesage
middlebroware

I am excited to announce that Michael Terren and I have signed a contract to edit a book titled "Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production" as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s “Creative Working Lives” series edited by Susan Luckman and Stephanie Taylor. We are currently sending out a call for chapter proposals.

Nov 5, 2021
Frederik Lesage
middlebrow

One of the questions that I am frequently asked when I mention to people that my research focusses on the intersection between digital culture and cultural production is what I think about the recent trend of NFTs — non-fungible tokens.

the latest:

CONFERENCE PRESENTATION: Tool: Figuring computation as craft and skill – A paper presented by Frédérik Lesage (Simon Fraser University, Canada) and Michael Terren (Edith Cowan University and University of Western Australia, Australia) presented at the ICA Preconference: History of Digital Metaphors (May 25, 2023) in Toronto. https://digitalmetaphors.wordpress.com/