Preprogrammed

How Electronic Presets Changed Music and Media

By: Amy Skjerseth

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Paperback | 20 October 2026 | Edition Number 1

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How much of your life is preprogrammed? Presets, or default settings on technology, can be found everywhere from predictive text and Instagram filters to microwave popcorn buttons and morning alarms. But while presets facilitate the completion of tasks and the production of art, they also reinforce-and sometimes challenge-economic, political, and social norms. In Preprogrammed, interdisciplinary scholar Amy Skjerseth turns to modern music and media to explore what presets allow and deny. Employing capitalist, queer, and feminist critique to reveal how audiovisual presets have reconfigured ways of seeing and hearing over the past century, Skjerseth shows how, from the popularization of the push-button car radio in the 1930s to the Auto-Tune era and the advent of AI, artists have co-opted preset technologies to develop new forms of artistic and cultural expression. An urgent reconsideration of the cultural and political systems we often take for granted, this book is an elegantly theorized and paradigm-shifting invitation to rethink the profundity of the everyday.

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