This workshop–demonstration invites undergraduates, graduate students and faculty interested in the idea of “music production” to think through the term not only as a creative practice, but as a form of labor shaped by expectations of productivity, output, and continuous presence. Drawing loosely on the idea of immaterial labor, the session treats music production as work that blends technical skill, aesthetic judgment, social coordination, and self-management—often without clear boundaries between work time, creative time, and personal life.
The workshop introduces exhaustion not simply as burnout or fatigue, but as a point where familiar distinctions—between creativity and technique, process and product, making and managing—begin to lose their hold, opening the possibility for a shift in perspective. Through live demonstrations and hands-on examples in music production software, participants explore process-based approaches that resist goal-oriented workflows and instead foreground ongoing systems, indeterminate outcomes, and shared listening situations. The aim is not to reject productivity outright, but to make its pressures audible and negotiable by redirecting attention from what music production typically demands of us toward what might emerge when producers allow themselves to remain surprised by their own tools. In doing so, the workshop frames music production as a site for critical inquiry, where process itself becomes a way to question how creative labor is organized, valued, and sustained.
WILL JOHNSON is a multimedia artist and composer from New York City. Themes from his past work include black digital memory, phantom archives and the latent poetics of audio engineer speak. He is the recipient of the Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Sound Art and Composition and the McKnight Foundation’s Fellowship for Musicians. His commercial work includes licensed sound and original composition for Acura, GAP, Beats Electronics, HBO and vocal contributions to Grammy-winning best electronic album Skin. Live performances by Johnson have been commissioned by Lincoln Center, the Kitchen, 92Y and Mass MoCA. He is currently a doctoral candidate at Brown University in Music and Multimedia Composition.
LOCATION:Classroom 9, Music Building STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260218T211500Z DTEND:20260219T045859Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR