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Clemency Burton-Hill presents a series exploring the impact of technology on creativity. Across three episodes she traces how technology has shaped the creative process, from conception and execution, to sharing and experiencing. Technology may help us to be more productive, but does it make our ideas better?

Artists are both preoccupied with technology and empowered by it. Technology underpins the way we live, but how does the technology artists, writers and musicians use change the way they create?

In this first programme she focuses on conception - how technology has shaped the way we have come up with ideas over the last 50 years. We examine the impact of a seminal event in New York that formed a brave new alliance between art and technology. Electronic music composer Suzanne Ciani explains how she trained as a classical composer, but was frustrated by the limitations of the instruments and sought answers in a new instrument built by a former NASA scientist. Pulitzer prize-winning composer John Luther Adams finds his music in wild exposures; a cabin in Alaska that was his home for close to forty years. For him the tool he keeps returning to is a rare discontinued pencil.

Computers can help us paint, write stories, design objects and compose music, but as technology is heralded as an enabler to a better life do we risk losing sight of that spark of imagination that makes us human? If human beings are no longer needed to make art, then what are we for?

Produced by Barney Rowntree.
A Reduced Listening production for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 3.