Studio Studies

Studios now play a central role in the bringing into being of all manner of material and affective objects, from artworks to buildings to video games. As such, studios are a principle resource for so-called culture industries, creative practices, and contemporary capitalist economies. If the laboratory is the primary site for the production of technoscientific objects and knowledge, then the studio is its cultural equivalent, where prototypes, models, designs and media are conceived, planned, tested, and assembled into coherent, bounded and affective forms. Remarkably, however, the studio remains a lacuna in the imagination of social and cultural research, most notably in the work of eminent scholars of cultural production. Studio Studies is an edited collection which explores and examines the studio as the principal site of aesthetic and material production, inextricably linked with - and a key feature of - contemporary forms of capitalism. The volume presents case studies addressing a wide range of sociocultural practices that are dependent on the studio as the setting for bringing tangible and immaterial cultural objects into being. The book addresses three concerns in present-day social and cultural thought: * the neglect paid to the settings of creative practices by studies of cultural production * the shift from essentialist views of creative cognition to distributed approaches to understanding creative processes and collectives * the emerging interest in aesthetic objects and practices by scholars of science and technology. This volume reconsiders the studio as a setting for the doing of scholarly socio-cultural production and the implications of working with the aesthetic and material affordances of data.