Studio Studies

Operations, Topologies & Displacements

Ignacio Farías, Alex Wilkie, Ignacio Farías, Alex Wilkie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317630425
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Consider the vast array of things around you, from the building you are in, the lights illuminating the interior, the computational devices mediating your life, the music in the background, even the crockery, furniture and glassware you are in the presence of. Common to all these objects is that their concrete, visual and technological forms were invariably conceived, modelled, finished and tested in sites characterised as studios. Remarkably, the studio remains a peculiar lacuna in our understanding of how cultural artefacts are brought into being and how 'creativity' operates as a located practice.

Studio Studies is an agenda setting volume that presents a set of empirical case studies that explore and examine the studio as a key setting for aesthetic and material production. As such, Studio Studies responds to three contemporary concerns in social and cultural thought: first, how to account for the situated nature of creative and cultural production; second, the challenge of reimagining creativity as a socio-materially distributed practice rather than the cognitive privilege of the individual; and finally, to unravel the parallels, contrasts and interconnections between studios and other sites of cultural-aesthetic and technoscientific production, notably laboratories. By enquiring into the operations, topologies and displacements that shape and format studios, this volume aims to demarcate a novel and important object of analysis for empirical social and cultural research as well to develop new conceptual repertoires to unpack the multiple ways studio processes shape our everyday lives.

1 Studio studies

Notes for a research programme

Ignacio Farías and Alex Wilkie

Introduction

This edited collection approaches the ‘studio’ as a key site for the production of cultural artefacts, and in doing so it aims to open up a novel and underdeveloped topic for social and cultural research. As the chapters of this book demonstrate, studios play an essential role in bringing into being all manner of aesthetic, affective and reflexive objects including, but not limited to, artworks, brands, buildings, crafted artefacts, concepts, designed products and services, live action and animated films, information technologies, music, software and video games. Even government policy is being conceived and incubated in ‘social’ and ‘service’ design studios, continuing the intervention of design into democratic procedures (e.g. SEE Platform 2013). The list is seemingly endless. Studios, it appears, have become the principle resource for what are, after Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1979), commonly known as ‘culture industries’ where so-called ‘creativity’ is heralded as the driving factor in the revitalization of contemporary capitalist economies. The premise of this collection, however, is that despite the key role played by the studio in cultural production, its importance has been, and remains, largely overlooked by anthropologists, sociologists, cultural theorists, historians, policy makers and so forth. In short, the studio remains a peculiar and remarkable lacuna in our understanding of how cultural artefacts are brought into the world and how creativity operates as a situated practice.

So where to begin and how to proceed? If social and cultural researchers want to study the studio, where might they start? What traditions and disciplines might provide the techniques, analytical tools and concepts for exploring, examining and analysing what a studio is, what happens in a studio, what is made in a studio, and what other sites, processes and actors the studio is connected to? For readers familiar with the programme of ethnomethodology as well as Science and Technology Studies (STS), one particular precedent acts as a cue to approaching sites where knowledge, material entities and practices come together in an organized, routinized and managed way to produce new phenomena and new knowledge: namely, the research tradition known as ‘laboratory studies’ (e.g. Knorr Cetina 1995). Such studies provide inspiration and instruction in how to address situated and coordinated work environments that are organized and maintained in order to support creative practices, invention and the making of cultural artefacts. Rather than understanding studio processes as the practical expression of an individual’s creativity, the chapters brought together in this collection variously view creation as a situated process wherein new cultural forms are made, without assuming an a priori distinction between supposedly creative acts and routine activity, or between creative actors as opposed to assistants, equipment and tools.

As we detail in this introduction, there is no easy access to the studio since the obstacles come in both empirical and theoretical form. That is to say, not only are studios challenging sites to gain access to, but ‘access’ also involves circumventing decades of sociological and anthropological assumptions about creativity in order to delineate an alternative approach to making as a situated and distributed process. Once this is achieved, we can begin to imagine the studio as the laboratory’s cultural analogous: a space that harbours and manifests the conditions in which prototypes, models, designs, media and visualizations are conceived, planned, tested, and synthesized into coherent, bounded and affective forms. But, as we will suggest, this is not enough. Paying attention to the specific epistemic–ontological problems configuring studio work requires us to start exploring alternative conceptual repertoires that take us beyond analogies with scientific experimentation and into questions of invention, intimacy and attachment. This is a task that this introduction can only begin to realize, and one that is further explored in the chapters of this book.

Creative work: towards a situated approach

Since the 1990s, creativity has emerged as a central category in public discourses about economic prosperity as well as social and individual wellbeing (Osborne 2003, Nelson 2010), as shown by its proliferation in notions such as ‘creative industries’ (DCMS 1998, Caves 2000, Howkins 2001), ‘creative class’ (Florida 2002), ‘creative cities’ (Landry and Bianchini 1995, Hall 2000) and ‘creative economy’ (UNCTAD 2008). It has also come to be seen as an obligatory point of passage for the cultural production of the new (e.g. Osborn 1957) – a necessary ingredient for stimulating and provoking novelty. For governments, the notion of creative industries has become a key instrument in policy frameworks across Europe, North America and around the world in attempts to harness cultural production for the restructuring of urban and national economies (Banks and O’Connor 2009). A prime example of this is the first World Report on the Creative Economy published by the United Nations, which entrusts the creative industries with the capacity to forge ‘a new development paradigm’ (UNCTAD 2008: 3). Most policy frameworks construe the creative economy by means of industrial classification systems, which typically include categories such as the visual and performing arts and crafts; service-oriented sectors such as architecture and advertising; and technology-intensive sectors including film, TV, radio, social media and video game industries. Underlying such classifications are vague definitions pointing to creativity as a human faculty, to expressive or experiential aspects of creative products characterized as ‘values’, or to the creation of intellectual property. Despite discussions about the distinctiveness of these industries (Banks and O’Connor 2009, Potts et al. 2008), the sense in which such industries are ‘creative’ remains largely ignored or undeveloped.

Clearly, then, the very notion of ‘creativity’ has become a black box – a process the contents of which remain unknown and unproblematic (Callon 1986, Latour 1987) – hindering empirical enquiries into actual creative practices and sites in the various ‘sectors’ of cultural production. Typically, creativity is imagined in two ways. On the one hand, by drawing on psychological definitions that point to original, divergent thought processes leading to new ideas (Csikzentmihalyi 1996, Boden 1994), creativity is located in an individual’s mind as a cognitive capacity acquired prior to, and the cause of, a person’s creative processes or ‘behaviour’. This understanding of creativity, for instance, leads urban policy advisors such as Richard Florida (2005) to recommend orienting urban policy strategies towards attracting members of the creative class. Notably, these formulaic approaches have been criticized for their misleading association of creativity with homogeneous occupational groups with high educational achievement (Markusen 2006) and the contradictory use of a microeconomic category (‘creativity’) to justify a macroeconomic construction (an industrial sector) nonexistent from a microeconomic perspective (Potts et al. 2008). On the other hand, scholarly research in sociology and geography has focused on the contexts and conditions that enable creativity to unfold and flourish, and on how creative industries can be nurtured. Here, studies place emphasis on the role played by creative milieus (Meusburger 2009, Hall 2000), creative neighbourhoods and urban spaces (Grabher 2001, Lloyd 2004), creative industry clusters (van Heur 2009, Sunley et al. 2008), and governance tools for the creative industries (Pratt 2004). Furthermore, scholars in the social sciences have also focused on the impact of the creative economy on the individual, in terms of both the constitution of new ‘creative’ subject positions (Reckwitz 2012) and the precarization of creative workers (McRobbie 2002). In examining the political economy of creative labour, critical scholars (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2010) have pointed to the market and institutional arrangements that allow firms in the media and cultural sector to extract the surplus value of creative work, such as exploiting unpaid labour time or deploying aggressive copyright regimes (Cohen 2012). Thereby, however, social scientists tend to overlook the very settings where the products of the creative industries are brought into being by focusing on the urban contexts as well as and inter-institutional conditions in which creativity is achieved.

This, then, is precisely the challenge presented to the contributors of this book: how can socio-cultural research overcome individualistic and contextualist explanations of ‘creativity’ and how might the situated and concrete dynamic of creative production be grasped? Evidently, this involves jettisoning the endemic correlation between creativity and innovation. As mentioned above, creativity is commonly understood as a thought process leading to a novel idea (Boden 1994). Apart from the problematic reduction to cognitive activity, the reference to novelty only allows for ex-post accounts of creativity, since whether a (thought) process is deemed creative depends on the future valuation of its upshot as being new; something that is not just uncertain, but also varying in space and reversible in time, as innovation studies have clearly shown (e.g. Akrich et al. 2002a, 2002b). An equally important problem with the notion of innovation is the way in which it works to amalgamate creativity and invention to the logics, rationalities and temporalities of market economics (Godin 2006), thus historically naturalizing the connection between the two.

With Studio Studies, our purpose, then, is to change the very register through which creativity is understood by bringing into focus creation processes understood as processes of both inventing and making cultural artefacts. In our view, creation processes do not deal primarily with the problem of interessement and enrolment of actors as new objects circulate through (and in doing so, fashion) space and time, that is, the problem of innovation. The fact that ‘nobody knows’ in advance whether an invention will become an innovation requires us to approach creation processes as more than just a prelude to innovation, that is, as processes imbued and shaped by other practical and, indeed, more pressing problems, such as how to produce knowledge about not-yet-existing things, how to engage in form-giving processes, how to stabilize new forms and artefacts, or how to model attachments to future users and consumers. By focusing on such fundamental problems of creation processes, Studio Studies sets out a redescription of creative work – an overhaul of how we understand and appreciate the emergence of new cultural artefacts.

It is important to note that creation has been classically understood as a process of imposing a form (morphe) onto matter (hyle) (cf. Ingold 2010); an understanding intimately related to that of creativity as a thought process leading to the generation of new immaterial forms. Such notion of creation bears similarities to the Kantian notion of cognition, which also posits an isolated ‘mind-in-the-vat’, grasping the world and producing knowledge in terms of its own synthetic categories (Latour 1999). In both cases there is a passive material world open to mental designs and categories and an individualized understanding of the ‘creator’ or the ‘cognizer’. But at least since sociologists of scientific knowledge discovered the laboratory as a site for studying ‘science-in-the-making’ (Latour and Woolgar 1986, Knorr-Cetina 1981), there has been a major move away from such a conception of cognition towards a notion of ‘distributed cognition’ (Gieri and Moffat 2003, Hutchins 1995). This shift has led researchers to study how the production, manipulation and circulation of material inscriptions through different media, technologies and bodies makes possible cognitive processes that no single person can perform. Moreover, in laboratory studies equal attention is paid to all the activities undertaken by scientists and lab technicians, whether routine informal talk, strategic career decisions or fact-making efforts. All such practices are considered part of knowledge-making processes, debunking the myth of scientific method and rationality, while furnishing it with a stronger objectivity.

The prospect of Studio Studies is predicated on a similar move made by introducing the notion of ‘distributed creation’ in its widest sense. Such a notion has, in our view, two key interrelated advantages. First, distributed creation allows one to account for the active and enabling role played by the materials and technologies participating in creation processes, undermining the distinction between form and matter that informs traditional understandings of creativity. Or, to paraphrase Latour (1987: 258), we have to be undecided as to what actors to follow and what creation is made of. Second, this mode of empirical accounting involves closely describing all the activities performed by all actors involved in creation processes, and not assuming an a priori distinction between creative acts and routine activity. Assuming that creation occurs in all manner of human and non-human configurations and thus, much like actor–network theory’s (ANT) methodological dictum to follow the actors, the study of creativity requires an appreciation and sensitivity to non-human processes and entities. Thus, the notion of distributed creation emphasizes creativity as a socio-material and collective process, in which no single actor holds all the cards (e.g. Farías 2015); a view that is somewhat sympathetic to and commensurate with ANT and its developments (Law and Hassard 1999).

Notably, taking distributed creation to its extreme brings us ‘back’ to Whitehead’s (1927 [1926]) original coining of creativity (Ford 1986, Meyer 2005, Halewood 2005: 35) as a metaphysical concept to describe processes by which entities and phenomena, human and non-human alike, come into being and change. The implication of this view is that creativity is a basic feature of existence, a generic, mundane and fundamental feature of all ontological processes, not just of persons endowed with special cognitive abilities. Thus understood, creativity is linked to the notion of ‘event’ (see Wilkie 2013, also Wilkie and Michael, chapter 2 in this volume) as a process of becoming. The principle of process is foundational for the emergence of all new entities and phenomena: ‘how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is … Its “being” is constituted by its “becoming”’ (Whitehead 1978 [1929]: 23, emphasis in original). Going back to Whitehead requires the ethnographer of creativity to attend to actual, specific and situated becoming of studio phenomena.¹ This approach also opens a view of the studio as a site productive of what, following Isabelle Stengers (2005), could be called ‘cosmopolitical’ events – events at which the possibility of new social and cultural arrangements, and the kinds of common worlds that studios are part of speculating on and constructing, are at stake.

One might reasonably assume that this has long been a major research focus in studies of cultural production. Yet, ever since Adorno and Horkheimer (1979) described the subordination of culture to an industrial logic based on rational standardization, commodification and capital accumulation, the study of cultural production has focused on its determination by ‘broader’ social, industrial and institutional contexts. Here, the prominence of Richard Peterson, Pierre Bourdieu and Howard Becker is unmistakable. Peterson’s influential ‘production of culture’ perspective, drawing on Merton’s sociology of science, focuses on the systemic and institutional configurations of cultural production by looking at six essential features: technology, law and regulations, the industry structure, the organizational structure of the dominating firms, occupational careers, and market structure (Peterson 1976, Peterson and Anand 2004). Bourdieu’s sociology of the ‘field of cultural production’ addresses how social spaces condition cultural production through competitive yet complementary relationships among individual producers, artistic genres, cultural intermediaries and cultural institutions. He thereby charges against the ‘ideology of creation’ and the individual artist as an ‘apparent producer’ (Bourdieu 1980). Bourdieu also refuses to address cultural objects, which he views as mere effects of the producers’ ‘agonistics of position-taking’, as Georgina Born (2010: 179) notes. Becker’s work on art as collective activity (1974) and art worlds (1984) is perhaps the most relevant and promising for our purposes, as it focuses on the interactive and cooperative practices and networks of people who par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Studio studies: Notes for a research programme
• Part 1: Operations
• Interview 1
• Part 2: Topologies
• Interview 2
• Part 3: Displacements
• Afterword – studio studies: Scenarios, supplements, scope
• Index