"Chances are, artists won’t be drawn back to the studio – but if they are, it will be a radically different place than it was in 1948. Machines are now so deep in our Imaginary that we are cultural, if not yet biological, cyborgs; we are soft-wired for technology in our desiring machines." (Caroline A. Jones: Machine in the Studio. Constructing the Post-war American Artist) As part of the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies’ focus on practice-based research, sociologist Ignacio Farías from Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung will present his current ethnographic research on creative processes of artists, architects and video game developers. Using concepts like assemblage (Gilles Deleuze) and expression (John Dewey) Farías develops conceptual and methodological understandings of how the studio is being reconfigured as a cyborg machine for artistic creation and experimentation. Farías will discuss empirical materials from his ethnographic research in the studio of the Berlin-based American artist and filmmaker Reynold Reynolds and compare these with findings from his fieldwork in architecture offices and video-game companies. Practice-based research is one of four specific research areas, which the Department of Arts and Cultural studies at present devotes special attention to.