ThinkArchitecture

VISUAL CULTURES AS OPPORTUNITY

Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer
Berlin: Sternberg Press 2016, ISBN 978-3-95679-100-0
Co-published with Goldsmiths, University of London
www.sternberg-press.com
mitpress.mit.edu

	Assemblies, gathering places, and agora-like situations have become popular sites for contemporary art. At the heart of these arenas is the search for new ways to counter the crisis-ridden experience of homo economicus—the pervasive and alienating marketization of all aspects of our lives. A great deal of hope is being placed on the potential of social formations enabled by new technologies of connectivity and exchange. Artists and cultural producers are at the forefront of testing the viability of transgressive actions such as coworking, crowdfunding, and open-source provisions. At the same time, it is apparent that global capitalism is expanding into multipolar constellations of top-down and bottom-up economic governance. In this volume, the fourth in the series Visual Cultures as..., Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mörtenböck analyze the networked spaces of global informal markets, the cultural frontiers of speculative investments, and recent urban protests, and discuss crucial shifts in the process of collective articulation within today’s “crowd economy.”

Visual Cultures as ...
Series introduction

Jorella Andrews (series editor)

Visual culture emerged in the mid-1990s as a new—or, rather, a newly articulated—field of inquiry that attempted to reintegrate a wide range of visual, artistic, philosophical, cultural, and political concerns. Crossdisciplinary in nature, it has become a site of encounter for divergent perspectives, including competing attitudes toward the ethical status and ideological functioning of the visual itself. Emerging from interactions between scholars, artists, curators, and activists, visual culture has also encouraged multilayered, often hybrid, modes of investigation. These have done much to extend, even reposition, intellectual research beyond the traditional parameters of the university.

Given visual culture’s highly differentiated character, this series of short coauthored books is not intended to be a comprehensive collection of representative texts. Indeed, its starting point—in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London—was a discussion about our own diverse investments in this still-evolving field. Each publication, therefore, invites a multifaceted investigation of a single, pertinent topic. In each case, two colleagues with shared interests—and differing points of view—examine their chosen subject in a particularized and probing manner. The format is always the same: two essays and a conversation.

But within this scheme, contents unfold in their own way with respect to their positions, polemics, and poetics. In some instances, it has been appropriate to combine newly commissioned work with essays that were written some time ago, or with material that has existed, until now, in lecture form only. The conversations, staged for the purpose of these volumes, provide fruitful context and offer a first layer of reflection and response in what are emphatically open and ongoing debates.

CONTENTS (selected chapters available as PDF)

9 Other Markets / Helge Mooshammer

39 Building Capital / Peter Mörtenböck

69 Protest Economies / A conversation between Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mörtenböck

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