25 Oct 2016

Launch of new volume in book series 'Visual Cultures as ...'

VISUAL CULTURES AS OPPORTUNITY
Book launch
Goldsmiths College, London, 27 October 2016, 7pm

www.gold.ac.uk/visual-cultures/


Goldsmiths' Visual Cultures department celebrates the launch of the fourth volume in the series Visual Cultures as …

with authors Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mörtenböck,
and series editor Jorella Andrews

Goldsmiths, University of London
Richard Hoggart Building (RHB 342)
Lewisham Way, New Cross, London

Thursday, 27 October 2016, 7pm - 8.30pm


About the book

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 Visual Cultures as Opportunity, 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.'

Published by Sternberg Press, Berlin 2016
ISBN 978-3-95679-100-0


About the series

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.

Volumes 1-3:
Gavin Butt and Irit Rogoff, Visual Cultures as Seriousness
Astrid Schmetterling and Lynn Turner, Visual Cultures as Recollection
Jorella Andrews and Simon O'Sullivan, Visual Cultures as Objects and Affects


Copies of all volumes will be on sale at discounted rates.


VISUAL CULTURES PUBLIC PROGRAMME autumn 2016

The book launch will take place in conjunction with the Visual Cultures department's public programme on culture and finance capital, which explores the intricacies of the phenomenon called 'financialisation'. The launch on 27 October will follow a talk by Dhanveer Singh Braar (UCL) on Poverty, Abstraction and Debt from 5pm to 7pm (same location: RHB342).

For further details on the Culture and Finance Capital lecture series organised by Louis Moreno and Tom Trevatt, please see: cultureandfinancecapital.wordpress.com