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.”