How the world—and the world of visual culture in particular—creates itself in a creative act that knows no economic return.

With its capacity to unsettle our sense of the temporal—through montage, doublings, hauntings—visual culture can enable a sense, or theory, of time travel. It invites us to consider the visual outside the realm of art, and to think beyond the technocratic and colonial tropes of science fiction. It can send us tumbling through deep space, into the past, or toward other speculations.

In the fourth volume of 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.”

The contemporary art world has become more inhospitable to “serious” intellectual activity in recent years. Set against this context, Gavin Butt and Irit Rogoff raise the question of “seriousness” in art and culture. What is seriousness exactly, and where does it reside? Is it a desirable value in contemporary culture?

Memory has become a major preoccupation in the humanities in recent decades, be it individual and collective memory, cultural and national memory, or traumatic memory and the ethics of its representation. Drawing on these complex concerns, Astrid Schmetterling and Lynn Turner focus on distinct films—11’09”01 – September 11 (2002), and Richard Linklater’s Tape (2001).

Largely due to the “linguistic turn” that has dominated the humanities since the mid-twentieth century, many contemporary scholars and artists habitually equate works of art with highly coded texts to be deciphered, deconstructed, or otherwise interpreted. Within this quest to consider art differently, Jorella Andrews and Simon O’Sullivan pay attention to the asignifying character of art, or simply its affective qualities.