The first issue of Glass Bead's journal is online: Site 0: Castalia ~ The Game of Ends and Means. With contributions by, among others, Tarek Atoui, Amanda Beech, Ray Brassier, Keller Easterling, Anselm Franke and Pete Wolfendale.
The first issue of this journal, as well as Glass Bead's project at large, is directed towards rethinking art as a mode of rational thought. It departs from the assumption that any claim concerning the efficacy of art—its capacity, beyond either its representational function or its affectivity, to make changes in the way we think of the world and act on it—first demands a renewed understanding of reason itself.
The site on which this issue focuses is Castalia, the fictional province imagined by Hermann Hesse in The Glass Bead Game (1943). Set in Central Europe some five hundred years in the future, Castalia hosts a peculiar society entirely dedicated to the pursuit of pure knowledge. Mobilising Castalia as an equivocal image, at once archetype of modern universalism and fortress delegitimized by its own enclosure, the aim of this issue is to revisit and transform the Castalian model for the unification of reason.
With contributions by Tarek Atoui (musician), Amanda Beech (artist), Mathias Béjean (mathematician), Ray Brassier (philosopher), Olivia Caramello (research mathematician), Gabriel Catren (theoretical physicist and philosopher), Mat Dryhurst (musician), Freeman Dyson (theoretical physicist and mathematician), Keller Easterling (architect), Andrée Ehresmann (mathematician), Anselm Franke (curator), Tristan Garcia (philosopher and writer), Linda Henderson (art historian), Holly Herndon (musician), Martin Holbraad (anthropologist), Deneb Kozikoski (researcher), Laboria Cuboniks (collective), Giuseppe Longo (mathematician, logician, epistemologist), Guerino Mazzola (mathematician and musician), Benedict Singleton (strategist), Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (anthropologist), Alex Williams (political philosopher), Pete Wolfendale (philosopher), and Fernando Zalamea (mathematician).