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 starts 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, ...

The first issue of the journal was dedicated to repositioning art in the landscape of reason. This issue is focused on the fabric of reason itself, and to the ways in which it is currently altered by the emergence of artificial intelligence. While the capacities of thought are being externalized in machines that increasingly mirror human intelligence, the question of the technical artifactuality of mind and its political ramifications becomes particularly pressing. For us, far from being limited to the computational instantiation of intelligence, understanding the politics of these developments in artificialintelligence requires acknowledging that mind has always been artifactual. Site 1: Logic ...

This issue, produced in the framework of Okayama Art Summit 2019 (“IF THE SNAKE”, curated by Pierre Huyghe, September 27 – November 24 2019, Japan), focuses on the concrete conditions of embodied thought. From the assessment of historical attempts at grounding critique in the body to the exploration of contemporary issues surrounding situated knowledge, from the analysis of the aesthetic and political economy at play in the encounter with advanced human-like sex robotics to the ways in which algorithms are transforming our sense of intimate relationships, and from the ways in which cruising practices subvert dominant discourses on architecture and ...