Guerino Mazzola | Melting Glass Beads—The Multiverse Game of Strings and Gestures |

As part of ART2, an International Platform on Contemporary Art held in New York during April, and one of its multifaceted projects, Composing Differences (curated by Virginie Bobin), Glass Bead invites philosopher Reza Negarestani and musician and mathematician Guerino Mazzola for a series of public talks at e-flux. Prior to its 2015 launch, Glass Bead inaugurates a year of inquiry in New York with a weeklong radio series addressing how art practices can explore new geometries of knowledge and initiate different modes of instituting. A critical review of Hermann Hesse’s idea of a glass bead game is presented in light of recent developments in mathematics, music theory, and theoretical physics. The common denominator of these new dynamics is the shift from Wittgenstein’s world of rigid facts to an ocean of elastic gestures. In such a soft architecture of knowledge production, the ultimate principle of uniqueness as conceived in the idea of a singular universe breaks down to a multiverse—