Live coverage: Glass Bead launch at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers 19-20 Feb

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Before opening up to comments, Garcia offers a poetic conclusion to a half-hour adventure through Priest’s oeuvre:

While speculating on reality, we won’t find major changes, but still we will find some changes. Literature is an acute way of making visible these minor changes.

The panel opens with Vincent Normand and Fabien Giraud joining at the table. The attention shifts to the essay Garcia has contributed to the inaugural issue of Glass Bead, The Photographic Real, wherein the themes discussed with Priest lead to a conversation on the magic of photography. Garcia states that if you believe that photography is keeping something from reality, from the presence of the object, then you must believe in its magic. The only way to be in front of a photograph is to believe in its continuity, a real continuity of information, light, but without any trace of its former matter. There’s always a small difference between the real and the photographic real. If you have many many pictures, says Garcia, you have many many worlds.

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It all begins and ends with Vincent Normand in this one, who also closes the Q &A by popping the question of realism again, so clearly marked in both Priest’s and Garcia’s work as it is. Considering variable realisms such as Meillassoux’s metaphysical real, or variable forms of the political real, which exist irregardless to us or our needs, Normand asks: is fiction is a realist vector marked by a certain necessity?

Another poetic assertion by Garcia (who is quite the Romantic realist, might I add): “Reality could be an object of desire. This is the kind of literary or speculative operation Priest is doing, not being in the real, but making a detour around it to make it visible. If reality is made visible in this way, it can be enjoyed, and not only seen as necessity.”

A good note to conclude the talks, to commence cocktail hour with, and to prelude Glass Bead’s final event, a performance by Tarek Atoui, which commences in little under an hour.

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For those at home and those not crowding up at the bar, by the way, here is a link to a contribution made by Tarek Atoui for Glass Bead’s Audio Research Program. It’s a roughly 67 minute music piece entitled The Suite, performed in 2012 with Uriel Barthélémi, John Butcher, Mira Calix, Susie Ibarra, Hassan Khan, KK Null (Kazuyuki Kishino), Lukas Ligeti, Robert Lowe, Ikue Mori, Sara Parkins, Zeena Parkins, Ghassan Sahhab and Sam Shalabi.

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Oft-cited as an avant-gardist, highly respected in circuits of music and art alike, Tarek Atoui takes the stage, this time not with a self-made instrument, but surely an experience that will provide equal parts catharsis from the technical theory alt. literary discourses of the daytime, as well as new inspiration for talks to come.

Atoui elaborates on the collaboration with Glass Bead in his introduction, contextualising the aforementioned interview for the Audio Research Journal with anecdotes about the variable discussions and exchanges completed in the year-and-a-half of close contact. The piece is a work in project, taking from Middle Eastern music, the Gulf Area, Northern Africa, the rest of which can be heard next week in Marrakech.

An ambience fills the formerly discursive space with non-communicative content that, in all its sonic muteness, suggests that perhaps Atoui’s sense of beyond is precisely where we want to progress from bounded rationality.

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One more for good measure, and proof people came in from their cocktails.

Suffices to say, it’s goodnight for now, but with Glass Bead up and about, you can follow the unfolding of the research program and audio excerpts online, not to mention, of course, mull over Site 0: Castalia, The Game of Ends and Means.

A final extract from the editorial as one last thing to muse on:

Making a move in this game of ends and means is necessarily bound to a collective act of self-transformation. Playing this game entails committing to an ongoing process of construction and revision that continually changes its nature. It does not leave us intact as players by preserving what we are but involves us in a constant redefinition of what we can be and ought to be.

Intrinsic navigate on!