In the second issue of * as a Journal, the asterisk is replaced by the word ‘cosmos’. The guest editor Julijonas Urbonas, whose Lithuanian Space Agency represented Lithuania at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, invites readers to leave the ground and delve into the space above our heads. How does it read, feel, taste, and sound? Catapulted up there, our reach and imagination are confronted with the hostility of outer space – otherworldliness at its most acute. The Cosmos issue looks into how we can attune imagination to such a departure from our terrestrial origins.

The third issue is dedicated to sound: as art; as vibrations in space; and as a constituent component of our experience of the world around us. Guest edited by Damian Lentini, the edition probes sound’s ability to shape and generate effects. Soundscapes as a Journal invites leading artists, writers and scholars to investigate sound’s ability to shift back and forth across times and spaces; incorporating traditional and contemporary positions, digital and analogue technologies, as well as that which emanates from both organic and inanimate bodies.

The issue explores the origins of otherness as a counterpoint to identity and will reflect on various meanings of Other: the other person as a source of moral responsibility in moral philosophy, the other as a threat in migration politics, the other as a non-human being (animal, but also alien), the other within the human body – both as an organism (viruses, bacteria, etc.) and a voice (demons, conscience, etc.). The issue’s guest editor Viktoras Bachmetjevas is a philosopher with an interest in ethics, and specifically the thoughts of Emmanuel Lévinas and Søren Kierkegaard. 

The seventh edition is guest edited by the art critic, curator, literator, and dreamer Jean-Max Colard from Centre Pompidou in Paris. This issue is as a kind of inquiry into the place that poetry occupies today in contemporary creation, and more broadly in our lives. Jean-Max is struck by the presence of poetry, particularly among the younger generation, on social networks, and especially in the art world. With his collaborator Louise Brunner, they played with the title of the magazine to compare the poem form with other fields: poem as a journal, as a movie, as an exhibition, as sex, as itself, but not as war.