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.

Table of contents:

The Very First Space Programme of the Lithuanian Space Agency: A Planet Made of Human Bodies
Julijonas Urbonas

Julijonas Urbonas and Gailė Griciūtė talk about their Collaboration on Extraterrestrial Sound

Comet Composition/Alien Materiality: Resilience, Attunement, and our Sonic Imagination
Daniel Gilfillan

Otherworldly Journeys
Nahum

On Extraterrestrial Relativism
Daniel Oberhaus

United in a Common Vertigo
Rob La Frenais interviews Kitsou Dubois

Intimacies with(in) the Space Station
Eleanor S. Armstrong and Akvilė Terminaitė

Whale Space, or, The Killers in Eden
Fred Scharmen

Concept of Creation in Lithuanian Mythology
Radvilė Racėnaitė

On how the Tree Became a Pellet: Capital Forests of the Baltics
Signe Pelne

The Curious Case of Lithuanian Astrobotany
Goda Raibytė inteviews Danguolė Švegždienė

Stranger than Fiction: the Reality and Fantasy of Eating in Space
Jane Levi

The Whiffing Particle
Milda Dainovskytė

The Space Rose: How the Sense of Smell Mediates Human Futures in the Cosmos
Claire Isabel Webb

Unrealised Cosmic art

The Ends of Everythings
Andy Gracie

Quintillion Years
Emilio Chapela

MDRS
Joseph Popper

True Moonshine
Julijonas Urbonas

Tour de Moon
Nelly Ben Hayoun Stépanian

There is No Such Thing as Empty Space
Nicole L’Huillier

Sightseer
Sitraka Rakotoniaina

Terra Nullius
Xin Liu