🐩✨The Nexialist #0270the first robot movie | stop renting your identity | spectacle | free spirits | double standards of gender affirming care | bitch: a history | leak it | click clack symphony
welcome to your weekly breakneck newsletter, the nexialist
hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. the gif above might or might not be the exact same position i find myself writing the newsletter this week. i’ve been back in amsterdam now for a week and though the sun has been appearing everyday and the city is stunning (as always) the temperatures are not yet so spring-like (for my brazilian blood). enough of small talk, i’ll let you read. enjoy! 🫀✨ ⏮️ time-machine: best brainsparks on this day over the past years: children’s ai manifesto, panopticon aesthetics, dictator questions (tn#218), adoro DJs, global happiness, macguffin, money dysmorphia (tn#166), little DJ, ai’s ethical compass, art, not pornography | breastfeeding the elderly (tn#114), nostalgia ball, distributed mentoring and fanfiction, community building, exit to community (E2C), people x consumers (tn#64), scientists going into your dreams? | selfies of the future | naked truth, how to spot fake news (tn#13) 🤖the first robot movie a long-lost film by the iconic french filmmaker georges méliès has been found recently: gugusse and the automaton, from 1897. it’s short and sweet, 45 seconds, but it reveals a lot, doesn’t it? the magician winds up a pierrot automaton that seems to come to life, with some violence, which then makes the human fight back. it got me thinking how long humanity’s fetish and fascination with robots and automation seems to be. it also predicts clarke’s third law, in which “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic:" the automaton belongs to the magic realm. and third: the technology quickly dominates its creator, acting unexpectedly, which could be stretched to one of sci-fi’s biggest cautionary tropes. a message from long ago to be cautious with our technologies.
brainsparks: the thinking machine (tn#186), how sci-fi has changed (tn#186), critic of technology (tn#121), predicting the past (tn#80), memories from the future (tn#48), ARTificial (tn#123), art ft tech (tn#17), fetish, glamour & grammar (tn#75) 🫀stop renting your identity
Amni Raihan shared this piece by Layla Shaikley a few weeks ago and it made such an impact on me. i had to go find the whole piece, and it was so worth it. at a time when ai can do things for us, and we can easily project an image that distorts reality, how to stay true to our identity and not fall in the trap of performing, instead of being. discipline and intentionality is in the core. (read the whole thing!), but here is a reality check:
brainsparks: cultural vacuums (tn#254), when images matter more than reality (tn#155), self-outsourcing age (tn#17), whisperverse (tn#194), quantitative validation (tn#199), program or be programmed (tn#200), social media x cults (tn#74), smartphones and rosaries (tn#44), deep doubt era (tn#193) 🌞spectacle
rina nicolae shared this and it stayed with me: i was trying to add more spectacle combinations in my head and also having a hard time understanding how life has become so intertwined with spectacle. and i love substack so much: someone commented how it looks like the depiction of the ancient egyptian god aten. i just love this visualization and i’ll try to use it for something else, i promise. brainsparks: amusing ourselves to death (tn#208), the mathematics of polycules (tn#82), the hidden networks of everything (tn#126) 🪽free spirits obsessed with ca7riel & paco amoroso’s eclectic sound in the new free spirits album: from bossa nova and drums to electronic and rock. they just don’t go small, right? it’s always a film, with a universe, a narrative, and the sarcasm that i love. burntout artists that rose to fame too quickly, going through the most advanced (?) therapeutic treatments to make their launch in time. competitive wellness (tn#220) meets burnout society. brainsparks: papota (tn#216), how to feel better naked (tn#79), worldbuilding ft. design fiction (tn#135), bibliotherapy (tn#14), logotherapy (tn#135) ⚧️double standards of gender affirming care
a few months ago i saw a video that opened my eyes to the hypocrisy of gender affirming care: when cis-men get hair implants (or toupee’s — now called hair systems), get testosterone replacement or even penis fillers, it is not seen as gender-affirming care — but that’s exactly what it is. iza writes how “gender-affirming care is accepted for cis people. for trans people, the doors remain closed.” it is a necessary reframing.
brainsparks: queer health (tn#141), biology enables, culture restricts (tn#82), brazil elects two trans women (tn#90), fake alpha-male (tn#259), self-esteem crisis (tn#210), the new soft boys (tn#227), expert on love and fatherhood (tn#242), let ‘performative males’ be (tn#242), men in media (tn#28), fruity men (tn#182), on heteropessimism (tn#174), man-loving (tn#190), the disappearance of men (tn#175), the alpha male myth (tn#127), colonial masculinity (tn#127) 🐩 bitch: a history
with this whole Bitch: a history. “The word can morph from noun to verb to adjective, from dog to human, from female to male. What will it do next?” a shape-shifter word that has been around for more than 1,000 years and its oldest spelling “bicce” to define a female dog, to the medieval prostitute, to jo freeman’s bitch manifesto above and meredith brooks iconic song, a lot of change and reclaiming happened. i loved this reading: it also includes other terms like son of bitch, slut, and the more taboo one, cunt, which is having a moment.
brainsparks: the perpetual infantilisation of millennial women (tn#139), slut techno (tn#139), living wage for artists (tn#246), 💾leak it ok, so the london-based girlgroup just released this 90s banger and i’m loving it. echoing ca7riel & paco amoroso’s free spirit, they also go to the retreat, in this case, “a private retreat where they turn irrelevante into relevante. a comment on youtube noted how the concept is basically the group escaping khia asylum: a fandom term that “evolved to encapsulate all singers who had minor hits, but then fell off without leaving any cultural impact.” brainsparks: angel of my dreams (tn#183) 👠click clack symphony raye did not have to go this hard and yet she did. this is such a different sound, the way the song progresses makes you want to stay until the end and hear the story she’s telling. so good! brainsparks: pan-genre blend (tn#75) see you next week, bitches 🫀✨❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻🔌Let’s Collab?I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes, teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist. I offer inspiration sessions called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below: You're currently a free subscriber to The Nexialist. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
|
🐩✨The Nexialist #0270
23:07
0
