🧅✨The Nexialist #0192

the body is art | the substance | artistry + world building | lighting class | suic*de | dafodil | frequency illusion | soft cells | petrichor

Sep 26, 2024

welcome to your weekly microdose of zeitgeist, the nexialist

hey you, i hope this message finds you not like the gif above. this weekend, we’ve been through the equinox, which means the official days for our seasonal shifts. i don’t know if i’m ready, but i’ll not think much about it. today i’m attending the trendwatching event in amsterdam, so get ready for some insights next week. for now, buckle up and get ready for some brainsparks from humans, nature, art and all that good stuff. enjoy 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

3 years ago » 🏝✨The Nexialist #0039 : Hy-Brasil | Zealandia, the 8th continent | Thassalophobia | James Webb Telescope | Kátia Flávia

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🦵🏼the body is art

this is worth watching on fullscreen. fka twigs is always on point with her music, dance and artistry. in this performance she is showing tracks for her upcoming album, eusexua (tn#191), and she is praying what she preaches: the body is art. i was indeed hypnotized by her performance. how can she be so magnetic?

brainsparks: eusexua (tn#191), glass and patron (tn#29)

💉the substance

from body as art to body horror.

last weekend, juan, andrea and i went to the movies to watch the substance. the trailer did not prepare me for what i was about to witness (and that is quite a compliment). starring demi moore and margaret qualley (which are both incredible), this movie did something to me —and to other people at the cinema, as audible reactions took the room.

this movie encapsulates so many absurd pressures women endure: always smile, be sweet, be young, be sexy, be perfect. and it uses so many tools to do that. the asmr quality of some scenes, the soundtrack, the nudity, the close-ups, the exaggeration of it all. there are scenes that made me beyond uncomfortable, which could only be intentionally achieved by a mastermind, coralie fargeat, the director.

i was not expecting the (super) gory aspect of it (which is not for the weak, i’ll tell you that), but i was also not exactly aware of what body horror really meant:

Body horror, biological horror, organic horror or visceral horror is horror fiction in which the horror is principally derived from the unnatural graphic transformation, degeneration or destruction of the physical body. Such works may deal with decay, disease, deformity, parasitism, mutation or mutilation.

i was speechless for some time, but now that i sat to write about it, i think i got it… the feeling of disgust mixed with a punch in the stomach that i had in the end is how we should feel as a society that imposes unrealistic expectations on women.

brainsparks: the perpetual infantilisation of millennial women (tn#139), filters & fembots (tn#17)

🌐artistry + world building

@nicky.reardon This @Charli XCX quote changed the way I view the world. An artist does not just create music, they create a WORLD Moving culture will always be more important than moving numbers, becuase moving numbers is a RESULT of moving culture. #charlixcx #bratsummer #musicindustry #musicmarketing #aspiringartist

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nicky reardon took this quote by charli xcx and it’s been in my head ever since:

"Music is not important. Artistry is. Not all artists have artistry. A Musician creates a song, but an artist creates an entire world. A great artist to me is more than just the songs, it's the entire culture and the space they inhabit. Music alone cannot create a world, the artist creates the world."— Charli XCX

when i think of the artists i’ve been obsessed about lately, that’s what they are doing. charli, chappell roan, pabllo vittar, rosalía, magdalena bay, sevdaliza, meghan thee stallion, the weeknd, lady gaga… you get it. they know what they are doing, they’re in the very business of worldbuilding.

nicky takes the critique further to the music industry, which, like every other industry, when it becomes about numbers, enshittification happens. he says that this accessibility of data is one of the worst things that happened to the music industry, because it made people (not only investors and c-levels, but the also the fans, i would add) hyperfixate in quantitative aspects. and i think this is true for so many other industries.

“moving culture is more important than moving numbers.”

brainsparks: worldbuilding ft. design fiction (tn#135), art predicts (tn#1), the craftivist manifesto (tn#178)

💡lighting class

did we just get a lighting lesson on xwitter? yes! valentina vee, director and cinematographer, explains why people look great in the french tv show, quotidien. from the number and types of lighting, to an illuminated table (!) that lights them from below. i guess i’ll be counting how many shadows are under people’s chin from now on.

🎗️suic*de

still in time for yellow september (wait… i thought this was a worldwide campaign for mental health and suicide prevention, but apparently it happens only in brazil? or is my algorithm forcing me in a bubble?)

I’ve never trusted men
And lost my faith in me
I was delusional
Can someone help me, please?

anyway, yseult’s new album mental is insane (?) as she embodies post-punk, punk rock, electronic, and EBM having mental health as the red thread. the other tracks i loved: garçon (made me think of joan jett), gasolina (loved the distorted reggaeton), anger (i cried to this one… an electronic baseline with a deep and intimate conversation about racism and challenges of being black and trying not to be angry). cute and tuning are also great.

brainsparks: electronic body music (tn#84), mental gym (tn#156), alibi (tn#180)

🌼dafodil

the new album of jamie xx, in waves, is so good. dafodils is one of my favorites. i don’t think i had ever heard this kind of groove, mixed with this deconscructed glitchy vibe. it works so perfectly. also, i love seeing these collabs with so many names.

brainsparks: you give me life (tn#178)

👁️frequency illusion

this week during dinner a friend from the US asked me about astrud gilberto. i froze because i didn’t know who he was talking about. he said: she sang the girl from ipanema! i probably had been living under a rock… or in brazil, where tom jobim’s version is imprinted in our minds. it turns astrud won the grammy’s song of the year for that song in 1965.

the following day, when checking the dafodil, guess who it samples/interpolates? astrud gilberto’s version of touching you.

i had to ask chatgpt: what is it called when you learn about something new and it starts appearing everywhere? you know what i’m talking about. it has a (weird) name— and a simpler one.

The frequency illusion (also known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon) is a cognitive bias in which a person notices a specific concept, word, or product more frequently after recently becoming aware of it.
The name "Baader–Meinhof phenomenon" was coined in 1994 by Terry Mullen in a letter to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The letter describes how, after mentioning the name of the German terrorist group Baader–Meinhof once, he kept noticing it. This led to other readers sharing their own experiences of the phenomenon, leading it to gain recognition. It was not until 2005, when Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky wrote about this effect on his blog, that the name "frequency illusion" was coined.

in this case i have to say the universe is gaslighting me. my friend said that when this happens, it means you downloaded a new expansion, which sounds more real to me 🫠

brainsparks: streisand effect (tn#36), ostrich effect (tn#80)

🧅soft cells

silence, a new shape just dropped! we’ve heard of the golden ratio, fibonacci sequence and tiling, and this feels like an expansion pack to that universe of mysterious patterns found in nature. “Mathematicians discover new class of shape seen throughout nature. ‘Soft cells’ — shapes with rounded corners and pointed tips that fit together on a plane — feature in onions, molluscs and more.”

it turns out nature is kinky, and not square (it avoids corners):

The researchers identified soft tilings in nature in the 2D shapes of islands in braided rivers, cross-sections of the concentric layers in an onion and biological cells in a tissue, as well as the 3D compartments of spiral shells such as those of the nautilus, a marine mollusc (see ‘Nature’s soft cells’). Nature generally seeks to avoid corners, they think, because such kinks have a high cost in deformation energy and can be sources of structural weakness.
Studying the nautilus “was the turning point” of the work, says Domokos. In cross-section, the shell compartments looked like 2D soft cells with two corners. But co-author Krisztina Regős, also at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, suspected that the actual 3D chamber had no corners at all. “That sounded unbelievable,” says Domokos. “But later we found that she was right.”

earlier this week i saw this image of the drawing in a sand pendulum after an earthquake (which i’m not able to verify if it’s true), but guess what… same shape.

brainsparks: implicate order & math tiling (tn#136), scientist (tn#169), sloshing time (tn#151), interstitium (tn#151), ask nature (tn#86)

💧petrichor

flora_and_frost

A post shared by @flora_and_frost

petrichor is one of these words we see in those ‘words without translation’ profiles: the scent of a rainstorm. it turns out, there is so much more to learn about it, as flora (i hope that’s her name) describes it so perfectly. i want to download all this information, so i’ll transcribe it all below. the third one i wrote verbatim and i’ll rehearse it in front of the mirror for the next time i need it. i also might want to have a kid just to name them petrichor (i’ll name my rock petrichor for now)

petrichor means blood of the stones. ichor is actually the fluid that flows through the bodies of greek gods.
the phenomenon of petrichor has been studied since the 1800s but the word pretrichor was only coined in the 1960s by australian scientists.
“petrichor is not just the smell of soil bacteria. that’s like saying chanel n5 smells like bergamot. it’s technically accurate but it’s woefully inadequate. petrichor is actually a combination of smells. it’s soil bacteria. it is the scent of ozone, which is created with lightning strikes, which has this metallic or sharp quality to it. and the coolest, which is that it’s a combination of oils plants. what they found is that in prolonged dry spells, plants would create oils that would inhibit seed germination. so they’re telling their seeds ‘hey, it’s not time to pop off yet, we do not have a rainfall.’ so when the rain falls, it washes and aerolizes these oils and then the seeds know it is time!”
humans tend to be better at smelling petrichor than sharks at smelling blood in terms of parts per billion.

brainsparks: what we get wrong about saving the bees (tn#138), interrobang (tn#188)

see you next week, dafodils 🌼✨

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