😶🌫️✨The Nexialist #0063
This is Not America | Planetary Consciousness | Cultural Concept Frameworks: Immersive Experiences | MOTOMAMI | CRASH
Welcome to a list of little pieces of the internet, told from my (foggy) brain
This week my brain and body are still in recovery mode from covid (I get the meaning of brain fog now.) So forgive me for yet another week of a brief Nexialist edition. I hope you enjoy:
P.S.: Welcome all new subscribers. Happy to see you here! ❤️
🇺🇸This is Not America
This video masterpiece has been circulating around my groups and social media and I get chills every time I watch it. Residente is a Puerto Rican rapper and Ibeyi is an Afro-French Cuban duo, all of who have already appeared around here, so it’s beautiful to see their collaboration working so well. Their work is a nod (and critique) to Childish Gambino’s This is America, reminding that America goes from “Terra del Fuego until Canada.” The video is directed by Gregory Ohrel.
@biencatalino made a list of the visual references he found in the video, many of which I did not know. It’s one of the beauties of the internet: to have a history class from a rap music video, crowdsourced with someone on Twitter. The symbology is a feast for the eyes and for the brains. Reproductions of iconic photographs from historical moments. Decolonial, anticapitalist and antiracist messages are clear, as well as the many references to police brutality against black, indigenous and poor communities and the harsh dictatorship the region went through. I guess the image of the Brazilian politician eating a steak while an indigenous child is hungry and wiping his mouth with the flag does not need explanation. Below, are some important things I learned:
-Túpac Amaru II, where the rapper Tupac got his name, was an indigenous Cacique who led a large Andean rebellion against the Spanish in Peru, amounting to more than 100 thousand indigenous rebels to the slavery regime in the region. “He later became a mythical figure in the Peruvian struggle for independence and indigenous rights movement, as well as an inspiration to myriad causes in Spanish America and beyond.”
-San Basilio de Palenque: At the end of the video you see a black woman with colorful clothing. She represents a Palenquera, part of the first free African town in the Americas, in Northern Colombia, where they speak
🌍Planetary Consciousness
This text has been on my reading list for a couple of months and watching the video above made me want to read it. Achille Mbembe, philosopher and political theorist, and one of Africa’s (and the world’s) leading public intellectuals is interviewed by Nils Gilman and Jonathan S. Blake from Noema Magazine. I took a few paragraphs, but I recommend reading it. His perspective is unique and so precious for futures thinking:
We are in an epoch when time is no longer differentially distributed along human and non-human scales — that’s what the Anthropocene shows us. As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, there’s no longer a social history separate from natural history. That is over. Human history and Earth history are now indivisible.
When we look into the archives of the whole world, not just the archives of the West, broadly speaking we find knowledges of how other-than-humans speak — and how humans, or some humans, have learned to listen to those languages. This requires a radical decentering, premised on the capacity to know together, to generate knowledge together.
The French term for knowledge is connaissance, a word that literally means “being born together.” We have to institute an act of radical decentering that forces us to be born together again. It seems to me that that’s what a new planetary consciousness forces us to undergo — and I believe it is possible.
Read: How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness | Noema Mag
🧠Cultural Concept Frameworks
Frameworks… something else that gives me chills. Matt Klein decided to give us more great content and now, he is releasing, with Brendan Shaughnessy, “a 3-Part series exploring the role of frameworks in breaking down complex cultural concepts to its parts.” The first two already came out, one about Immersive Experiences, the other about Constructive Conversations.
Cultural Concept Frameworks are invaluable because they explain the inner-workings of an intricate subject down to its bare essentials — the bones. No fluff, just the core components. The mechanics. This allows the reader (ex. client) to see a complex idea distilled down to its lightest, most durable essentials. Frameworks support weight and action. Once built, we (or they) can work from there.
Just to give it a tease, below are the elements for the Immersive Experiences framework. I encourage you to go there to check it out. Matt’s motto is Synthesis > Curation so I assure you these posts have the right length. Also, I would love to see all of the printed 😏
Immersion (I): I1- Sensory Immersion, I2- Emotional Immersion.
Participation (P): P1- Active Immersion, P2- Passive Immersion.
Users (U): U1- Me, U2- We.
Needs (N): N1- Free, N2- Novelty, N3- Mastery, N4- Intimacy, N5- Agency, N6- Belonging.
Read: A_Framework_To: Frameworks: Dissecting Cultural Concepts | Zine
Read: Beyond VR & The Metaverse: A_Framework_To: Immersive Experiences | Zine
Read: Beyond Cesspools: A_Framework_To: Constructive Conversations Online | Zine
🦋MOTOMAMI
For you to understand how much I was waiting for this album: I had an event in my Google Calendar. I’m always so happy to see Rosalía releasing new music. Honestly, it was not what I expected, but I am here for it (and it has been scoring pretty high for the music critics). Loved the mix of reggaeton, hip-hop, flamenco and all the other styles.
So then she released this TikTok Live Performance and I love it even more. I’m not a big TikTok user, but it doesn't matter. Rosalía is showing how it’s done: immersive content, vertical first, mixing production value with social value, shifting from high-level performance to behind the scenes, from world-class artist and performer to best friend. Gotta love her.
💥CRASH
I’m always waiting for whatever Charli XCX does, so CRASH is another album I have been playing since it came out on Friday. Charli goes even more mainstream, assumes the bombshell persona (and I feel she’s even making fun of herself for it) and makes good music for us. Gay Rights!
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