🍩✨The Nexialist #0078
🍩✨The Nexialist #0078
Deep Space | Everything, Everywhere, All at Once | Transitional Space | Meta Morphism | Sophistry | El Dorado | Data as The New Soil, not Oil
Welcome to another week of flashes from my brain ft. the web, The Nexialist;
Nice to see you here again (if it’s your first time, buckle up). Today I will skip right to the content since my brain power was left there, as well as my Dutch classes and the Business Analytics course I’m taking. Enjoy!
1 year ago » 🥚✨The Nexialist #0028 : Lil Nas X's Digital Fluency | Social Constructs | Men in the Media | Relearning Fertilization | Spiral Sperm | Super Industry of the Imaginary | Creative Effectiveness | Mafiosa and more...
🔭Deep Space
I think the coolest thing that happened this week was the first batch of images sent from Hubble’s successor, James Webb Telescope. It broke the internet with plenty of memes and excitement. It also became my phone’s and laptop’s background image.
Webb’s image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground – and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of vast universe
Webb’s sharp near-infrared view brought out faint structures in extremely distant galaxies, offering the most detailed view of the early universe to date
It’s so cute to see the excitement of Neil deGrasse Tyson, and his power of synthesis. It is mind-boggling even trying to think about the number of things out there that can be studied or even just stared at.
Light from these galaxies took billions of years to reach us. We are looking back in time to within a billion years after the big bang when viewing the youngest galaxies in this field. The light was stretched by the expansion of the universe to infrared wavelengths that Webb was designed to observe. Researchers will soon begin to learn more about the galaxies’ masses, ages, histories, and compositions.
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Webb’s MIRI image offers a kaleidoscope of colors and highlights where the dust is – a major ingredient for star formation, and ultimately life itself. Blue galaxies contain stars, but very little dust. The red objects in this field are enshrouded in thick layers of dust. Green galaxies are populated with hydrocarbons and other chemical compounds. Researchers will be able to use data like these to understand how galaxies form, grow, and merge with each other, and in some cases why they stop forming stars altogether.
🍩Everything Everywhere All at Once
I try to avoid using superlatives here (note that I did not say I was successful at it), but this movie has truly become one of my all-time favorites. I just love how it doesn’t fit in a single genre… the official website defines it as “a hilarious and big-hearted sci-fi action adventure about an exhausted Chinese American woman (Michelle Yeoh) who can't seem to finish her taxes.” This is true, but it is so much more. My Nexialist self felt represented by the mix of so many things, as well as the main character’s multiverses. It’s random, unexpected and silly while being deeply philosophical and meaningful… it got me crying and laughing simultaneously. I’ll not give spoilers here, but if you haven’t yet, do yourself a favor and go watch it. We need more things like this
(And thank you, Juan, for inviting me 🫀)
🧩Transitional Space
Recently listening to one of my favorite podcasts, float’s vibes em análise about best friends (if you understand Portuguese, I highly recommend it), Donald Winnicot was mentioned. I don’t think I was familiar with his line of work and now I’m in love. I found this article by James Barnes for Psyche that gives us a nice introduction to Winnicott’s work. What caught my attention is this idea that there is a third way between one and the other, going beyond a dualistic line of thought.
Where Freud was focused on rational interventions from the outside, this gave way in Winnicott to a co-creative journey occurring in the area in between, which was much more about who one was and what one did, than what one thought or said. In his book Playing and Reality (1971), Winnicott called the location of this experience ‘transitional space’, alluding to its dynamic, insubstantial quality, but also to its nature as a place of becoming. It is, he said, a place we both create and that creates us – a paradox that we must accept and not try to resolve – where unformulated possibility replaces fixed identities, and experience is necessarily co-constructed.
In times of polarization and individualism, his work seems revolutionary, I would say. I’ll definitely want to read more from him. I’ll leave the conclusion here:
As therapists, and as a compassionate society as a whole, we would do well to go back to Winnicott: to his vision of the psyche as intimately interpersonal and social in nature; to his centralisation of interpersonal trauma and deficit at the root of our suffering; and to his profound insights into the area in between, which come into focus when we do so. Doing this will help us settle on a model that better accounts for, and helps to address, the all-too-obvious interpersonal and sociocultural determinants of our distress.
Read: For Donald Winnicott, the psyche is not inside us but between us by James Barnes - Psyche
🎭Meta Morphism
Iris van Herpen’s work always fascinates me with the way they mix craft and technology to show us true innovation. Last week the Maison celebrated their fifteenth birthday at Paris Haute Couture Week 2022 with a mesmerizing collection named Meta Morphism. The pieces are just incredible (watch the Inside the Atelier video to see the process). I don’t think I had ever read a whole description of a collection, and if I’m not mistaken, rarely are there longer texts like this one. I would say that just as important as the pieces is the process and the weaving of this text. It definitely gave another depth to the already incredible collection, asking contemporary questions about identity in the age of the metaverse and post-humanism.
Holding a lens to our intangible identities and shifting society with the metaverse and hyperreality at the horizon, this collection explores the depths of the body in posthuman realities.
With the new realms of our digital lives expanding, we are faced with an eternally rhetorical question: who are we beyond our physical bodies? Is the digital you shaping your pre-existing compass?
Through 'Meta Morphism’, Van Herpen expresses the body as an elusive system, rooted in transcience and speaks to a greater message of introspection. The leitmotif of van Herpen’s history expresses the body in a state of permanent flux, metamorphosing with the milieu, and while the Maison is regarded for its futuristic approach, this season the designer reflects on Ovid's magnus opus poem ‘Metamorphoses’.
At the time of Ovid’s writing, the act of metamorphosis was appreciated in relation to humanity and its place amongst nature, yet Ovid’s retelling exists a relevance today, navigating the ramifications of technology that is constantly complicating the definition of identity. With the ability to recreate our digital twins, the space of soul-searching, losing a sense of self, and finding new realities, are life lessons.
The collection examines the ancient visions of Ovid’s mythology through modern themes of transhumanism, where man and technology exist in eternal fluctuation, thus defying classification, allowing us to question the limits of our self. Resounding the thematic tensions between artifice and nature, the collection is built around three myths, the story of Arachne; the story of Narcissus and finally the story of Daphne and Apollo.
The tragedy of Arachne is translated in fine laces that are gradient dyed and trapped in embroidered webs, causing the trapped spiderwebs to float. Other looks are designed as if Arachne is still weaving them, hundreds of unspun threads float and spin around the body.
The second myth behind the collection evinces the story of Narcissus, who falls in love with his own reflection, slowly languishing to death through self-obsession. The translucent layering and reflective textures of growth in this collection speak to a greater message of introspection. Transparent voluminous drapes echo around the body like ghosts, creating patchworks of shadows, designed to turn inwards on ourselves. Accents of dark blues and amethysts, ochres, metallic silvers and copper intersect the lucid palette. The ‘Narcissus’ gown and coat express the power of self-creation and the contradiction of how self-obsession can ultimatrly cause loos- ing your sense of self.
The allusion to Daphne and Apollo is betokened through the finale look, embodying the very moment that Daphne transforms into a laurel tree, while the 'Glitched Growth' dress and other looks mimic the alternate stages of Daphne’s metamorphoses, diffusing the creation of plant and bone structures growing together. These looks are designed around body objectification and imagine future metaverse hybrids of Daphne’s myth in which the body is boundlessly transformed and where man and nature are indistinguishable. In keeping with the Maison’s collaborative spirit, this season, Iris van Herpen partners with sculptor Casey Curran, bequething a prospective statue of a future Daphne, bursting from the centre of the runway. Daphne’s sculpture transforms through herbose creatures blooming from her skeleton, at her chest appears a large crevice, revealing her mechanical heart pulsating inside, pertaining to the notion that the elusiveness of identity means that nothing can perish.
🎭Sophistry
Ted Gioia reintroduced me to the term Sophistry in his newsletter, arguing that it should be the word of the year due to its revival. I’ll have to agree with him.
Below is a definition of the sophist, drawn mostly from Plato and Aristotle—who feared the tremendous influence of these public figures.
-The sophists, unlike philosophers, do not pursue the truth, but only master the art of persuasion.
-In a very real sense, talking is their vocation, although you might guess otherwise from their rhetoric, which invariably promises more than any sophist will ever deliver.
-Despite the shallowness of their thinking, sophists have far more influence than honest and serious thinkers, especially in matters of politics and policy. This is because the sophist’s rhetoric is always shaped by what their audience wants to hear.
-For that same reason, sophists will avoid painful truths that run counter to popular demand. Addressing hard truths is bad for their business.
-Sophists are frequently deceivers and sometimes outright charlatans, whose goal is to make people believe whatever they want—and thus, according to Plato and Aristotle, they are responsible for a large portion of the public holding false beliefs.
-If necessary, a sophist can actually argue both sides of any issue—and thus has the skill to make the bad seem good, or evil look like justice.
-They are often aligned with the rich and powerful, and have a knack for making money from their abilities.
-In the words of one classicist, the end result is a powerful group of influencers (as we would call them today) who are “crudely self-serving” and “frivolously manipulative.”
-Yet the sophists remain popular despite all these obvious warning signs. That’s no coincidence, because the sophists practice a vocation that deliberately aims at enriching and empowering the possessor of sophistical skills.
Read: The Word of the Year Is: Sophistry - by Ted Gioia
It even got me wondering if there’s anything to do with the word sophisticated and Bingo! The etymology is below:
sophisticate (v.) c. 1400, "make impure by admixture," from Medieval Latin sophisticatus, past participle of sophisticare (see sophistication). From c. 1600 as "corrupt, delude by sophistry;" from 1796 as "deprive of simplicity." Related: Sophisticated; sophisticating. As a noun meaning "sophisticated person" from 1921.
📜El Dorado
Since the first Nexialist, I have sent articles and videos about new discoveries in the Amazon. For centuries colonizers were looking for El Dorado, the golden city, driven by their greed until it was dismissed as a myth. I know the reality is much harsher, but I can’t help but imagine a Wakanda-like story, of a hidden city with ancient technology. I hope these findings inspire even more Amazofuturism and Indigenous futurism, imagining futures from their perspective.
… by the middle of the 16th century they were hearing rumors of another city, where: "A great Lord... goes about continually covered in gold dust. And washes it away at night." Those rumors eventually became the legend of El Dorado, a city made of gold, hidden in the Amazon rainforest. These impressive cities made a golden city seem plausible so many Europeans set off in search of El Dorado. But they all failed. Most ended in starvation, disease, and death. No one found a golden city, but they did record signs that one could exist.
🌱Data as The New Soil, not Oil
This idea brought on Sentiers’ newsletter definitely got my brain caressed, especially in this time of Surveillance Capitalism and Data-Determinism.
Micah L. Sifry interviewing Jerry Michalski about “how we need to build a ‘betterverse,’ not the metaverse.” This is one of those click through and explore pieces, lots of links to background or to nodes of his “brain” (a mind-map of the people, ideas, articles and encounters he’s had for more than 20 years).
The soil metaphor is to represent that we need better managed data, collective data that we can nourish and grow new ideas from, instead of the black goo of data oil, today’s leading paradigm for data. One can see the ‘betterverse,’ as growing from that, as “some kind of layer or protocol that enables people sharing their knowledge with others in ways that accrete up to collective knowledge.”
Read: Data as the New Soil, Not Oil
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