🍼✨The Nexialist #0114

primavera | little DJ | rurbanization | pope in a coat | ai’s ethical compass | obdurate | art, not pornography | breastfeeding the elderly | it's euphoric

Mar 30, 2023

welcome to another week of questioning/making sense of reality, the nexialist

hello, you! i hope this e-mail finds you ~~less tired than me~~ well. this week i had the opportunity to watch live one of the Netherlands’ most famous (at least for me) night-talk-shows, de avondshow met arjen lubach (thank juan and giacomo). no, my dutch is not good enough to fully understand it, but i was impressed at how they decide, write, record, edit and release all in a day. also, i feel a tiny bit more dutch after this.

also, i need to tell you about this. recently i e-mailed zine’s matt klein asking him an important question: would there ever be an actual printed zine? oh well, now you can pre-order his audience capture zine and i’m super excited about it. go go go!

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🌸primavera

this week my algorithm showed me this timely song for spring (despite the snow we still had this week in amsterdam). ppj, or páula, povoa and jorge is a brazilian/french electro-pop band that i wish i had known before, but i’m more than happy to listen to their stuff for the first time. enjoy!

the trio's first single Primavera is a glistening concoction of ‘80s tinged electronica, sweetly vulnerable vocals and chiming live piano.

🧠little DJ

Tamar Shafrir 🌴 @tamars

Looks like a little DJ in there

this tweet gave me immediate men-in-black vibes, and i just needed to share it here with you. is this who they call ego, or the little alien/creature who is controlling us in the simulation that life is? it’s one of those things you can’t unsee.

🪴rurbanization

no, rurbanization is not the new rupaul initiative to make cities drag-centric (though that would be amazing), but one of the rabbit holes brought by thomas klaffke in his newsletter. it made me think of são paulo and amsterdam in different ways, and how could they be as rurbanization grows.

“People have long stoked an urban-versus-rural rivalry, with vastly different cultures and surroundings. But a burgeoning movement—with accompanying field of science—is eroding this divide, bringing more of the country into the city. It’s called rurbanization, and it promises to provide more locally grown food, beautify the built environment, and even reduce temperatures during heat waves. It’s also reversing the longstanding assumption that growing food is straight-up bad for biodiversity because clearing land for agriculture necessitates removing native plants and animals.”

✝️pope in a coat

last saturday i was in a whatsapp group when the above image appeared. even the name of the designer was included with it. i was so confused, because something about it made me think it was ai, but still, i was fooled just like the whole internet . i even asked if there was a word for this, when we question if everything is real or synthetic. a friend said: it’s post-truth. also post-reality. yes, but i still want a more specific word… oh well… i can’t wait for this year’s april fools.

listen: how an AI pope pic fooled us - today, explained

🧭ai’s ethical compass

IDEO released a few years ago an ai ethical toolkit, which is not only cute but brings great questions if you want to bring ai to your work. i know i am already playing with it here and there, so having some questions set out will for sure inspire me to do it with caution instead of completely avoiding it. they also shared a more recent post with some ways in which they are applying it. also, a teaser of their ai principles.

1. Data is not truth
Data is human-driven. Humans create, generate, collect, capture, and extend data. The results are often incomplete, and the process of analyzing them can be messy. Data can be biased through what is included or excluded, how it is interpreted, and how it is presented. Unpacking the human influence on data is essential to understanding how it can best serve our needs.
2. Don’t presume the desirability of AI
Just because AI can do something doesn’t mean that it should. When AI is incorporated into a design, designers should continually pay attention to whether people’s needs are changing, or an AI’s behavior is changing.
3. Respect privacy and the collective good
While there are policies and laws that shape the governance, collection, and use of data, we must hold ourselves to a higher standard than “will we get sued?” Consider design, governance of data use for new purposes, and communication of how people’s data will be used.
4. Unintended consequences of AI are opportunities for design
Just as with any design endeavor, we know that we’re not going to get it right the first time. Use unanticipated consequences and new unknowns as starting points for iteration.

🪖obdurate

adjective
ob·du·rate ˈäb-də-rət -dyə-; äb-ˈdu̇r-ət, əb-, -ˈdyu̇r-
1 a: stubbornly persistent in wrongdoing; b: hardened in feelings
2: resistant to persuasion or softening influences

this is a new word for me. in portuguese we say cabeça dura (hard head) for someone who is stubborn, and maybe it connected to that in my head. also, it made me think how are we affected as a society when all reality is questionable and we grow suspicious of everything. is this making us close-minded and obdurate to learning new ways to look at the world?

🗽art, not pornography

this story is so sad and frustrating. a teacher was forced to resign in florida after showing the iconic david statue by michelangelo to sixth graders. the idea that nudity, even in a statue/painting, can be considered pornography is just absurd and talks so much about false moralism. this discussion is not something new, but everytime i see it, it reminds me how much work we still have to do. i will always stand for exercising nudity as a reminder of our most true reality. exactly 2 years ago i brought the story about the naked truth (tn#13).

On Saturday, Dario Nardella, the mayor of Florence, tweeted that “mistaking art for pornography is just ridiculous”, and said he plans to invite Carrasquilla to Italy, “to give her recognition on behalf of the city”.

🍼breastfeeding the elderly

*Roman Charity* (c1645) by Gaspar de Crayer

margie orfordis writes: “since antiquity, artists have depicted a perverse scene of a daughter breastfeeding her aged father. what does it mean?” i honestly had never thought about this, so this piece is full of insightful art history and symbology of breastfeeding. spoiler: it was connected to magic for a long time. but the plot twist came here:

In both these paintings, as with the Rubens, the daughter’s breast, nurturing and erotic, distracts us from patriarchy’s blind spot: male need, dependence, vulnerability. There is the explicit danger that Pero might be caught breaking the law by feeding Cimon, but to save her father she must break an unwritten law. This taboo is not the prohibition against incest. It is the prohibition of an elemental truth of patriarchy: that for this familial, social and cultural system of power and dominance to function, there has to be a denial of the dependence of men on the care given to them by women – that dependence, as the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote, is the origin of men’s fear of women.

🏃‍♂️it’s euphoric

i’m so happy to hear georgia is releasing a new album this summer. press play and enjoy. (some of the characters in the video seem to have been made by ai.. here i go questioning even this…)

see you next week, aliens 👽

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