🎞️✨The Nexialist #0155

when images matter more than reality | f@k€ | occluplanida | synthetic data | retronym | babooshka | pina bausch

Jan 11, 2024

welcome to another cyber collection of real insights, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. this week the thermal sensation in amsterdam has been very cold, like -12, which i don’t remember happening since i moved here. next week i’ll write to you from são paulo. i’ll be spending a couple of months between brazil and argentina, so i bet the thermal sensation will be much higher. fingers crossed my immunity will thrive and not crash 🤞

i started noticing a pattern: when i’m nervous about something (i.e. this trip), instead of doing what i need to do (organize my things before i go to brazil), i start doing something else which i’ve been avoiding for months. i thought this was the definition of precrastination, but it’s not. i’m not sure if it’s the most effective or healthy method, but hey, there is the reactivation of a personal project coming soon (i’ll keep it quiet until there is something to show). now, wish me luck and enjoy this edition, full of illusions, fakeness, synthetic stuff and discoveries. 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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📲when images matter more than reality

i completely forgot where i saw this link, but thank you to whoever shared it. leonardo werner introduces us to the work of brazilian-czech philosopher vilém flusser, towards a philosophy of photography. i remember hearing his name in my semiotics classes at uni, but this piece brings his thoughts and ideas to our present context.

The first thing the reader should bear in mind is that Flusser’s departing point for his philosophy of photography is the advent of the technical image, which was born thanks to the invention of the photographic camera. To Flusser, there is a world before and after the invention of the camera. Its creation marked a historical breakthrough as much as the invention of linear writing because it has completely reshaped the collective imagination of events and how information is transmitted.
The technical image is different from traditional images, like paintings, because the former gives, at first glance, the impression of an objective representation of reality. Flusser stresses precisely the opposite understanding: images can never objectively represent reality: they are always representations of the world. In that sense, images can never be neutral, as they are not mere objects of contemplation. Rather, they act on us.
In technical images, on the contrary, the symbolic character is not evident, as they carry an illusion of objectivity. Between the act of taking a photograph and the picture itself, the camera’s black box decodes the world accordingly. This process happens without the photographer’s intervention. The illusion occurs because the technical image becomes a screen, which hides what it essentially means.

werner then brings flusser’s work to the present: selfies, Kardashians and all that. flusser says that images shape reality, the camera also shapes the photographer’s perspective. now, we’ve all become “photographers” or able to create technical images from our phones. images more than ever shape our reality, and our devices got us in a chokehold. it’s what matt klein talks about in audience capture.

i have to say, i kept thinking what vilém flusser would say about our ai-generated images.

"Human beings forget they created the images in order to orientate themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives become a function of their own images: Imagination has turned into hallucination." — Vilém Flusser

brainsparks: super industry of the imaginary (tn#28), counter-culture x counter-futures (tn#10), context collapse (tn#25), fake authenticity (tn#70), ontological design (tn#3), personal machines and portable worlds (tn#132)

🫦f@k€

once more, shygirl is renting a triplex in my mind with this banger that is like a cold-pressed juice of our times. don’t be real, be unapologetically fake. the devil is on the details and i just love the @ and € on the title, maybe an ode to the digital and the capital.

Who needs to be real?
I want it fake, bitch
Give me sex appeal
I want it fake (fake, fake, fake, fake) (you look like-)
I need a fake (fake, fake, fake, fake) (you look like-)
Everything you see, I bought it
Paid, I chose what I wanted
Plastic, it could be synthetic
Slim, hot, just look at it

brainsparks: barbie’s authentic artificiality (tn#130), the essence of camp is its love for the unnatural (tn#12)

🧫occluplanida

i’m obsessed with this project: The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group - A Database of Synthetic Taxonomy. they are basically using scientific frameworks/vocabulary that we use for the natural kingdom to categorize the synthetic world, more specifically, those little weird plastic pieces used to seal the bread package. i’ll never look at them the same way.

Taxonomy: Class Occlupanida (Occlu=to close, pan= bread) are placed under the Kingdom Microsynthera, of the Phylum Plasticae. Occlupanids share phylum Plasticae with “45” record holders, plastic juice caps, and other often ignored small plastic objects.

via messy nessy chic

💿synthetic data

months ago i had to write about synthetic data for work (it is published here, on the techdetector) and i just had a brainspark to squeeze this in here. i remembered being puzzled: isn’t all data synthetic? do they mean fake data?

Artificial data, often generated with the support of deep neural networks, allow the creation of highly accurate and realistic data sets based on existing data. This solution makes it possible to rely on Big Data while protecting the identity of people in a database and avoiding their reidentification.

engines like the one above take real data sets (related to real-world events/people/transactions), process them using ai and create new data sets with the same relations, but without any connection to real data points. in done right, synthetic data is a privacy-friendly way to overcome gdpr and other data protection laws. also, it allows smaller organizations and universities, for instance, to innovate using data sets that are anonymous.

🎞️retronym

retronym (noun) — ret·ro·nym ˈre-trō-ˌnim
: a term (such as analog watch, film camera, or snail mail) that is newly created and adopted to distinguish the original or older version, form, or example of something (such as a product) from other, more recent versions, forms, or examples.

recently, the word of the day was retronym at merriam-webster’s newsletter. so now, because of the term synthetic data, we have real data. because of digital camera, we have film cameras. i never knew there was a word for this, but i’m thankful it’s there.

brainsparks: retrospective aging (tn#80)

🪆babooshka

my algorithm pushed me this video this week and i loved it. believe it or not, i had never paid attention to the story kate bush is telling here: a wife testing her husband’s fidelity by sending scented letters signed as babooshka (which at the time she didn’t know meant grandmother in russian). from what i understood, somehow he found the magic again in her. would this be another tale of “fake til you make it?”

brainsparks: running up that hill (tn#2)

💃🏻pina bausch

this week i had the opportunity to rewatch pina with andrea, after more than ten years (i remember being on 3D session on the first time… haven’t seen those in years). i think this movie helped me understand, years ago, that dance is another language and helped me create a sensitivity to this and other art forms. it is so touching, how she can convey through dance universal themes of love, ageing, life and death, freedom and struggle. if you can, watch it.

see you next week, babooshkas 🫀✨

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