✨The Nexialist #0169

good luck, babe! | anti-design | noise era | bit-core | exploiting time | berghain | baddy on the floor | scientist | frequently secretly | achillean

Apr 18, 2024

welcome to your weekly cyber-fever-dreamy-newsletter, the nexialist

hey you! i hope this brainspark reaches your eyes and mind. this week we go from design, queer stuff and cultural shifts, to partying and the origins of the word scientist. it’s that good ol’ mish-mash which you know i love and at this point you’re used to. i’ll leave you to it as i still have some offline moments to enjoy (and i’m late) and irl events to attend to. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🍀good luck, babe!

today we start with a sapphic anthem by chappell roan. i have to say i was sleeping on this artist (thanks juan for playing this earworm) and i’m finding not only great tunes, but also a super campy queer artist who is also exploring drag in her aesthetics.

but what caught me was the design of the lyric video, purposefully “bad,” which seems to be a thing (keep reading). the best comment i saw:

brainsparks: dyke camp (tn#12), lesbian gaze (tn#12)

👾anti-design

watching chappel roan’s video, i thought of charli xcx’s next album’s cover, with a pixelated low-res ugly-green photo. some people didn’t understand it, but it’s very much in her brand: pc-music aka hyperpop uses noise and glitches as part of the sound, and here she did the same.

in an era where ai can make perfect things in seconds, we seem to be craving errors and mistakes. if a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163), and we live in peak nostalgia and see beauty in degraded media (tn#147) this is a convergence of all of that.

anti-design is not a new thing, since design exists, its countermovement has surged from underground movements to the main stream, and not only in graphic design, but also interior design and other disciplines. there’s definitely another wave happening and i’m here for it (btw, maybe my website thenexialist.xyz passes the test of anti-design?)

Anti-design is an approach that bucks the rules of conventional design in favor of challenging, experimental layouts. In web design, this means doing away with the clean, symmetrical, grid-based layouts so commonly seen in today’s websites in favor of loud colors and crowded, asymmetrical design. —Built In

brainsparks: a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163), the moodboard effect (tn#81), the vanishing designer (tn#81), the age of average (tn#115), glitch nostalgia (tn#34), technologies of convenience (tn#122), revival as loss of identity (tn#103), nostalgia theory (tn#19), glitched nostalgia (tn#34)

🎧noise era

then this week my algorithm pushed this interview with

Andre Alves

at gama revista (maybe because i love

floatvibes

). it’s a short but super insightful talk (pt-br) on the dynamics of dissatisfaction in our modern times: it moves us forward, but then what’s the limit when the message all around us is that nothing is enough? i took a quote from that stood out connecting to today’s edition.

We're living in a kind of age of noise [...] it's almost as if the age of information, or the age of disinformation, or the age of tension... all of this is a finished. we are at an era of a lot of noise. this mental cacophony that we live in… data, social media, smartphones, the excess of choices, algorithms. this excess that at the same time leaves us a little overwhelmed, and also sometimes seems like a sea of sameness. It's the noise from the amount of good morning messages, telemarketing calls, this ocean of content.
But noise is this slippery word, noise is also the place we escape to when we want to escape noise. So, from that very complex day to day, full of things, full of tasks, and picking up the kid from school, i-don't-know-who has a fever, doing this and that, work meetings, let me stay here for 30 minutes, 3 hours, on social media consuming noise.

brainsparks: bye dissafistaction (tn#10)

💽bit-core

deathtostock

A post shared by @deathtostock

thank you andré for sharing this. we love aguspanzoni / deathtostock’s visual analysis and this time again it got me excited, because she captured things i’ve been seeing and liking and put into words. it’s transcribed below, but it’s worth watching and signing up to their newsletter for the full visual reference.

an 80s-inspired aesthetics is being modernized in 2024. as seen in the use of geometry, grids and perspective angles, fluorized gradients, and pixels everywhere, from forms to typefaces, even cursive ones. bit-core, as we coined it, is the latest aesthetic to evolve from the third coming of synthwave visuals. it takes cues from the ongoing 80s revival, by mimicking early computer graphics.
this aesthetic’s lo-fi tech references invite audiences to escape to a time that feels both modern and familiar. existing in stark contrast to the ongoing ai avalanche, bit-core’s nostalgic comfort, seems to remind us that technology can be created for us and not just happen to us.
this might be why the innovation sector is strongly embracing this aesthetic. bit-core’s use of bold photography anchors this style in reality, with imagery portraying vintage-looking technology dominating this space.

brainsparks: cypherpunk (tn#127)

⏳exploiting time

Ana Andjelic

has again rented a whole penthouse in my head with this post: the creative economy, how brands exploit time to make money. we have been seeing signals like peak nostalgia, old music selling more than new releases, vintage and second-hand growing more than new collections. it made me uncomfortable but i love how direct ana is in this post. below are some quotes to make you go read it:

Today, money is made in mining the past. (…)
In the creative economy, past is the currency. (…)
Unlike the previous economic models that depleted our physical world, the creative economy exploits time. (…)
To exploit the past, a brand first needs to have it. If it doesn’t, it needs to invent it. (…)
It’s lucrative to own time. As the ultimate currency, time increases price of something. (…)
In the economy that monetizes time, the ultimate goal is to achieve immortality. (…)

and of course, this very nexialist quote:

For this transcendence to happen, different areas of cultural production need to fuse. Tourism and branding, film and television, gaming and fashion, art and design, architecture and content creation, and advertising and publishing are becoming a single brand narrative.

brainsparks: old vs new music (tn#58)

🏢berghain

this channel has some pretty cool visualizations, mostly about urbanism/politics, some of them about dutch-related themes. i loved this video they made about berghain, the techno temple, or the epicenter of club culture, as many refer to it. they sew together the story of a club-goer to the political, architectural and social context of this legendary place.

🪩baddy on the floor

such an amazing ft. for the summer. i couldn’t leave it out as honey dijon is (or was?) one of the residents at panorama bar. it’s such a feel good song!

🧑‍🔬scientist

this was sent to me by my sister, gabriela. even though we have a current problem of most credited scientists being male and stem being male-dominated, the term scientist originated for a woman, the polymath mary sommerville. she tutored ada lovelace and wrote the On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, connecting different sciences and deeply influencing cambridge university’s first science curriculum. suddenly the term “man of science” felt obsolete. of course it made me think of nexialism.

In 1834, the Cambridge don William Whewell wrote a complimentary article about Mary Somerville, a Scottish researcher whose erudite books brought together previously disparate fields of mathematics, astronomy, geology, chemistry, and physics so clearly that the texts became the backbone of Cambridge University’s first science curriculum. He called Somerville a scientist, in part because “man of science” seemed inappropriate for a woman, but more significantly because Somerville’s work was interdisciplinary. She was no mere astronomer, physicist, or chemist, but a visionary thinker who articulated the connections among the various branches of inquiry. According to Somerville’s biographer Kathryn Neeley, Whewell’s coinage of the word “scientist” was not meant to be merely a gender-neutral neutral term. Whewell wanted a word that actively celebrated “the peculiar illumination of the female mind”: the ability to synthesize separate fields into a single discipline.”

brainsparks: interstitium (tn#151), the gay science (tn#53), how tech changes the way we speak (tn#136), nature disconnection (tn#137)

🏳️‍🌈frequently secretly

you gotta love orville peck and country icon willie nelson calling out internalized homophobia in the country macho culture. since i opened the newsletter with a sapphic tune, it feels correct to close with an achillean tune.

Well, a cowboy may brag about things that he's donе with his women
But the ones who brag loudеst are the ones that are most likely queer

brainsparks: queer the future (tn#24)

⚢achillean

Achillean: men who are attracted to men, inclusive of gay, bisexual, pansexual, and queer men and nonbinary people who identify with manhood. A term that refers to the Greek hero Achilles, modeled after the use of the term “sapphic” for women who are attracted to women.

looking for an equivalent term to sapphic but for men (as if we needed it), and i found this and i’m not keeping it to myself. i could not find this definition in the dictionary, but i hope it gets there soon.

brainsparks: the queer code (tn#92)

see you next week, babes👾✨

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