🪈✨The Nexialist #0176

maricoteca | queer histories of the piers | shifting realities | a history of delusions | pills | lost in space | music on the radio | espectacular | lagoon music

Jun 05, 2024

welcome to your weekly batch of fermented ~~kombucha~~ content, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this e-mail finds you exactly like this gif (full video is at the end). last friday, my family got the sad news that my maternal grandmother, Clarice, departed. she was a strong woman, the embodiment of a matriarch, hard-working, loving and sported the sweetest laugh. I always found her name super beautiful: Clarice means “that who is clear, shiny, luminous… sparkly.” quite poetic, if you ask me. may she rest in peace 🫀✨

this week we go from queer content, to a deep-dive in reality shifting, to some nice music videos. i hope you enjoy!🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🪩maricoteca

since sharing the camp gaucho (tn#171) video/song, i’ve been falling in love with the work of queer chilean artist alex anwandter, more specifically his 2023 album, el diablo en el cuerpo (the devil in the body). it’s an 80s-synth-pop, delicious disco heaven vibe. just the name of the album is already amazing, reclaiming what some religions still perpetuate, that LGTBQIA+ have been posessed by demons.

brainsparks: priDEMONth (tn#123), camp gaucho (tn#171), same gender lyrics (tn#27)

🏳️‍🌈queer histories of the piers

this piece of queer history showed up recently in my feed. david hammon’s day end, a permanent public art project located in the hudson river park, sheds light into the queer history of the piers. a history about creating community, freedom, and some sort of a parallel reality. while feeling forgotten and left out, the queer community has been known for creating their own reality, spaces and rituals, and this piece of work reminded me of that.

“When I look at "Day's End" it evokes a pier that's gone. It evokes the contributions of a generation of people. I'm able to see the temples within which they built the divinity of queer identity.” —Elegance Bratton, Artist and Filmmaker

brainsparks: queering the future (tn#5), queer health (tn#141)

🧠shifting realities

this week my jaw dropped while listening to the podcast episode by Radio Escafandro: shifting and the escape to hogwarts (in brazilian portuguese). they are investigating the topic of reality shifting, where young people claim to be able to mentally shift their consciouness from the CR (current reality) to DRs (desired realities).

Reality shifting refers to a practice where individuals attempt to shift their consciousness or awareness to alternate realities or “realms” through various techniques, often involving meditation, visualization, scripting and intense focus. These alternate realities might be based on existing fictional worlds, personal fantasies or entirely new creations. — mark travers, psychologist

there’s a whole shifting community, with their own lingo, platforms, videos with billions of views. there are influencers telling their experiences there, and of course, some are selling courses, audios and tools for the ones that still haven’t been able to visit their DR. one of these influencers claimed to go to hogwarts and she even got pregnant (the father is draco malfoy).

looking at reality shifting as a symptom, what could be some causes/drivers? these are some brainsparks that came up:

📱tech-dependent or techless?

could this movement come from the wish to abandon technology, or a tech-hangover? with emerging extended realities via technology (i.e.: augmented reality or virtual reality) there is something quite rebellious and empowering about using your own mind to create other realities. not everyone can afford a VR headset or the latest videogame, so there is a certain autonomy from technology with shifting. at the same time, SR depends on technology: subliminal videos for reality shifting, meditation or frequency sounds, and the access to the community is all mediated by tech.

brainsparks: virtual economy (tn#18), counterculture x counter-futures (tn#10), synthetic media (tn#18)

🤯mental health and escapism

in your DR, your clone (their version of a videogame’s avatar) can look the way you want (a different gender, body type, style). there have been stories of shifters that prefer living in their desired reality and spend hours there (locked in their rooms). some even want to move permanently to the other reality (meaning, ending their lives here).

the phenomenon did catch on during the pandemic, when a lot of us were not coming to terms with the reality around us. now, in a world of climate emergency and anxiety, loneliness pandemic, growing social/economic inequality, deteriorating mental and physical health, no wonder young people want to escape. reality shifting is also part of the toolbox one can use to escape the current reality (alongside technology, substances, work, etc).

brainsparks: parasocial relationships (tn#47), personal machines and portable worlds (tn#132)

🎮playfulness and the paracosm

i just learned about the term paracosm: “a detailed imaginary world thought generally to originate in childhood.” most shifters are of young ages, from pre-teens and teens to young adults. it made me think of neil postman’s the disappearance of childhood (tn#121). it seems that in the lack of play we face in adulthood (and in modern childhood too) in the west, reality shifting emerges as a way to rescue playfulness.

brainsparks: drops of joy (tn#16), play-full futures (tn#121)

📿ritual and spiritual

byung-chul han talked about the disappearance of ritual “as a means of diagnosing the pathologies of the present.” RS seems to emerge in the empty space of rituals, as it uses different techniques, from meditation, visualization, frequency matching to self-hypnosis, to reach this kind of transcendent experience. some compare it to daydreaming or astral projections.

brainsparks: digital esoterism (tn#116)

👤individualism and loneliness

as much as there is a lively community around RS, this activity is done mostly alone. also, the universe one creates is very much their own, like an ultra-personalized single-player game, as each person is the only one who can visit and experience their DR. it made me think how the community can be something positive, but up until a point, as it can exacerbate isolation.

brainsparks: the lifespan of loneliness (tn#156), witches and loneliness (tn#98), the new rules of gathering (tn#37), bronfenbrenner's bioecological model (tn#85)

🧠colonized minds and capitalism

it’s interesting to see how many shifters want to visit franchised universes: hogwars and star wars are some examples. it made me think how, even when one has the chance to create their own DR from scratch and the sky is the limit, there is still a magnetism to choose such established universes from the entertainment industry. of course, having common and known universes can help with creating a sense of community, but it still got me thinking.

brainsparks: protopia dreams (tn#69), imagination as necessity (tn#15)

😵‍💫a history of delusions

my spotify algorithm pushed me this podcast from 2018, a history of delusions, where experimental psychologist daniel freeman explores cases of delusion. i’ve only listened to a couple episodes, and it connects classic delusion cases with current ex-patients sharing how they perceived reality. in one episode about “delusions of grandeur” a woman explains how she was sure she was jesus christ. in the second, “walking corpse delusion” another woman tells how she thought she was dead. it’s quite interesting to understand how one can build realities, or be fooled by the chemical imbalances of the brain.

💊pills

the new song of brooke candy felt weird at first and now it’s a banger. it says a lot about our seamless lives, where we look for easy miraculous solutions, everything at the reach of a pill.

More pills, one to wake up
One to go dance, one to get fucked
More pills, one to shut up
One to feel cute, one to get fucked

brainsparks: a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163)

🫲lost in space

i have to say i haven’t followed what foster the people had been up to since their pumped up kicks hit back in 2010. this appeared in my feed, and are they singing about reality shifting?

And I've been drifting in a daydream
Fantasies that keep me in my bed and awake at night
Floating and drifting and flying through the open sky
And I'm lost (Lost without you)
I'm lost in space (Lost in space)

🍄music on the radio

empire of the sun is a band that knows how to create their own zany universe, and i loved this one.

🍑espectacular

this song has been on my repeat playlist for a few weeks and it’s delicious. it made me realized that the word culo is in espectacular.

🪈lagoon music

now, talking about parallel realities, this seems like a pretty concrete reality. hermeto pascoal is a brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist from alagoas. and this footage from 1985 shows a symphony in a lagoon, where water is interacting with the instruments and all. one of the most relaxing, chill videos i’ve seen in a long time. the best comment:

see you next week, cuties🫀✨

🫀✨thank you for reading The Nexialist. This post is public, so feel free to share these brainsparks 🧠✨

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes, teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist.

I offer inspiration sessions called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below:

thenexialist.xyz

The Nexialist