✨The Nexialist #0178

flow state | expand your perception | how to do great work | what is post-branding | craftivist manifesto | fuel a conversation | you give me life | heat | alright | together against each other

Jun 20, 2024

welcome to your weekly parcel of curated brainsparking content, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this bunch os 0s and 1s finds exactly like this gif. this weekend, i had a beautiful celebration of my 35th birthday with people that i love, at my house, with a pretty nice weather. there so many things to be thankful for, which i know is a privilege with everything happening.

this week i’ll be covering tnw festival in amsterdam, and on the weekend i’ll be deejaying at tropikali. it feels a bit too much, but we also know these intense moments are full of discoveries and joy. i’m super excited!

now, this nexialist might look a bit extensive, and if that’s the case, save it for later and come back to it. it kind of turned out to be a mini toolbox, so check if you find anything useful before skipping it. i also hope you enjoy the music at the end. enjoy and i see you next week! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🌊flow state

this showed up in my timeline as a great reminder for this weekend. i usually get quite stressed about deejaying, especially as tropikali grows (thousands of people will be there). this week while rehearsing and preparing my set for a couple of months, i feel i moved from anxiety / fear of failure to flow state. it’s quite a nice feeling (wish me luck). thank you, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi for this:

Flow in positive psychology, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time. Flow is the melting together of action and consciousness; the state of finding a balance between a skill and how challenging that task is. It requires a high level of concentration. Flow is used as a coping skill for stress and anxiety when productively pursuing a form of leisure that matches one's skill set. (Wikipedia)

brainsparks: entering flow state (tn#76)

🧠expand your perception

thank you, juan, for sharing this. maybe you’ve seen dr. jill bolte taylor’s ted talk about her incredible/revealing experience having a stroke while being a neuroanatomist. well, now she is in a big think video teaching us how the different modules of the brain interact, and how we can empower ourselves through knowing this. i just love how enthusiastic she is.

this first thing she breaks is that myth of left = emotional, right = analytical (or whatever we’ve been brainswashed to). both sides have emotional and thinking modules, she connects these four parts. it reminded me of of anatomy classes about the four parts of the heart and how blood/oxygen flows, but with the brain.

We have the capacity to understand and have a healthy relationship with all the different parts of who we are. And when we look at the anatomy of the brain, when we get that streamlined activity between the two thinking parts of our brain, the two emotional parts of our brain, and we're having a whole brain life, wow, things change.
I think the first thing we need to do is be willing and open to explore what's going on inside of our own head. Get to know who you are. Get to know your four characters. Get to know how they engage in your life, who they have relationships with, how they feel inside of your body. How much time do you want to spend in each of these four different parts?
Once you know that, then you can create a negotiation. And to me, that's personal freedom, to be able to know I have the power to choose moment by moment who and how I wanna be, regardless of my external circumstance. And it's a wonderful, wonderful way of being.

brainsparks: liveware & malleability (tn#56), second brain, neurorights (tn#132)

💼how to do great work

i’ve been starting to read substack’s notes (it’s been quite a nice feed to visit tbh). this one has been making the rounds around here and i loved it. how to do great work, is a combination of paul graham’s collection of techniques.

If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.
Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard."

brainsparks: creative work (tn#165), asynchronous work (tn#49)

🛟what is post-branding

ironically the beautiful design of the cover of this book caught my attention. by Oliver Vodeb and Jason Grant, “What is post-branding? How to Counter Fundamentalist Marketplace Semiotics” is quite a confronting book for those of us who studied and work with marketing/branding/advertising. the book is not only beautiful visually, with a bunch of historical references to how branding was created as a tool of domination and has been working in favour of colonization and capitalism. the book has a clear manifesto, and case studies of brands/campaigns practicing post-branding. it’s satisfying to see how it matches what i’ve been feeling and questioning, showing alternatives to the way we’re doing things.

here’s one of the items:

Branding is not isolated. It is product, symptom and catalyst of capitalism. But creating meaning around signifiers, through a process of meaningful exchange like communication does not have to be predatory.
Can we imagine an alternative method of communicating collective identity that supports the common good? Can we abandon the brandwagon? Can we imagine post-branding?
Though branders may dismiss it as utopian', or ‘naive,’ or as an 'activist aesthetic', post-branding is a change at the root of how and what we know-how. We imagine the world and do things in it as designers. We need to wade through branding's shallow depths and simplistic complexities. Why is branding being taught in universities with no real alternative? Why are design awards rewarding branding? ls branding
merely a compensation, an attempt to hype a terminally boring culture?
Commercial forms of communication are based on ‘external authority'. It is the image, the appearance —as a brand and branding device— which help legitimise and enable extractive cultures. Can we instead design as if all the world wasn't just a shopping mall and all its citizens targeted competitive consumers? A collective identity can create relations which include the interdependencies, needs and desires of a broad constituency, rather than the exclusive priorities of a minority corrupting power.
Post-branding is new set of strategies embedded in a new culture of craft. A new way of being and knowing for a new way of relating with the world.

brainsparks: the vanishing designer (tn#81), enshittification lifecycle (tn#106), life after lifestyle (tn#91)

🪡craftivist manifesto

since my last visit to brazil i’ve been reintroduced to marina lima’s song fullgás, which i heard a remix at a night out. since then i’ve been following her on social media and i’m loving seeing how connected she is to the zeitgeist.

marina shared this craftivist collective manifesto from danmark design museum in copenhagen. it connected me to last week’s post about culture curators (tn#177), and i see this as another movement/tool to slow down/degrow the status quo.

craftivism: simply explained are the words activism and craft woven together. there are lots of people who interpret activism through craft differently and our approach with the craftivist collective, we call gentle protest. we don't mean gentle as in passive or weak but gentle as in considered and compassionate. with craftivism we're not starting from our love of craft and allowing that to lead us.

brainsparks: laborer, craftsman, artist (tn#161), degrow your mind (tn#117)

💬fuel a conversation

since i’m going to tnw this week, this post appeared in the perfect timing, shared in messynessychic’s newsletter. as someone who is shy about talking to strangers, i found it quite helpful.

brainsparks: new rules of gathering (tn#37), how to speak so that people want to listen (tn#61)

😵‍💫you give me life

jamie xx got together with robyn and released this banger. i was getting chills while listening to it, the cerrone sample (tn#118) is just so good, with robyn’s voice it’s even better.

brainsparks: a part of you (tn#118), robyn: from pop puppet to independent icon (tn#8)

🥵heat

tove lo + sg lewis new ep, HEAT, is pure summer euphoria/horniness in the shape of sound. the video is so hot and sex-positive, so don’t watch it at work.

brainsparks: rush (tn#130)

🔥alright

now, this is another pop video that got me obsessed. i just love how she flips between masculine and feminine energies in the choreography, it’s perfection.

💿together against each other

now, my favorite boyband (who is dutch) just released a new album last week, samen tegen elkaar (together against each other), and i’ve been loving it. it’s always a blast to see how they bring trending musical styles with their irony (and sometimes quite seriousness) to their work. besides the singles they already released like sex and you&me, the following tracks are my favorites: FML, Spijt, Vuur & Vlam, Slapen.

brainsparks: affordable romance (tn#33)

see you next week, craftivists 🫀✨

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