🔪✨The Nexialist #0180

nearbywiki | calculating empires | alibi | the next big drag queen | girl, so confusing | miss missogyny | ra ta ta | like an italian drama

Jul 04, 2024

welcome to your weekly public stash of curated content, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message (in a bottle, sent from italy) finds you. i’ve been relaxing and slowing down in tuscany, getting some vitamin d, writing morning pages, eating delicious food (thank you giacomo, juan and roel). i had forgotten how it feels to not know which day of the week it is, and it’s a blessing. i had some content lined up for this week, so i made some time to send you this week’s nexialist. i hope you enjoy it! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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📍nearbywiki

thank you,

Tássia Frossard

, for sending me the the art of noticing 163. robwalker shares (among other amazing things) the nearbywiki, which puts wikipedia entries with a corresponding address in a map. another way to bridge our daily reality with digital information (or help you planning a trip and knowing more about where you’re going).

i still want to explore it more, but i was in awe to find that the former headquarters of the dutch west india company is two blocks from my house, and i bike/walk in front of it almost every day, which was “given jurisdiction over Dutch participation in the Atlantic slave trade, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America.” this was the company that tried to take over olinda and pernanbuco in northeast brazil. nearbywiki is also a tool of memory for all the monuments and constructions from another time.

The area where the company could operate consisted of West Africa (between the Tropic of Cancer and the Cape of Good Hope) and the Americas, which included the Pacific Ocean and ended east of the Maluku Islands, according to the Treaty of Tordesillas. The intended purpose of the charter was to eliminate competition, particularly Spanish or Portuguese, between the various trading posts established by the merchants. The company became instrumental in the largely ephemeral Dutch colonization of the Americas (including New Netherland) in the seventeenth century.

brainsparks: atlas obscura (tn#66)

🤖calculating empires

this is one of the coolest and solid things i’ve seen in a long time. calculating empires: a genealogy of technology and power since 1500 (via

Michell Zappa

). this interactive infographic, by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, maps the long and complex relation between technology and power. you can browse from 1500 until now (bottom to top), and the verticals are numerous, from communication devices, interfaces and communications infrastructures, to algorithms, human bodies and surveillance infrastcture. there is even a colonialism vertical.

it reminded me of the rivers of life or faiths of men in all lands (tn#146), considering religion has also been used as a power tool.

living in the netherlands i think a lot of the technologies that historically made this such a rich nation: their maritime power, their windmills… as well as their colonialism via the west and east indie companies.

Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound. By tracking these imperial pathways, Calculating Empires offers a means of seeing our technological present in a deeper historical context. And by investigating how past empires have calculated, we can see how they created the conditions of empire today.
[…]
Calculating Empires takes Donna Haraway's provocation literally that we need to map the “informatics of domination.” The technologies of today are the latest manifestations of a long line of entangled systems of knowledge and control. This is the purpose of our visual genealogy: to show the complex interplay of systems of power, information, and circumstance across terrain and time, in order to imagine how things could be otherwise.

brainsparks: rivers of life or faiths of men in all lands (tn#146), encyclopedia (tn#177), visualizing and communicating complexity (tn#61), at the height of complexity (tn#49)

🔪alibi

this banger has been on the tease for so long and i’m so happy to see it going live. sevdaliza is an iranian-dutch indie artist, and she’s brought two other amazing artists with her: yseult from france, and pabllo vittar, our brazilian icon. i was getting chills listening to the song, seeing pabllo going into their lower register, and such a beautiful video. stream it so they reach the top, as an indie tune.

the sample is from rosa by colombian artist magín díaz featuring carlos vivese totó la momposina.

brainsparks: sevdaliza (tn#5)

🇧🇷the next big drag queen

if you follow the nexialist, you must know how excited i am to see pabllo vittar, one of my favorite brazilian artists, getting this piece at the new york times: The World’s Next Big Drag Queen Is Brazilian: Pabllo Vittar has become an A-list pop star and L.G.B.T.Q. activist in Brazil. Can she conquer the world?

“RuPaul may still be the queen of queens, but the heir to the global crown has arrived.”

i’ve been following pabllo’s work for so many years, and in gay brazil we have this strong parasocial relationship with pabllo and other artists, we root for them. i find it so nice when i meet non-brazilians that know and like pabllo’s work.

brainsparks: amazonize the world (tn#74), pabllo vittar (tn#4), queer the future (tn#5)

💪🏼girl, so confusing

you also know i’ve been obsessing with brat (tn#177), charli xcx’s new album, and this honestly made me cry. this is a masterclass on vulnerability: charli wrote a song about how confusing is the relationship with other women, especially in the music industry. the fans speculated it was a diss track about lorde (which she probably was).

lorde responded and participated in the remix, opening up about the whole thing: she was in her head, has her issues and had no idea charli was thinking about her. i’m not in the music industry, but it’s so relatable to be in your head and fuck up things.

brainsparks: find true belonging - brené brown (tn#46), brat (tn#177)

🏆miss missogyny

i’m always impressed by villano’s rapping. i am obsessed with villano antillano and i had no idea there was new album coming. i loved the album before, la sustancia x (tn#98) and miss myssogyny is a great sequel. even if i wouldn’t consider myself fluent in spanish, i can understand quite a lot, i think because a lot of it is also mixed with english.

brainsparks: bzrp + villano antillano (tn#83), la sustancia x (tn#98)

🏍️ra ta ta

mahmood is another artist that i’ve been loving. and now we have a new single, which was not in his new album. ra ta ta aesthetically puts him in a motomami/ motopapi era.

brainsparks: tuta gold (tn#159), motomami (tn#99)

🍊like an italian drama

since i’m in italy this seems the perfect timing for belén’s new song, como en un drama italiano. the aesthetics are cinematographic and beautiful and the song is delicious.

brainsparks: copilot (tn#116)

see you next week, alibis 🫀✨

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