🫂✨The Nexialist #0183

hey homie | envisioning cities | arqueology of the future | starlinking the amazon | gen-gen | the most creative time ever | image | angel of my dreams | skullfu*ker

Jul 25, 2024

welcome to your weekly web-tasting newsletter, the nexialist

hey, you! I hope the gif above does not represent you atm (nor does my e-mail represent the red creature). i’ve been luckily enjoying the ephemeral dutch summer in amsterdam this past week, and ready for pride season: pride walk, milkshake festival and pride parade are all happening in this period. this week, i’m bringing themes like friendship, the future of cities and the amazon, and the present/future of creativity. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🫂hey homie

timely new track from sofi tukker, as i finished last week’s edition with the post about normalizing loving your friends (tn#182). hey homie celebrates their friendship in a mix of bossa nova and drum’n’bass and it really touched me. i have to say my eyes were tearing up while i listened to it. i’ve been to a few of their concerts, and they have such a good chemistry together, so it’s so precious to see them making such a statement.

brainsparks: loving your friends (tn#182), relationship anarchy (tn#6)

🌆envisioning cities

i’m so proud to show you what i’ve been working in the past months with envisioning and cappra institute: envisioning cities. a big thank you to everyone involved <3 you can start by the intro and the “how to navigate” page, so you can get the most of it.

Our goal with this radar is to showcase emerging solutions that can help people imagine and build the futures of cities. For this reason, our radar organises 80+ solutions into 10 slices, each representing one of the 10 targets of UN’s 11th Sustainable Development Goal - Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
[…]
This radar serves as a starting point, a futures literacy tool to help us imagine urban possibilities. There is no silver bullet that can take on this complex task of SDG11, nor are all necessary solutions presented on this radar. In this iteration of the Envisioning Cities radar, we have expanded our selection beyond technologies to also include some policies, ideas, strategies, concepts or trends. This shift illustrates that the futures of cities and their citizens do not depend solely on technology but on changes across the board.

now, we even have an ai assistant where you can ask questions. you can navigate in english or portuguese and read about each solution, focused in the urban context. each entry has its own TRL (technology readiness level), and is tagged with the four Core Dimensions of the New Urban Agenda: Social Sustainability, Economic Sustainability, Environmental Sustainability and Spatial Sustainability. we also tagged them by their use in the World Bank’s framework, “Resilient Recovery: Building Back Better, which promotes the achievement of “resilience through stronger, faster, and more inclusive post-disaster reconstruction.” Each solution has been tagged according to which moment they can be used, which you can explore as a filter: Humanitarian Relief, Restoration of Basic Services and Reconstruction and Asset Recovery.”

if you are in urban planning or any area that could influence the future of your city and see potential for collaboration, do not hesitate to contact us.

brainsparks: urban futures (tn#179), centaur mindset (tn#106)

🌀arqueology of the future

radio novelo recently told the story about amazonia revelada (revealed amazon) in an episode called arqueologia do futuro (arqueology of the future). i was so excited and emotional listening to it. this project is using lidar technology (included in the envisioning cities radar), to find ancient indigenous settlements in the state of acre, in brazil. the strategy is to map these lands with the help of local forest folks, recognizing their arqueological status, and therefore granting environmental protection. the amazing part is that they keep finding a web of these geoglyphs, suggesting a type of distributed society.

recently i shared about moon ribas, who uses technology to create art in partnership with earth. this project (and many others) are using technology to help us rewrite our history by showing what we otherwise couldn’t see. such a beautiful and necessary use of technology.

brainsparks: cyborg art (tn#179), ancestral future (tn#112), el dorado (tn#78)

🛰️starlinking the amazon

(thank, juan, for sharing this). it’s common to hear about leapfrogging as a purely positive phenomenom in developing countries, like a high-tech fairy tale. this article by jack nicas for tnyt shows the complexity and duality of the new technologies in the marubo indigenous community. it’s like fast-forwarding in 9 months what happened in urban contexts slowly over the past decades. “The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes: Elon Musk’s Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world — and divided it from within.”

She was kneading jenipapo berries to make a black body paint and wearing ropes of jewelry made from snail shells. Lately, the youth had become less interested in making such dyes and jewelry, she said. “Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet,” she said. “They’re learning the ways of the white people.”
Then she paused and added, “But please don’t take our internet away.”

in 2018, i remember when humanity reached an important milestone: half of us were connected to the internet. at first, i saw it just as a milestone, but of course in our reality it just means one thing: the other half needs to be connected too, asap. and a race begins.

brainsparks: connecting the amazon? (tn#124), critic of tech (tn#121)

🤖gen-gen

box1824 is the trend bureau that got me into trends back then when i still in university, using this format of video collage and analysis with their iconic “we all want to be young” (tn#8). now, in “gen-gen: the dawn of the generative generation, it’s powerful to see how they synthesize the conversation around generative ai, using voices from different continents and contexts, showing both risks and desirable futures. you can also watch in portuguese here. also the way the structure the chapters is quite compelling:

the time revolution: how the industrial revolution changed our perception of time.
the space revolution: how the digital revolution changed our perception of space and distance.
the creative revolution: how ai is revolutionizing how we create, not only in the artistic sense, but in finding solutions for problems.
the power of curiosity: a call to action to stay curious, ask the right questions and be critical of where we are heading with generative ai.

brainsparks: we all want to be young (tn#8), exploiting time (tn#169), ai: engine for the imagination (tn#85)

👹the most creative time ever

my youtube algorithm knows my soft spot for video essays and showed me this one by facetatt philosophy. what came to mind at first was: THIS IS WRONG, STOP. aren’t we living in the age of average (tn#115) and in a less colorful world, in peak nostalgia, just doing remakes of everything?

well, turns out he has a point. at least in pop/celebrity culture, there are signals of peak creativity (which is also pointed in the gen-gen video, but in other contexts). he uses examples like lady gaga, lana del rey, doja cat, chappell roan, ethel cain, melanie martinez and cindy sherman as precursors of what is coming. in postmodernism, subjetivism and rejection of grand narratives and expectations pushed these artists to create (and live) a persona that blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. we see this trickling down also to creators/influencers.

postmodernism, which we are in right now, is a philosophical movement believed to have begun around the 70s and is defined by skepticism, subjectivism, relativism, and rejects objectivity or ideas of grand narratives.

what is interesting is how he also end the video with the same idea from the gen-gen video, where we are merging with technology, and so is our self-expression, opening new possibilities.

brainsparks: time of monsters, clown in mainstream (tn#181), shifting realities (tn#176), permacrisis (tn#194), counterculture x counter-futures (tn#10), synthetic media (tn#18), play-full futures (tn#121), less colorful (tn#123), old vs new music (tn#58), the moodboard effect (tn#81), the vanishing designer (tn#81), the age of average (tn#115)

⏰image

magdalena bay is also one of these artists that i would add to the hall of creativity. it checks all the boxes of postmodernism. i was happy to see a reference to the imaginal disk (tn#19), which i brought here years ago.

brainsparks: imaginals vs imagination (tn#19), mercurial world (tn#64), top dog (tn#117)

👼angel of my dreams

jade just debuted her solo career, as she was one of the members of the girlgroup little mix. when i watched it the first time i was so confused, the video and the song are fragmented, mixing different vibes and styles. now i can’t stop listening. also, the chair falling in the rhythm of the song gave me such an oddly pleasant feeling, wtf is that??

💀skullfu*ker

i mentioned gottmik a few newsletters ago about the time of monsters, and they just released a new song/video in a 80s goth vibe, which is perfect to close today’s edition.

brainsparks: time of monsters (tn#181), mistress violet (tn#31), fade to gray (tn#66), post-punk, electronic body music (tn#84),

see you next week, homies 🫂✨

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