🛟✨The Nexialist #0201

abba voyage | reality hunger | i’m not a robot | nevrotika | glimmers x triggers | young lion | pamela anderson

Nov 28, 2024

welcome to your weekly batch of fresh links and thoughts, the nexialist

hey you! i hope this message arrives as a little s.o.s. (save our souls!) i came back from london last sunday filled with inspiration. i saw the rosetta stone in person, visited my record number of museums in a week, record number of musicals in a week, and a not so nice cold —maybe stendhal syndrome? (tn#88). tomorrow i’ll be going to são paulo for a last-minute project which i’m super excited about (also to escape the 4pm sunsets for a month). this week you get a critic side of me, along with entertainment, new concepts, a short film and a lot of emotions. i hope you enjoy it! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🪩abba voyage

last saturday, juan, some friends and i experienced the abba voyage in london, abba’s holographic concert at the abba arena, a venue made specially for this show. no one asked me for a review but i couldn’t help myself but writing it. it was incredibly fun, impressive and also disturbing, maybe because it’s a new kind of entertainment emerging: a mix of movies, sing along, party, residency-style concert and amusement park, mixing realities and technologies. spoiler alert: if you’re planning to go, i might be oversharing things 😘

holograms: i’ll start with the obvious. the holographic aspect of it was impressive from where we were standing, on the middle of the dancefloor. however, if you look at it from the side, the illusion is a bit gone and you perceive the flatness. but i love how they mix that with the lights, mirrors and enormous screens, where sometimes they add immersive backdrops or close-ups. also, they change their fabulous outfits before every number, showing the limitless possibilities: they had replicas from the past but also reimagined futuristic abba outfits, like the ones on the trailer.

barely-post-uncanny-valley: the texture of their skin (because they do close-ups like in a concert), the way the hair moves, the way their eyes are shining, and the way the sparkling clothes move and reflect the lights as they dance and twirl, it’s all almost too perfect. of course, there is still something lifeless with the way their mouth moves and no air comes out. also, since it’s recorded, the interactive parts with the audience are a bit awkward, if people laugh or cheer while they are talking or singing, there isn’t that spontaneity we are used to. but it feels this is just the beginning, so they could fix it soon.

there is a live band: i did not know about this beforehand, but their band is quite amazing, and mostly formed by women. they even have some numbers they perform center-stage without abba, which were honestly some of the most fun moments. i think this is where they got it right, because it’s not like they are using the technology to replace artists, but are collaborating with them, in a truly centaur fashion.

the audience is gold: the importance of the audience is greater as the act itself. seeing mostly women in their 50s-60s all dressed up, in groups of friends or their families, singing along and having a great time warmed my heart. the whole thing is quite peak-nostalgia. i think having a virtual artist made people interact more amongst themselves, as everyone is there with a common goal: to have fun in nostalgia’s sake, but also create new memories.

time-bending: while they did use archive footage (from eurovision, for instance), and iconic outfits, i could see the effort to appeal to younger audiences: there is a whole animation sequence of a character exploring a pyramid and finding ancient abba references, for instance. also, the outfits/editing shifted from oldschool to futuristic during the show, and it’s interesting to think they can update the show periodically.

the hits: i loved that they played most of their hits, but some very dear to me were missing, as they prefered to promote songs from their latest album (which no one knew enough to be excited and sing along). that did feel a bit off, but i guess their goal is to also explore new repertoire.

the controversy: what crossed my mind a lot was how this becomes a money machine, exploring the artists’ images and work for posterity (there was a also a shop filled with merch). in this case, the artists are alive and consented to their image and work being shared (and we don’t know at what cost). but how about for artists who passed away?

this new format might become another tool to perpetuate this peak nostalgia déjà vu moment in culture where we are stuck living off of re-recordings, re-masterization, samples, sequels, prequels, as record labels and studios want to monetize as much as possible from their portfolios. or it also allows new artists to imagine other possibilities.

brainsparks: exploiting time (tn#169), centaur mindset (tn#106), old vs new music (tn#58), decoding community (tn#121), egregore (tn#11)

🌐reality hunger

Thomas Klaffke

shared this piece recently in the rabbit holes series under the title “reality hunger.” The article by james marriott is called “Why human creativity matters in the age of AI — A world of machine art would be an eerie one. Art connects us to one another. We cannot – and we should not – replace that connection with a simulacrum of it.”

It is curious that machine art should have arrived at a time when our cultural obsession with the human personality in art is more powerful than ever. The writer David Shields’ useful phrase ‘reality hunger’ describes the 21st-century yearning for the authentic and the real.
As sales of literary fiction decline, the memoir flourishes. As soap opera viewership slumps, reality television booms. Even the novel itself has succumbed to this trend. Writers like Karl Ove Knausgård, Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk have pioneered the new form of autofiction – novels that acquire their fascination and authority from their connection to life. The power of the novels that make up Knausgård’s My Struggle series derives from the reader’s suspicion that everything, or almost everything, in the book is real. Knausgård’s genius for artistic banality – the long passages describing, say, the making of a cup of instant coffee, or a journey through the Swedish countryside with fractious children, rests on our belief in the authenticity of these moments. Knausgård could have made up more dramatic incidents, but boring reality is more interesting to his readers. Such is human nature.
[…]
In a future flooded with machine-produced content we may place a higher value on human art than ever before. In his classic essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin speculated that the advent of machine reproduction of images would damage the almost magical aura of authenticity that surrounded original artworks. What is the point of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers if you can buy a thousand cheap prints of it for a fraction of the price? Benjamin, of course, was wrong.
Precisely the opposite happened. The proliferation of cheap prints increased the mystique of authentic artworks and caused their market value to rocket. In the latter half of the 20th century art became obscenely expensive – its value deriving from its contact with the original human genius. Perhaps the advent of AI art will have a similar effect. A culture flooded with machine-produced content may be one that places an extraordinary premium on the human.

after being in quite an intense cultural week in london, going to museums, enjoying musicals, walking around the city, seeing people performing in public squares, i was feeling not only more inspired, but more in tune with myself and my emotions. had i not read this article i wouldn’t have been thinking so much that maybe i was having all these feelings and ideas because i was satiating my reality hunger. i do go to museums in amsterdam, but not so many days in a row. i do go for walks, but not with the tourist gaze. also the musicals we saw made me realise how powerful it is to have so many people performing live, singing, dancing, acting, in tandem. in a world of screens, these irl moments feel like luxury.

brainsparks: artificial intimacy (tn#168), synthetic media (tn#18), ARTificial (tn#123), the age of re-enchantment (tn#123)

🤖i’m not a robot

it’s so nice to discover dutch content being projected to the world. dutch filmmaker victoria warmerdam brings us a tense and surreal identity crisis when lara continuously fails the captcha. btw, did you know captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart?

brainsparks: digiphrenia (tn#191), back to the future: identity (tn#34), witte flits (tn#194)

🫦nevrotika

yes, whenever there is something new from myss keta, you can count it will be here in the nexialist. she is soon releasing and album and also touring, so i can’t wait to see her live again. this time she’s singing about being neurotic, perfect with our identity crisis of becoming half machine from the short-film above.

brainsparks: they want to be me (tn#197)

✨glimmers x triggers

another gem from

Thomas Klaffke

’s

Creative Destruction

, a counterpoint to triggers: glimmers. we know it’s good to have words for things around us, so if you have your mental list of triggers, maybe it’s time to start your list of glimmers.

brainsparks: languishing (tn#16), new words for new worlds (tn#111), memes, enojis and rosetta stone (tn#9)

🦁young lion

sade’s new song/video young lion touched me so deeply. the song is a celebration to her trans son’s journey, izaak adu, and shows intimate footage from their childhood. it’s just so powerful to see a parent using their art and work as a means of apologizing, celebrating and coming to terms with this. this simple/beautiful detail of “you shine like a sun” also being her acceptance of izaak as her son just got me. it’s impossible not to think of the sweetness of caetano velosos’ leãozinho. as james marriott’s article earlier in the newsletter, a machine could not do this.

brainsparks: same gender lyrics (tn#27), love, forgiveness and technology will bring us to another planet (tn#132), is the love song dying? (tn#199)

🛟pamela anderson

to close today’s nexialist in a more cheerful note. rigoberta bandini makes this kind of music/videos that i love, as she mixes humour, politics, humanity, randomness… i never know what’s coming next from her, but i always know i’ll enjoy. here she sings how she was watching pamela anderson’s documentary after a long day, and does this fun and sentimental homage to how she survived to industry.

brainsparks: if i died tomorrow (tn#194)

see you next week, glimmers 🫀✨

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