🔠✨The Nexialist #0228

atypography | the tonnetz | when space becomes sound | mystery in the digital age | the assessment | something beautiful | fame is a gun | chemical reaction

Jun 05, 2025

welcome to our cyber-garden’s weekly harvest, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message message finds you well! this week, i had the privilege of seeing dua lipa’s concert for her radical optimism tour and i’m in awe. not only by her performance and presence, her voice, and her moves (that have come a long way since her pencil-sharpener went viral), her beauty and her outfits. i was also impressed by the stage: huge screens with augmented reality, with higher installations that allowed everyone to see and not miss a moment. more than that, i was thinking how this woman understands culture and capitalizes on it so authentically (triad of capital (tn#203). she’s been doing a cover of a local artist every city she goes to, and i was wondering what she was going to do here in amsterdam. she did a cover of andré hazes’ dutch anthem bloed, zweet en tranen, IN DUTCH, prompting everyone to sing with her and showing interest in local culture. recently, i shared how dua lipa’s questions (tn#217) in author interviews and her bookclub/newsletter service95 are positioning her beyond a pop-star, but as a thought-leader. i don’t think i’ve ever seen a pop star take that road and i’m here for it.

this weekend i will be chanelling my youth for more energy, because i’ll be in barcelona for primavera sound, and i’m hoping to see so many artists i’ve been posting about here: charli xcx, chappell roan, fka twigs, haim, amaia, magdalena bay (if they hadn’t overlapped them with another artist i love), etc. so perhaps expect a more quiet or musical nexialist next week. now, enjoy 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🔠atypography

this manifesto-like video about atypography is the kind of thing that gives me braingasms. the video itself is so cozy, i can’t explain it: the narrator, the clarity, the discovery element.

i studied advertising, so readability is a always a must when thinking about conveying a message. atypography challenges that, inviting some friction (and fun) in the reading process, as if solving a puzzle of decryption. you can find the atypography manual here.

Typography and abstraction have come to an agreement. Please welcome, Atypography.
… the letter "A" in "Atypography" or "Atype" doesn't stand for anti or abstract but instead, it signifies "without" or "not".
This art movement explores the limits of traditional writing, crafting abstract yet universal characters. No universality, no Atypography. It breaks down traditional characters to their core components, to create new forms with as few variations as possible.

brainsparks: anti-design (tn#169), a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163), pixo (tn#156)

🎶the tonnetz

reuben_levine

A post shared by @reuben_levine

talking about the geometry of things, this video by reuben taught me something i never learned (i think i would remember this if i had been exposed to this): the tonnetz. how did i not know of this? (you can play with it on this website)

In musical tuning and harmony, the Tonnetz (German for 'tone net') is a conceptual lattice diagram representing tonal space first described by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1739. Various visual representations of the Tonnetz can be used to show traditional harmonic relationships in European classical music.

reuben puts it very well: any chord, interval or scale in music can be represented in a shape on the tonnetz grid, creating a visual link between harmony and geometry. consonant sweet sounding chords like the major seventh or the minor seventh appear as beautifully simple shapes. on the other hand, dissonant chords, the ones with crunchy or unstable sounds, create stranger wackier shapes.

brainsparks: hidden networks of everything (tn#126), vibration cyborg (tn#11), sonic weapon (tn#219), sonic healing (tn#11)

📻when space becomes sound

protein has been hitting the spot for me with what they’re sharing. in this seed riccardo trabattoni shared how “a new matrix of musical connection is reshaping how we gather, listen and move together.” maybe you’ve also heard the gen z (or was it the millenials) is killing nightlife, clubbing is dying out, bla bla bla. here this story is reframed, as sound travels and communities move.

Of course, nightlife is far from dead. Its reinvention reshapes both where we gather and how we experience sound, giving rise to what I call “the nightlife renaissance matrix”: a new framework mapping three dynamic quadrants of musical community-building.
The traditional “clubbing” quadrant still exists, representing the familiar landscape of dedicated nightlife venues. But today’s story lies in the three quadrants that are reshaping how we think about music, space and collective experience;

brainsparks: architecture ft music (tn#15), trajectories of future festivals (tn#187), collective effervescence, egregore (tn#11), the new rules of gathering (tn#37)

✨mystery in the digital age

“The Reenchanted World: On finding mystery in the digital age” by Karl Ove Knausgaard has rented a treehouse in my mind. this is a long but splendid read, one i can identify with, for its earnest telling of learning and exploration. so many themes and brainsparks i’ve been brining here over the past years are sewn in in karl’s journey of discovery: from finding meaning in his garden, his lack of knowledge about technology/computation (while being completely changed by it), the reframing of his carreer as a writer… and so many other things. it’s a magical reading, go for it:

In many instances, this meant that texts were understood to be isolated objects, with all ties to the world around them severed, including those to the author. They were a kind of closed system of signs whose meaning arose in the differences between them, rather than in the extratextual reality they pointed to. It was fantastic. Signifier and signified, signifying and signification, phenotext and genotext, denotation and connotation! But it was signs that we sat hunched over, it was signs we related to, so that what we were doing was basically a kind of encoding and decoding, while it was the poor souls at the natural-science department who were out at sea or in the woods or out in the fields, learning about biotopes and ecosystems, about blood and nerves, galaxies and flower meadows. They were the ones who cut into bodies, programmed machines, scanned brains, researched dreams and trees’ symbiosis with fungi. Their approach toward nature may have been reductive, but at least they were looking at it. How did I not realize this back then? How could I have been living under the illusion that I was the one in touch with nature, with human nature, when in fact I was just messing around with signs and abstractions?

thank you

Maria Clara Villas

for sharing this one in

Galáxia

brainsparks: age of reenchantment (tn#123), digital garden (tn#227), fetish, glamour & grammar (tn#75), digital esoterism (tn#116), cozy tech (tn#202), abba voyage (tn#201), culture of proximity (tn#6), blurry jpeg of the web (tn#111), reality hunger (tn#201), umwelt (tn#86), ancient computer (tn#48), cybernetics & philosophy (tn#219), cybernetics (tn#199), nature disconnection (tn#137)

👶the assessment

i usually don’t write about the movies i watch here, but this one fits perfectly with the previous theme. i deeply enjoyed this film because it’s beautiful and weird, it made me giggle while being uncomfortable, it made me pissed off, it made me think a lot. also the photography is stunning.

but there lies a kind of tension (and maybe this is a spoiler alert) between the professions of the couple. for context, they’re applying to adopt a kid in a barren society that stays young (with meds) but is so scarce that has strict population control. while she has her cozy greenhouse, cultivating decades of life and hundreds of species, the husband focuses on creating the most realistic haptic fluffy extended reality pets/companions. and both of them are so enchanted by what they do.

brainsparks: bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model (tn#85)

🎬something beautiful

i’m obsessed with miley cyrus’ new album, something beautiful. i’m curious to watch the whole movie, or pop opera, as it’s called in the trailer. talk about reenchantment: the album is cinematic in its sounds, lyrics, fashion, interludes, themes and performances. it’s like timetraveling to the 70s, 80s and 90s. my favorite tracks, beyond the singles, are walk of fame (ft. brittany howard), every girl you’ve ever loved (feat. naomi campbell) and reborn.

brainsparks: flowers (tn#104), end of the world (tn#220)

🔫fame is a gun

i already shared how obsessed i am with addison rae. switched on pop even made an episode about her. we all know she can dance and she could be trying too hard to give your usual pop star image, but she’s tapping into richer references, sonically and visually. i love the tumblr nostalgia in her videos, and in this one, the low budget art house style. (i’m going mad trying to find where/when this sound is from, i’m sure i heard songs with this synth.)

brainsparks: high fashion (tn#214), madonna-ology (tn#211), aquamarine (tn#211)

🧪chemical reaction

debbii dawson is another artist i’m in love with, for her sweet voice, lyrics and 60s-70s homage. the stevie nicks x abba x dolly parton quality of it all is working for me.

brainsparks: you killed the music (tn#215), abba voyage (tn#201)

see you next week, beautiful things 🫀✨

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