🛼✨The Nexialist #0268
portunus | viking was a job description | body futurism | online body | not ur mom | medicine
welcome to your weekly cyber-facturas for your brain, the nexialist
hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. this week i’m back at work after a beautiful time with my parents and juan in sunny buenos aires. after this nourshing family time i’m feeling super inspired and ready for work. this weekend i’ll get to enjoy lollapalooza argentina before flying back to são paulo and then amsterdam. can’t wait to bike back in amsterdam streets and meet my friends (and cats). i’ll leave you to it, enjoy 🫀✨
⏮️ time-machine: best brainsparks on this day over the past years:
becoming post-tragic, the great chiasmus, new york stoops (tn#216), pombagira, hooked on coffee, dopamine culture, inner rewilding (tn#164), ancestral future, designing an economy like an ecologist, everything is a remix pt.4, biblioburro, dashboard (tn#112), resilience tech, cosplaying as poor, the basic laws of human stupidity (tn#62), collective effervescence, egregore, rethinking rituals, digital commute, sonic healing, vibration cyborg (tn#11)
🚪portunus
together with juan and my parents, we visited the museo de la casa rosada, located behind argentina’s iconic pink government house. the museum is built in the ruins of the old galleries of the aduana nueva, the first large-scale public building of buenos aires, built at the end of the 19th century. it was stunning (and it’s free!)
on that same week, i saw this video from the mostrandoalingua podcast (in pt-br), talking about portunus: the ancient roman god of keys, doors, livestock and ports. so many words stem from that same root: port (the gateway/portal from land to sea), export/import and my favorite to have learned: opportune / opportunity.
opportune(adj.): “seasonable, timely, convenient,” c. 1400, from Old French opportune and directly from Latin opportunus “fit, convenient, suitable, favorable,” from the phrase ob portum veniens “coming toward a port,” in reference to the wind, from ob “in front of; toward” (see ob-) + portus “harbor” (see port (n.1)). Related: Opportunely; opportuneness.
recently, i saw a beautiful and unsettling two-face statue, and i forgot to look up who it represented. now, it has shown up while in this rabbit hole: it’s janus, closely related to portunus, “god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. the month of january is named after him.
(ah, and people from buenos aires are known as porteños.)
brainsparks: patagonian giants (tn#171), rose of the winds (tn#181), good conversations have lots of doorknobs (tn#207), opening doors (tn#45), calculating empires (tn#180)
⚔️ viking was a job description
maybe this idea of “you are what you do” is not as new as we thought. i had already learned that the vikings were not the ‘pure-bred’, blonde-haired, and blue-eyed warriors we saw in the movies — and that they had been in north-america long before columbus set foot there. now we have new data from a massive effort to sequence the dna of vikings and help us rewrite what we’ve been taught.
The genetic details may also rewrite popular perceptions of Vikings, including their looks: Viking Age Scandinavians were more likely to have black hair than people living there today. And comparing DNA and archaeology at individual sites suggests that for some in the Viking bands, "Viking" was a job description, not a matter of heredity.
brainsparks: greatest historical discoveries ‘24-25 (tn#237), ancient amazonian root urns (tn#230), archeology of the future (tn#183), ancient jungle cities (tn#222), ancestral future (tn#112), el dorado (tn#78), 5000 years of coexistence (tn#170), time for indigenous futurism (tn#65), history of surprises (tn#58), out-of-place artifact (tn#126)
🗽 body futurism
after looking at the past through archeology and dna data, let’s turn to the present and future. toby shorin, who shared the iconic life after lifestyle (tn#91) piece, shared body futurism, and it’s been on my mind, one of the best reads i’ve had in a while.
it is indeed quite us-focused, but it does echo the west and sparks for the rest of the connected world. what happens when our bodies, our communities and our minds become so entangled with technology and its inherent ideologies of progress? this piece felt like a diagnostic and a very actionable manifesto. you need to read this.
Now we Americans are at it again. Ancestral diets, crip cultures and diagnosed identities, health “protocols,” entrepreneurial interest in biomedicine, surrogacy, ubiquitous biometric measurement, and trauma discourse are all facets of the body’s increasing role in social thought. The new body futurism takes over from the now-tired futurism of software, but it is made of the same raw materials, mined from the California coast. Body futurism is the result of a republic turning its mind inward, of opponents of Cartesianism seizing the day in the academy, of technologists moving their attention from virtual spaces to physical places. In other words body futurism is overdetermined—so best get familiar. Settle in, settle in…
brainsparks: life after lifestyle (tn#91), competitive wellness (tn#220), collectivity as a technology (tn#260), productizing yourself (tn#68), the body is art (tn#192), gay body culture goes mainstream (tn#190), body neutrality (tn#125), electronic body music (tn#84), social health (tn#179), stresslaxation (tn#68), social and cultural infrastructure (tn#225), a compost theory of culture (tn#225), social infrastructure (tn#15), cosmophobia (tn#135)
🤳 online body
if a lot of your life happens on screen, like mine, you’ll find this piece by dagny tepper for MØRNING quite eye-opening. and meta. a new field guide to the online body: the meat and muscularity of being online. i was smiling, cringing, clenching my jaw and holding my breath while reading, i felt it was narrating my relationship to my screens.
Being online often feels like a disembodied experience. A metaphysical grey area where touch is reserved for screens and spiritual connections are linked to prompt boxes. There, we shift out of our physical presence and into a murky other. But as Dagny Tepper, friend of MØRNING and founder of the inimitable Pilot Magazine describes, we may be missing a trick in overlooking the muscularity, and therefore humanity, of these online experiences…
brainsparks: cyborg art (tn#179), friction-maxxing (tn#259), escape economy (tn#212), technologies of convenience (tn#122), a frictionless world is boring as fuck (tn#163), self-outsourcing age (tn#17), fetishizing friction (tn#235), cultural vacuums (tn#254), seedless fruit: futureless tech (tn#198), intention economy (tn#209), program or be programmed (tn#200), whisperverse (tn#194), curated coping mechanism (tn#224)
🛼 not ur mom
six sex is one of the argentinian artists i’ll be able to enjoy this weekend at lollapalooza argentina. i just love her aesthetics, persona, and the not ur mom song is perfectly chaotic disco. watch with subtitles
brainsparks: u&me (tn#255), slut techno (tn#139)
💊 medicine
i dare you to play and not start shaking. i don’t know how but i never get tired of this synthesizer, it sounds and tastes like summer. the reference to 100% pure love is just so good.
brainsparks: dance like this (tn#9)
see you next week, ultra terroric fantasies 🫀✨
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