🌥️✨The Nexialist #0271

into the sun | klouds will carry me to sleep | cloud forms | naming clouds | the moon’s origin story | pattern index | research practice = creative identity | corpo gaslighting | contagious radar ‘26

welcome to your weekly pattern realization newsletter, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well as the gif above, gleefully ignoring the world outside, even if just for these few minutes. this week i was inspired by the sky, we’ve had some sun and rain, and a beautiful rainbow in amsterdam. by coincidence, the sky and its bodies started appearing on my feed, so you get some of that. i’ll leave you to it, enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

⏮️ time-machine: best brainsparks on this day over the past years:

algorithmic condition, cybernetics and philosophy, ghiblification, sonic weapon, audible enclaves, fish doorbell, shipwrecked treasures (tn#219), cowboy carter, what memories are made of, p*nis positivity (tn#167), naked education, good sex explained, the age of average, tanganmen (tn#115), zebras x unicorns, time for indigenous futurism, ecopoetry (tn#65), neural trips, knowledge curatorship, bibliotherapy, emotional intelligence, compersion, emotional responsibility (tn#14)

🌞 into the sun

on friday, robyn finally dropped her new album, sexistential and it’s always such a delicious moment. seeing an artist who knows their universe and has such a consistent yet innovative point of view in each album. go listen to it, have fun and stay horny. (chose this one to be aligned with the sky theme the universe sent my way)

brainsparks: stay horny (tn#260), robyn: from pop puppet to indie icon (tn#8), social health (tn#179), the age of pleasure (tn#123), good sex explained (tn#115), erotic intelligence (tn#1)

💭 klouds will carry me to sleep

i was reluctant about clicking on this video because, you know, what to expect? i’m glad i did because i had never heard of gelli and i’m now invested. it’s so cute, playful and interesting: the weird/zany sound, the outfits, the whole thing is just a caress to my inner futuristic (?) child — loved the name of the label: innovative leisure.

brainsparks: continent of play (tn#240), drops of joy (tn#16), play-full future (tn#121), imaginals vs imagination (tn#19), playscape (tn#67), why do we dream? (tn#72), mercurial (tn#72), top dog (tn#117), the lazy report (tn#117), the shape of dreams (tn#207), the most common dreams (tn#146), animal dreamworlds (tn#138), scientists going into your dreams (tn#13)

☁️ cloud forms

i was on the phone with my family this weekend when my mom reminded us of a story: when we moved to the south of brazil decades ago, a guy who was befriending our family asked why we looked up at the sky so much. none of us had noticed that up until that point and we couldn’t (and still can’t) answer. this happened after my sister asked us to go look at the moon and i had mentioned the beautiful rainbow.

i went looking for the names of the clouds after that: i remember sitting in that class, but somewhere else in my mind.

brainsparks: rose of the winds (tn#181), blue skies (tn#1)

🌥️ naming clouds

how did the clouds get their names? turns out metereology was a late bloomer as a science, and the pharmacist luke howard was the one coming up with these names according to the patterns in shapes, movements and behavior. i would love to get of first name bases with them.

Howard identified seven cloud types, but these have since been expanded to ten, cloud nine being the towering cumulonimbus thunder cloud, which is probably why being on cloud nine means to be on top of the world.

brainsparks: rose of the winds (tn#181), blue skies (tn#1), bugs like jewels (tn#234), birdie, what sound is this? (tn#234)

🌕 the moon’s origin story

still looking up at the sky: this hit my feed and got my attention (who doesn’t love to look at our stunning moon?). how did our moon get there? the giant impact hypothesis, which is the only one i knew of, always felt a bit off. in this video we learn about this and other hypotheses and how probable they are: co-accretion, fission, capture, synestia. it’s interesting to see how they go about analysing it.

Our moon is rather odd. It’s really large compared to the Earth, while most of the other moons in the solar system are relatively tiny. And our moon carries a weird amount of our system’s angular momentum.

brainsparks: moon tree (tn#264), new pyramid theory (tn#263)

👯pattern index

recently, i shared about max cooper’s work here and it sucked me in. he invites different artists to create the visuals, and shares about the process in the video description, both him and the invited artist. such a cool, simple and effective way to collaborate, in this case with katia schutz. pattern index is a track from his new upcoming visual album, feeling is structure.

I have always been obsessed with using technology to push visual boundaries and create beautiful things that completely overwhelm the senses. This piece kind of operates like my own brain… imagine having 100 browser tabs open at once, while 3 radios play, 10 reference books are open, and I’m doing karaoke in the background. - Katia Schutz

brainsparks: a sense of getting closer (tn#263), the hidden networks of everything (tn#126), the pleasure of patterns in art (tn#247), life as computation (tn#247), water-based intelligence (tn#238), biocomputing (tn#238)

🧑‍🎤research practice = creative identity

Zoë Yasemin posted this piece and it spoke to me on so many levels (even if i’m not a creative director): your research is your creative practice. it’s easy to fall into the trap of sameness and simply collecting when doing research (visual or not), and zoë captures this so well. also, it’s such an inspiring piece because she’s being transparent about her own process. go read the whole thing:

Collecting is saving images because they are beautiful, because the mood is right, because they might be useful someday. It is passive. It lets the image speak without asking it any questions. A folder of thousands of saved images is evidence of a good eye, but it is not a research practice, it’s a database.

Research is when the act of looking starts producing ideas. You are making connections across unrelated fields, noticing patterns, and building a visual argument. You find a photograph in a 1970s Italian architecture magazine, and it changes how you think about negative space on a brief you’ve been stuck on for two weeks. You read a paragraph from a Susan Sontag essay on photography and suddenly the casting direction for a project you couldn’t articulate becomes clear. The research is not feeding the work, it is the work.

brainsparks: reworking, referencing, releasing (tn#125), content curation approaches (tn#54), hoardiculture (tn#191), the age of average (tn#115), moodboard effect (tn#66), the vanishing designer (tn#81), creative generalists (tn#264)

💡corpo gaslighting

Matt Klein and Sophia Epstein managed to make me feel outraged and inspired in the same post. we have normalized market “predictions” that don’t happen (hello metaverse!) and there is no accountability. the invitation is for us and other institutions to reconnect with our accountability muscles.

Predicting the future, or pledging to change it, has become a form of marketing in itself, or more precisely a performance. Many consultancies act out whatever they think will get applause or attention. For agencies, it’s whatever they have to do to get the next client. For publications, it’s whatever it takes to get the next reader. For politicians... you get it.

Today’s predictive performance is like professional wrestling kayfabe – they know it’s BS, and we suspend disbelief as they earnestly entertain us. The problem is just when we take their claims at face value. (Optimistically, they also know it’s nonsense, otherwise, Gartner’s credibility should be seriously reconsidered.)

brainsparks: consultancy horror story (tn#144), meta trends ‘26 (tn#263), self-destructing reality (tn#240), silicon valley’s wrong future (tn#243), unthinkable futures (tn#233), hypernormalization (tn#210), hypernormative (tn#200), foresight as activism (tn#143)

💡contagious radar ‘26

is it just me or this year’s contagious radar is more critical than usual? i love their materials, it’s always filled with great creative references and cases, but this time i noticed some bolder than usual approaches and i’m happy about it. here are the trends they point:

The Attention Sink / We explore how brands cut through and create an impression when surface-level engagement isn’t quite enough.

The Nostalgia Industrial Complex / When the past feels more attractive than the present, the commercial power of nostalgia is appealing. But is it really a strategy?

The Loneliness Disconnect / Outsourcing ‘connection’ to Big Tech has not gone well. The rise of AI companions is a symptom, not a solution. Find out how brands that bring people together are rebooting belonging.

Social as a Vice / Social media is being reframed as a vice product: when platforms start looking more like a liability than an opportunity, what does that mean for your media budget?

The Optimisation Obligation / When everything else in life feels relentlessly chaotic, your body becomes the one territory it’s possible to micromanage. But which brands are emerging as allies in our fascination for transformation?

The Death of Aspiration / Nearly half of Gen Z say planning for the future feels pointless. For brands that were built on the idea of ‘progress, eventually’, what happens when your audience stops believing in tomorrow?

brainsparks: the creative process (tn#87), creative manifesto (tn#184), the most creative time ever (tn#183), scenius aka communal genius (tn#31), creative work (tn#165), creative effectiveness (tn#28), permission to be creative (tn#23)

see you next week, cloudlets 🌥️✨

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I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes, teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist. 

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