welcome to your weekly cyber-refreshment, the nexialist
hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. it’s finally summer in this side of the globe (happy belated solstice!) and the temperature in amsterdam has been tropical. for this reason, this week’s nexialist is shorter than usual and more focused on audio-visual findings: i don’t have ac to enjoy any extra time in front of the computer, the sun is cracking (as we say in brazil, “o sol tá de rachar"), and being outside is necessary. enjoy! 🫀✨
⏮️ time-machine: best brainsparks this week over the past years:
post-ai-hype?, death of a fantastic machine (tn#231), #tnwconference, cyborg art, social health, capitalism 2.0, urban future (tn#179), self-fulfilling cyberpunk, cypherpunk, solarpunk and lunarpunk. gambiarra > kludge, the alpha male myth. colonial masculinity. male objectification through the ages (tn#127), discriminator, third eye(lid), eye floaters (tn#26)
last weekend, juan and i watched the first musical i ever saw live 20 years ago here in amsterdam. it was quite emotional to hear all the songs i still knew by heart. it also felt weird because i had forgotten a lot of the story, and i was questioning if either i was too young/innocent to understand all the nuances, or if my english was not so good, so it did feel like a rediscovery.
the musical is based on a banned german play/tragedy from the end of the 19th century, and even if it’s that old, the themes are still so contemporary: puberty, sexuality, r*pe, child abuse, homosexuality, su*cide, teenage pregnancy and abortion. it’s frustrating to see how we are still discussing these themes more than 120 years later.
“this coming-of-age story set in late-19th-century Germany. It follows a group of teenagers navigating the turbulence of puberty and awakening sexuality. Oppressive, uncommunicative adults demand absolute obedience, which triggers a tragic sequence of events...”
the show ends with the song of purple summer, and we watched it on the first day of summer, under a heatwave. sometimes time rhymes.
brainsparks: sloshing time (tn#151)
by coincidence, i was browsing these photos from the same period of the musical: a collection of men embracing from victorian times. i love seeing these, as these moments are quite rare to come by, and they let us take peek at affection between men in such a conservative time.
Men affectionately hold hands, drape their legs over one another and sit in each other’s laps, enjoying intimate physical contact without any evident trace of the self-consciousness one might expect from the stiff portraiture of the late 19th century.
None of the portraits include captions or identifying information, leaving the relationships between the sitters to the imagination of the viewer.
(via messy nessy chic)
brainsparks: queer the future (tn#5), vintage flirt (tn#21), predicting the past (tn#80), fruity men (tn#182), the alpha male myth, colonial masculinity (tn#127), masculinity (tn#48), straight men kiss (tn#95), on heteropessimism (tn#174)
mnek knows how to make a banger, and this time it’s no different. the 90s/y2k pop vibes are there, the sports car, the parking lot (?) but make it 100% gay. it’s pride month, but we need more of this the whole year.
brainsparks: taste so good (tn#73), rush (tn#130), lesbian gaze (tn#24)
i’ve shared maro music here before, and her music is so chill. i’m going on vacations this week and this is the perfect soundtrack for that. i thought she filmed somewhere in portugal because of their christ the redeemer, but it’s in italy.
brainsparks: amsterdam in the summer (tn#185), end of summer (tn#236), tempo (tn#44), nuragic civilization (tn#83)
inna is the queen of eurosummer, and i did not know she’s from romania until now. this hit though, morenito, is in full spanish and i’m here for it.
i didn’t know amanda sarmento, but this song found its way to my feed, my heart and my body. for the non-portuguese speakers, quente means hot/caliente, and even if we don’t usually use it in the same sense, amanda is pushing for it (or is gen-z using it and i’m not informed?). also, i love she’s talking about being hot and being a business woman:
This woman is on fire
When I get bored I’ll call you
I’ll make room in my schedule and put you in
I can’t right now, I’m plotting with my partners
I have plans
Plans and business
Things that can’t wait more than a year
I’m preparing a plan to get rich this year
the video reminded me of tinashe’s classic superlove.
🫀✨thank you for reading The Nexialist. This post is public, so feel free to share these brainsparks 🧠✨
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.
I offer inspiration sessions called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below:
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