Preview | Loss of Distinction w/ art critic Ben Davis (NM63)

Full Ep released to subscribers: 17 Sep 2024 | newmodels.io // Remilia Corporation, founded in 2021 by Charlotte Fang, describes itself as an institution, a lifestyle brand, and an artist’s colony, among other things. As the group behind the influential and infamous Milady NFT project, Remilia also exemplifies a particularly contemporary artistic practice—one in which an online swarm algorithm-hacks certain language, images, and aesthetics into relevance, thereby generating their own market. Earlier this year, Remilia released issue one of Remilia Quarterly, a “literary magazine and critical journal for the New Net Art.” Joining us on this episode is the journal’s editor, L.B. Dobis. "Remilia is a manifesto. Remilia is an institution. Remilia is a self-organization. Remilia is a lifestyle brand. Remilia is a master-planned community. Remilia is an investment fund. Remilia is an artist's colony. Remilia is a crowdfunded video game. Remilia is an autonomous smart contract. Remilia is an independent record label. Remilia is a community center for the digital village. Remilia will save the internet. […]" For more: 
 https://quarterly.remilia.org https://remilia.org

Full Ep released to subscribers: 1 Oct 2024 | newmodels.io // This NM Dispatch monologue by @lilinternet is not about a physical place but a region of the internet—the increasingly adversarial realm of online shopping. _ Somewhat relatedly, we put together this product shortlist of baby items that we hope those new to (or curious about) early parenthood might find useful. https://www.newmodels.io/editorial/general/product-shortlist-the-baby-edit

Full Ep released to subscribers: 9 Sep 2024 | To join New Models, find us via newmodels.io // With this first episode of NM Talkcore we speak with Alex Kazemi, author of New Millennium Boyz (2023). In doing so, we bring back the format of NM TopSoil, a freeform conversation about things that are mutually top-of-mind. For this ep, that includes, among other items: personal branding and the book publishing industry, Paramount wiping the MTV News archives, y2k masculinity, history in a time of infinity information, and history in a time of AI. For more: 
 https://alexkazemi.com https://permutedpress.com/book/new-millennium-boyz

Full Ep released to subscribers: 1 Aug 2024 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com // A few weeks ago, artist and friend of New Models, Bjarne Melgaard reached out with an episode proposal. He'd become close with actor and artist Paz de la Huerta, whose debut solo show had just closed at Rutkowski;68 Gallery in Paris. Bjarne had been painting Paz for a new series of work and she was interested in speaking to us together with him about that collaboration, her own art, and their shared healing. With this episode, we give you an edit of the resulting conversation — one that is as much about friendship, trauma, and healing as it is about media, image-making, and power. For more: Ruttkowski;68 (Paris)
 Gallery VI, VII (Oslo)
 https://bjarnemelgaard.no & @bjarnemelgaard (IG)

Full Ep released to subscribers: 21 July 2024 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com // From AI to global power alignments to domestic political sentiments in the US and EU, 2024 is shaping up to be a frontier zone year of an era to come. Joining us on this episode is journalist James Pogue who is no stranger to the edges of the political present and uncommonly adept at anticipating where they lead. When Pogue last came on the show in 2022, his piece on America’s New Right for Vanity Fair had just gone viral. More recently, he’s been penning a three-part series for Granta magazine on the turbulent power games in the resource rich Sahel region, where he spent the better part of last year. We discuss both on this episode, unmooring ideations of what ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ now mean. For more:
@jameshensonpogue (X) https://granta.com/gold-fever-in-the-coup-belt/ https://granta.com/wagner-in-africa/ https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets

Full ep released to subscribers: 10 Aug 2023 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com _ Artist Trevor Paglen speaks with New Models about systems of “influence” past and present – pointing to a transition from a world of surveillance capitalism that is potentially becoming one of PSYOPS capitalism. This conversation follows Paglen’s parallel 2023 exhibitions “Hide the Real, Show the False” at n.b.k. Berlin and “You’ve Just Been F*cked by PSYPOS” at Pace Gallery in New York. For more: Tw/X: @trevorpaglen https://paglen.studio/ Jak Ritger, https://www.punctr.art/unlimited-hangout-the-ufo-story

This reading was first released to subscribers: 05 Feb 2024 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com“ For millennia one had measured oneself against the cycles of the seasons and the heavens, or against changing social mores and geopolitical configurations. To now be compelled to measure one’s life against the pace of machine time invited madness.” In this long-form essay by Seth Price, a “cultured middle aged artist from New York” attends a winter solstice party at an “open-air, tropical-Modern” island villa hosted by a man named Trader, “tanned, with a graying mane, khakis, trainers, and a billowing linen Oxford.” The real drama of this story, however, is arguably the “practice of divesting and reinvesting meaning” in our world of signs, a world whose semiotic layer is undergoing an epochal shift .. or so it seems. // This ep is part 1 of 2. “Machine Time” by Seth Price was first published in Heavy Traffic issue 1 (2022). We bring you this reading as part of Heavy Traffic’s New Models residency, which features essays from the magazine read aloud by their authors. Heavy Traffic issue IV is out now. See: heavytrafficmagazine.com For a conversation with Heavy Traffic publisher, Patrick McGraw, see NM75.

Full Ep released to subscribers: 08 Mar 2024 | To join New Models, find us via https://patreon.com/newmodels & https://newmodels.substack.com // One of the most compelling examples, so far, of media made using AI content generation is the video that artist Jon Rafman created for Kanye West’s new album with Ty Dolla $ign, "Vultures." Rather than aiming for maximum realism in these clips, Rafman leans into visual incoherence, moments where the software experiences a collapse of distinction. This, coupled with prompts that could have gone something like “gang members in balaclavas imploding like the Pruitt-Igoe housing project demolition 1971” with style tags “cult horror, VHS, America 1986, Norwegian black metal” meant the video also conveyed a sense of what we thought might be a Witch House revival. So we called up cultural savant and 2010s historian Dean Kissick to discuss. But Witch House did not remain the central thread of our conversation. Instead, all paths lead back to something more fundamental—the struggle for iconicity in a time of infinitely available content. // For more: https://twitter.com/deankissick (X) // NOTE: Dean will be helping New Models resident Patrick McGraw to stage a very special Heavy Traffic reading at EARTH, 29 Orchard Street, New York City, on Easter Sunday, March 31st.

Released to subscribers: 25 Nov 2023 | For full episode, find us via https://patreon.com/newmodels & https://newmodels.substack.com _ The Girlstack w/ theorist Alex Quicho (NM74) A conversation with cultural theorist Alex Quicho. Building on the ideas of Tiqqun’s 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chu’s Females and Bogna Konior’s work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the “Girlstack,” which, to borrow her words, models the “ultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girl’s natural habitat.” Quicho talks with us about it here. [To be clear… we’re speaking of not actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl . . . girl as a vehicle for selling a product, girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, girl as living currency, girl as desiring machine.] For more: https://amfq.xyz/ 
 Alex Quicho, “Everyone Is a Girl Online,” Wired (September 2023) Alex Quicho, Small Gods: Perspectives on the Drone (Zer0 Books, 2021)

Released to subscribers: 17 Apr 2023 | For full episode, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com National Art Critic for artnet News and the author, most recently, of Art in the After-Culture (Haymarket, 2022), Ben Davis speaks to New Models about his recent essay “How We Ended Up in the Era of ‘Quantitative Aesthetics,’ Where Data Points Dictate Taste.” For more: benadavis.com twitter.com/benadavis news.artnet.com/opinion/quantitat…esthetics-2276351 Art in the After-Culture (Haymarket, 2022) 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket, 2013) [episode image: Butch McCartney / dogphotographer.eth.co]