New Models

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

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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

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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]

First released: 27 Feb 2023 | To join New Models & receive our full stream in real time, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com

This episode is nominally about the state of style but ultimately is about the changing media paradigm that underpins how we signal through sartorial codes in 2023. New York-based writer Olivia Kan-Sperling is our guest. She is an assistant editor and regular contributor to The Paris Review and her work has appeared in publications such as Interview, Praxis, Heavy Traffic, and Cabinet. Last year she published a book of Kendall Jenner x Lil Peep fanfic titled Island Time (Expat Press, 2022), an excerpt of which she shares here. The conversation is NYC-centric but, more so, generationally specific, pushing us to shift our viewpoint to unfamiliar angles.

For more: https://oliviaks.page/

IG @dianadiagram & Tw @diamonddustpaw

lucky-jewel.com

Music for this ep: Cocteau Twins, "Know Who You Are at Every Age"

First released: 31 Aug 2023 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com

On Sunday (27 Aug 2023), climate activists blocked the road to Burning Man, demanding that the festival—which was founded on principles of decommodification, radical self-reliance, and civic responsibility—ban single-use plastics and private jets. While the protest delayed a relatively small amount of physical traffic for less than an hour, it seized swathes of the online space for days given the action's adjacency to so many memetic themes, incl.: #climate, #collapse, #decarbonization, #privilege, #indigenous (land), #police and ofc the punching bag that is #burningman.

Much of the initial drama played out on the Instagram and X accounts of gonzo journalist Michelle Lhooq (Rave New World) who broke the story while on assignment for The Guardian. On Monday, Michelle joined New Models from Reno to discuss what she witnessed as well as the changing nature of activism’s stage both online and off.


For more: IG: @michellelhooq X: @MichelleLhooq

https://ravenewworld.substack.com

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/28/burning-man-protest-climate-change-environment