New Models

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.

Olivia Kan-Sperling reads her non-linear fashion noir, “The Perfect Glove” from Heavy Traffic II

"Although a whole day has passed since opening, the plushy carpet shows no footprints. This must be the oft-reported death of retail, which reminds Leo of the death of movies, which reminds him of his own death. Then again—he cheers up—dead or no, neither—stores nor movies—ever seem to go away. [...]"

Olivia Kan-Sperling’s “The Perfect Glove” is a holographic short essay set between LA and NYC, the 20th c. and today. It was first published in Heavy Traffic II. Based in NYC, Olivia is the author of the Kendall Jenner x Lil Peep fanfic, Island Time (Expat Press, 2022) as well as an assistant editor + regular contributor to The Paris Review. Her writing has also appeared in Interview, Praxis, Kaleidoscope, n+1, and Cabinet, among other publications and venues.

Note: For maximum impact, we recommend listening to this episode in stereo. Editing and mixing by Lil Internet. 

This reading is part of Heavy Traffic’s New Models residency, which features pieces from the magazine read aloud by their authors. Heavy Traffic IV of is out now.

https://heavytrafficmagazine.com

See also:

NM60 | Olivia Kan-Sperling on the programming logic of style

https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/code-couture-olivia-kan-sperling-nm60

NM75 | Heavy Traffic magazine w/ editor/publisher Patrick McGraw

https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/mcgraw-heavytraffic-nm75/s-VB0sQZYweL0

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]

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

First released: 08 Apr 2023 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com

Adapting climate scholar Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021, Verso) for the silver screen, Daniel Goldhaber has transformed Malm’s non-fiction manifesto into “one of the most original American thrillers in years" (Roger Ebert). As it sees its US theatrical release this week, Daniel joins NM to speak about the film, the state of indie filmmaking, and the terms of politically engaged creative production in our over-mediatized, performatively politicized age.

For more: https://neonrated.com/films/how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline

First released: 25 Aug 2023 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com

Three members of the Collapsology / Crude Futures group — Richard Hames (co-author of The Rise of Ecofascism, Polity, 2022), Washington-state based writer Beau-Caprice Vetch, and UK-based producer/writer/DJ Jake Colvin (NKC) — discuss the idea of collapse, its historical role in consolidating power, its geopolitical vs. biopolitical registers, its relationship to spirituality, and frameworks for approaching adaptation to the worlds revealed in its wake.

The occasion for this conversation is the publication of a zine and card game that the Crude Futures group — which started in the New Models Discord server and also includes members Mina Miller, Jack Tarpey, phm, Matīss Groskaufmanis, Jon Benjamin Talleräs, Cat MacGregor, T.M. Wilson, and Marcelino Llano — created over the past two years and released this July.

Printing of the zine and card game was made possible through proceeds from the NM Codex Y2K20, and initial proceeds from the Crude Futures sales will go toward production of whatever NM-sphere initiative emerges next. The zine and card game are available at https://shop.newmodels.io as well as select bookshops in London and Berlin.

For updates on the Crude Futures project, follow https://crudefutures.substack.com and IG: @crudefutures

See also: NM 41 | Eco-Tomorrow w/ Sam Moore https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/nm-pod-41-eco-tomorrow-w-sam-moore?

First released: 23 Jun 2023 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com

NYC has always been a scene superconductor, replete with an infinite supply of ambitious young bodies and a world class media machine to document it all. But over the past few years, a new strain of #downtown has emerged that incessantly flickers between the physical and online realms. On this episode, NM is joined by three denizens of this New York sphere — novelist and co-founder of Forever Magazine, Madeline Cash; artist chloé waifmaterial; and full stack engineer slash man-about-town David Yoakum — to recap a cluster of events that transpired during Praxis Week, including the premier of Angelicism’s Film01, a reading at the new VC-backed Lower East Side event space Sovereign House, and the sudden onset of a climate event that amplified it all.

For more:

@davidy____

waifmaterial.com & @waifmaterial

madelinecash.com & @madelinecash

Related writing from NM sphere:

- Madeline Cash reviews Angelicism’s Film01 for Spike Art Magazine

- Paige K. Bradley reviews Angelicism’s Film01 for Artforum