New Models New Models
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- Society & Culture
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Public RSS | Art, tech, politics, pop culture, climate | Hosts: Caroline Busta, Lil Internet | Est. 2018. ( ͡° ͜ʖ( ͡° ͜ʖ°)ʖ ͡°) | https://newmodels.io
This is the public RSS. | To access weekly content and the NM Discord, subscribe via https://patreon.com/newmodels or https://newmodels.substack.com
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Preview | NM Special Report: Ye and the Future of Content w/ Dean Kissick
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. -
Preview | The Girlstack w/ theorist Alex Quicho (NM74)
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) -
Preview | Loss of Distinction w/ art critic Ben Davis (NM63)
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] -
Unlocked | Code Couture w/ writer Olivia Kan-Sperling (NM60)
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" -
Unlocked | NM Special Report: Burning Man Blockade w/ Michelle Lhooq
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 -
Unlocked | How to Blow Up a Pipeline w/ Daniel Goldhaber (NM62)
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