Detail of Tobias Spichtig, Die vier Jahreszeiten (The Four Seasons), 2019; view of "Tobias Spichtig: SPRING" at Deborah Schamoni, Munich, 2019

NOTES ON THE WORK OF TOBIAS SPICHTIG
Caroline Busta

IT'S 1998 AND HELMUT LANG is sending his ss99 looks down the runway: white techy silk and layers of translucent acid-house pink over human skin. No logos, no binaries (many styles are pointedly unisex). It's an iconic pre-Y2K staging of a post-millennial mood. The show lives on in '90s lore as well as via the wardrobes of Art Basel dealers for whom Lang's '90s asceticism-luxe continues to signify power Elysium-elite.[^1] Is it too romantic to imagine that this late '90s Lang, with its clean lines and user-friendly palette also envisaged the art world's digital presence to come; that it gave a code set for how the white cube would be translated to screenspace, the sans serif type and expanses of white, the 72dpi 'image galleries' of paintings photographed under ultra-florescent light above poured concrete floors? Asceticism, rationalism, frictionless scrolling.

72 looks from Lang's ss99 show feature in Tobias Spichtig's recent work, Die vier Jahrezeiten, 2019. They have been heat-pressed onto raw canvas to serve as the background onto which the rest of the painting is made. As it was for Warhol and Duchamp, Spichtig will also tell you that "the background is the hardest part to do...," which makes so much sense when you consider how, in art, a subject or idea only becomes legible when set against a certain ground. Figure/ground, a framework for understanding image-making as old as the discipline of art history itself. And it's one that still holds: without its contextualizing brand, a hot piece of streetwear is just a €10 shirt; without a background in place, a stock image is just a .tiff file in a server repository waiting for the next pitch deck. 

Tobias Spichtig, Die vier Jahreszeiten (The Four Seasons) and Stiefel del Nachbarin (Neighbor's Boots), both 2019

But if fashion is the ground in Spichtig's Die vier Jahrezeiten, it arrives having been already cancelled. Cutting dramatically across this canvas is a tribal tattoo-type glyph, a massive hand-painted mark of #authentic #human #soul contra fashion's "new spirit of capitalism"-compliant grid. But deployed in a Western context, aren't tribal tats compliant too? Spichtig's amalgamated Maori-motif-slash-Chinese-character-turned-phoenix-rising is, in a sense, meaningless global culture trash. And as such, it is fully legible as free spirit in scare quotes, the kind of "free spirit" that would advertises himself as a guru of "open minded thinking" on Instagram. 

But back to figure/ground because in Spichtig's painting, it's in this zone between the two where the work takes hold. Picabia's "Transparencies" come to mind here. The master shapeshifter, during his surrealist phase, layered non-sequitur iconography—a goat head, a woman, a double-helix—so that all of these signs were interrupting, cancelling each other and it would be up to the viewer to negotiate where the "figure" ended and "ground" began.  

With Spichtig, however, the area in play doesn't end at the canvas. Often his works are installed in spaces that he fills wall-to-wall with multiples of a single type of domestic consumer good—mattresses, kitchen tables, refrigerators, couches—so that the paintings themselves are partially blocked from view. This means that the gallery floor, the viewer's literal ground (and one that, for painting shows, is typically kept Elysium-level pristine) is disrupted and unclear. Does one just observe from afar? Or does one enter into the space, hacking a path through this landscape of an entire eBay Kleinanzeigen[^2] search thread materialized in one place? In engaging in this extra-physical experience, traversing over or between objects to get a closer view, does the viewer herself become part of the work? Or is it all just part of a joke, a hyperbolic articulation of the opposite of one-dimensional screenspace? After all, it's such a simple idea, filling the space up with objects. It's like one you'd imagine in a test-run for a VR demo at a trade-show where the key trick to creating a memorable user-"experience" is to synthesize a shift in the user's sense of the ground.

View of "Tobias Spichtig: Long Stories" at Jan Kaps, Cologne, 2018

There's maybe another connection in Spichtig's work to the semiotics of screenspace, though: the way that IRL objects are essentialized in his practice. Certain things—"sunglasses!", "mountains!", "flowers!"—are not just reoccurring motifs, but images deployed with the legibility of international signage. For instance, the iconic Swiss alps that have shown up several times in his work do happen to be personally relevant (the artist grew up surrounded by them), but in the life of these paintings they operate foremost as the sign "mountains" more than offering some personal clue. After all, they are not just any mountains, but Swiss mountains, the most iconic mountains, the mountains that get stamped on chocolate wrappers to signify "tradition of quality" and "luxury" and "European." 

The same sign-factor is operative when people are depicted in his work. Take for instance Theresa, 2018, in which Spichtig depicts his partner and collaborator, Theresa Patzschke. Fresh faced, hair down, natural smile, she appears in this painting as the platonic ideal of youthful female beauty. This is all the more apparent when viewed, as Spichtig staged it in his show at Cologne's Jan Kaps Gallery, presented beside another painting of a shirtless, older Iggy Pop (Iggy Pop, 2018), which in turn hangs beside one featuring past-their-prime stalks of crimson lilies (Sie doch nihct so verloren [I don't think you're so lost], 2018), petals curling back, greenery browning. In this grouping, Iggy Pop appears the titan of all post-peak icons and the lilies are similarly totemic as a testament to "life having been lived." Beside Theresa in the Kaps show was a fourth work, Staring at Canvas Again, 2018, which is a "blank" painting but not really: the canvas has been sized with resin and brushed with diamond dust so that the surface is both translucent and literally brilliant. Individually, let alone taken all together, the connotations are almost all too much, which is the point because the too much is also what makes Spichtig's work, at its core, also funny—and universal, a kind of mediagenic openness that one finds on record covers and memes. 

But this isn't to say that the biographical is to be entirely disregarded in Spichtig's practice. The personal sphere is the foundation of his practice and where every piece begins. The first action as he makes a new painting involves a selection from his immediate surrounds (think Jonas Mekas or Nan Goldin or Mark Morrisroe) or rather a selection from the flow of images he and his community collectively generate as they mediate their experience of this already surveillance-rich world. These photos—whether of his friends or references passed among them (i.e., garments from his stylist neighbor, a snapshot from last night,  Helmut Lang grid)—are the ground on which everything else is built. Rather than sizing his canvasses with gesso, Spichtig primes them with the visual language of his network. And isn't this only natural given that it's through this hyper-mediation practice of social media, etc. that we (as part of the late 2010s Western world) do see our daily lives? Furthermore, isn't it this aesthetic act of image capture and selection (as opposed to the automatic data capture and processing of most digital interfaces) that, at least at this stage of automation, can appears as a decidedly human gesture today?

Tobias Spichtig, Midha Koray, 2018 and Kein Fragen, kein Perspektive (No Questions, No Perspective), 2019

Returning to Die vier Jahrezeiten—particularly, the relationship between the Helmut Lang look index and the gestural mark layered on top—perhaps it can also be read in an alternate way: not only is the ludicrous free-spirit mark expressing the will of a human hand, Spichtig's selection of this particular Lang look index is too. In a time of increasing algorithmic selection and suggestion, to insist on the chaotic, complex codes of memory, on the improbability of these two disparate signifiers—tribal tats (Lollapalooza mass culture) and late-90s Lang ('relational aesthetics' elite)—sharing a word cloud or page is to assert human gesture, human expression, human gaze.

Published: Oct 2019

Notes


1. Elysium, a 2013 film directed by Neill Bomkamp that portrays a world starkly divided between the underclass,  who are bound to a savage dystopian life on Earth, and an upper class existing in a sublime, verdant utopia installed on a massive terraformed platform orbiting Earth.

2. eBay Kleinanzeigen (or eBay Classifieds) is similar to '00s Craigslist in that if facilitates the exchange of typically pre-owned goods between geographically local users.

Caroline Busta is the editor of New Models.



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NM77: Novelist HARI KUNZRU on his life in cyberculture

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NM75: Heavy Traffic magazine w/ its editor and publisher Patrick McGraw

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NM72: Natasha Stagg on Artless: Stories 2019-2023


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2022

NM56: The Para-Real w/ Cade Diehm of New Design Congress

NM55: Viral.rip w/ artist Kreayshawn aka Natassia Gail Zolot

NM54: Damn Nation w/ journalist James Pogue

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NM47: Mise en TV w/ artist Calla Henkel (author of Other People's Clothes)

NM46: Boomocracy w/ Kevin Munger (author of Generation Gap) on generational power in America

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NM41: Eco-Tomorrow w/ Sam Moore re/ his 2022 book, The Rise of Ecofascism

2021

NM40: Now in 4-D w/ Nora Khan & Joel Kuennen re/ algorithms & deep time

NM39: Paintings by Numbers w/ @jerrygogosian's Hilde Lynn Helphenstein and Matthew Capasso

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NM35: Net Povera w/ artist Joshua Citarella

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NM33: Imagination Nation w/ Richard Beck on moral panics

2020

NM32: Click, Click, Boom w/ Tim Hwang on attention, advertising

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NM30: Harm Reduction w/ Katharine Neill Harris on drug policy

NM29: Sad Frog w/ "Feels Good Man" (Pepe) filmmakers, Arthur Jones & Giorgio Angelini

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2019

NM20: Guest List w/ Natasha Stagg

NM19: The Flourishing w/ Tom Krell, aka How to Dress Well

NM18: Yung Matrix w/ Trevor McFedries of Brud on AR & marketing

NM17: Nonfood [+Bonus] w/ Lucy Chinen & Sean Raspet on food futures

NM16: E Pluribus Zuck w/ Mat Dryhurst & Kei Kreutler on FB's Libra coin

NM15: Remote Port w/ Benjamin Bratton on Earth's systems

NM14: Shift Alt Right Clique w/ Joshua Citarella on Irony Politics & Gen Z

NM13: Je Refuse w/ Jenny Odell on Attention and Refusal

NM12: Black Socialists w/ Z from Black Socialists of America

NM11: Downstram w/ Liz Pelly on cultural production, platforms, independence

NM10: Loose Climate Change w/ Christine Lariviere

NM9: Stack Attack w/ Cade on digital dark patterns

2018

NM8: Manplay w/ Ed Fornieles

NM7: Authenticity Dungeon w/ Toby Shorin

NM6: Teenage Radicals w/ Joshua Citarella

NM5: Unrealestate w/ Mat Dryhurst, Martti Kalliala, Michelle Lhooq

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NEW MODELS
 is a media channel and community addressing the emergent effects of networked technology on culture. Est. 2018, Berlin.

NM pods are hosted by Caroline BustaLil Internet, Daniel Keller.

The NM community is a digital local distributed worldwide via Discord with light leaks to the dark side of newmodels.io and maintained by Leïth Benkhedda

In summer 2021, the NM community published the NM Codex Y2K20 and the NM Webdex.

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HIGHArt by highsnobiety, What Does the Internet Smell Like? (w/ Philip Maughan)

Index Magazine, Online Futures: What's Next for the World Wide Web — New Models (Caroline Busta, Lil Internet), Trust (Arthur Röing Baer, Joanna Pope), and Other Internet (Toby Shorin) in conversation with Anna Dorothea Ker

Kaleidoscope, American Memetics (Joshua Citarella, Caroline Busta, Daniel Keller, Lil Internet)

KW's Open Secret, Losing Yourself in the Dark (Caroline Busta)

Document, The Internet Didn't Kill Counterculture—You Just Won't Find it on Instagram (Caroline Busta)
CTM 2021, Possible Futures of Music Valuation — Cherie Hu, Jean-Hugues Kabuiku, Trevor McFedries; mod. New Models (Caroline Busta, Lil Internet)

2020


Kaleidoscope, Influencing the Void: How the Art World Lost the Thread (Caroline Busta)

HIGHTech by highsnobiety, Club Future: A Tour of Posisble Worlds with Berlin's New Models (w/ Philip Maughan)

2019


Shure.24, Interview with New Models

Novembre New Models (feat: photography by Ilya Lipkin, text by Ida Eritsland, design/layout by Betty Wang)

2018


TANK Magazine, "A podcast and anti-algorithm media platform covering contemporary topics at the bleeding edge of art, politics and culture"

FAST Company, New Models is the Intellectual Drudge Report for Critical Theory (Cale Guthrie Weissman)

ART News, Aggregate This!: Caroline Busta and Lil Internet on New Models, Their Art-Tech Answer to the Drudge Report (John Chiaverina)


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For the purposes of New Models, Channel is a membership and distribution meta-layer shared with two creators that we greatly respect and that have been central to our thinking since NM's inception: Joshua Citarella and Interdependence (Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon).


WHO IS BUILDING CHANNEL?

Interdependence
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NM DISPATCH

Reflections on the everyday

2023

NM Dispatch: America Diaries 12/2023 by Lilinternet

NM Communiqué: Notes on War 23.11.2023 by Lil Internet & Carly Busta

NM Dispatch: Dubai Diaries 2023 by Lil Internet & Carly Busta

NM Dispatch: America Diaries AW2023 (mini-bonus ep) by Ian Beckman Reagan

NM Dispatch: America Diaries AW2023 (Pt. 2) by LILINTERNET

NM Dispatch: America Diaries AW2023 (Pt. 1) by Carly Busta

2022

NM Dispatch: America Diaries (Pt. 2 of 2) by Lil Internet

NM Dispatch: America Diaries (Pt. 1 of 2) “Real Engine” by Carly Busta


RADIO PLAYS by LIL INTERNET

Elon Musk: 2040 / 69 (2023)

Ricky Backtrace, Private Trend Consultant - Ep 3 (2022)

Ricky Backtrace, Private Trend Consultant - Ep 2 (2022)

Ricky Backtrace, Private Trend Consultant - Ep 1 (2022)

Baddieverse (2022)

NFT Dreams (2021)

A Meditation on FOMO (2020)


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NM Special Report: Bonn After Hours w/ artists Dena Yago & Joshua Citarella

NM Special Report: Pret-à-Panique w/ Dean Kissick on Balenciagagate

NM Special Report: documenta 15 w/ Paige K. Bradley, @abe1x, Felix Ansmann

NM Special Report: Digital Resilience & War w/ Cade Diehm

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NM Special Report: NM UX w/ NM's web designer Jon Lucas

NM Special Report: The Wedding Album w/ Carly & Lil Net <3

NM Special Report: Ambient Value w/ James Whipple (M.E.S.H.) re/ art NFTs

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2020

NM Special Report: Uncanny Rally w/ Jak Ritger, Clack Auden re/ techniques of crowd-staging and opinion manipulation

NM Special Report: George Floyd, Minneapolis Unrest w/ journalist Steve Marsh

Earlier

NM Special Report: Black Socialists launch Dual Power Map w/ Z from Black Socialists of America (2019)

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NM Short: Lil Internet's VICE Interrupted (2024)

NM Short: Carly & Lil Internet on Jordan Wolfson’s “Body Sculpture” (2024)

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NM Short:  Lil Internet’s Notes on Belly (1998, dir. Hype Williams) (2023)

NM Short: Indie Sleaze w/ fashion editor Taylore Scarabelli (2022)

NM Short: Cryptoverse w/ artist Bjarne Melgaard (2022)


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Musicians and other creators in the NM sphere discuss their new work.

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NM Greenroom: Paradigm Trilogy w/ Katharina Korbjuhn (2021)

NM Greenroom: Lyra Pramuk (2020)

NM Greenroom: Steven Warwick (2019)


NM RECOMMENDS

Recent books by NM guests:

• Olivia Kan-Sperling, Island Time (2022, Expat Press)
• Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition (2021, Chicago)
• Kevin Munger, Generation Gap (2022, Columbia)
• Keving Driscoll, The Modem World (2022, Yale)
• Sam Moore, Alex Roberts, The Rise of Ecofascism (2022, Polity)
Calla Henkel, Other People's Clothes (2021, Sceptre/Doubleday)
S. Basar, D. Coupland, HUO, The Extreme Self (2021, Penguin)


COMMUNITY LEAKS


NM CREATOR NETWORK

INTERDEPENDENCE
JOSHUA CITARELLA
[DNR] DO NOT RESEARCH
TRUST


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NM WEBDEX LAUNCH - 09 / 2021


NM CODEX LAUNCH - 07 / 2021


RESIDENCY: NM X HEAVY TRAFFIC

Selections from Heavy Traffic magazine, read aloud by their authors

NM x Heavy Traffic: Keller Easterling, “NON_2”

NM x Heavy Traffic: Seth Price, "Machine Time" (Part 1)

NM x Heavy Traffic: Seth Price, "Machine Time" (Part 2)


NM TV

Kevin Munger on Vilém Flusser's Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations?

Richard Kennedy's Fubu Fukú, Trauma Bar und Kino, Berlin, 2020

What Does the Internet Smell Like? (NM x High Snobiety)


NM LECTURES

NM Lecture: Understanding Predicting Media — Global Art Forum, Dubai, 4 Mar 2023

NM Lecture: Do You Know Where You Live? — "Future of Criticism" Congress, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, 18 Nov 2022

NM Lecture: Clearnet vs. Dark Forest: Notes on the New Psychogeoraphy of Art — UCLA Design Media Arts, 12 Mar 2021


NM TOPSOIL (2018-2022)

Talk-core with Carly, Lil Internet, and Daniel Keller re/ current events, tech, art, and pop culture. Many eps feature exclusive radio plays by LIL INTERNET and/or special guests.

2022

NM TopSoil 86: URBEXIT

NM TopSoil 85: Meta Daze

NM TopSoil 84: Art Basilisk w/ Alex Scrimgeour

NM TopSoil 83: Radio Active w/ Most Dismal Swamp

NM TopSoil 82: Kayfabe Capital

NM TopSoil 81: Palanpilled

NM TopSoil 80: Public Goods w/ Dan @ eth.denver

NM TopSoil 79: Dapp Rig w/ @chorist

NM TopSoil 78: Lootstrap

NM TopSoil 77: aka Topsoil 76 pt.2

NM TopSoil 76: pt.1 Read All Over w/ Cathal of NEWS/ACC

2021

NM TopSoil 75: Flightmare w/ Jöran Mandik of Radio Spätkauf on BER Airport

NM TopSoil 74: Back to the Land w/ Stephanie Wakefield

NM TopSoil 73: Meta Mindset w/ Hazmat Raheem

NM TopSoil 72: Swift Update

NM TopSoil 71: Keep on TRUC'n

NM TopSoil 70: Fulfilled by Taliban

NM TopSoil 69: Copening Ceremony

NM TopSoil 68: Danifest Destiny

NM TopSoil 67: No Whippits in Paradise

NM TopSoil 66-X: Earth Flatteners

NM TopSoil 66-X: Gram-Boss w/ @moma.ps5

NM TopSoil 65: Super League Prostate Exclusive

NM TopSoil 64: Prime of Life

NM TopSoil 63: Cargo Cult

NM TopSoil 62: Manicherial

NM TopSoil 61: Gate Analysis w/ Andrew Russeth

NM TopSoil 60: Cringe Core w/ Taylore Scarabelli

NM TopSoil 59: Ghost Face Shillah w/ @davidy

NM TopSoil 58: Virtue Signal

NM TopSoil 57: Capital Insurrection

NM TopSoil 56: Miami Based

NM TopSoil 55: Gloria

NM TopSoil 54: Capitol Gains w/ special report by Thomas Faison on Jan. 6th capitol attack

NM TopSoil 53: Stevia Jobs

2020

NM TopSoil 52: Power Broker

NM TopSoil 51: Crashocracy

NM TopSoil 50: Build Back Best

NM TopSoil 49: American Vibes

NM TopSoil 48: A Contest of Swords

NM TopSoil 47: Zapf Dingbats Are Real Life

NM TopSoil 46: Spiritual America

NM TopSoil 45: Mani/Pedo

NM TopSoil 44: Eternal Log

NM TopSoil 43: 3G Towne

NM TopSoil 42: Death by Exposure

NM TopSoil 41: Slide to the Left w/ Michell Lhooq

NM TopSoil 40: Mount Trashmore

NM TopSoil 39: Black Bloc

NM TopSoil 38: The German Dream

NM TopSoil 37: Querty

NM TopSoil 36: Sour Dough

NM TopSoil 35: Doral Futures

NM TopSoil 34: Sabbath Year

NM TopSoil 33: Escape From Moscow w/ Chiara Di Leone, Philip Maughan, Pierce Myers, Bryan Wolff

NM TopSoil 32: Silent Carry (MIAMI/LA/DFW/NYC/METAVERSE) pt. 1 w/ Stephanie Wakefield, Sean Monahan, Jean-Luc Vila, Natasha Stagg, Cade Diehm

NM TopSoil 32: Silent Carry (MIAMI/LA/DFW/NYC/METAVERSE) pt. 2 w/ Stephanie Wakefield, Sean Monahan, Jean-Luc Vila, Natasha Stagg, Cade Diehm

NM TopSoil 31: Corona Sands

NM TopSoil 30: Hole Adjacent w/ Eric Schwartau of Talk Hole & Lilnet's Mom

NM TopSoil 29: Quack is Whack

NM TopSoil 28: Of Froth & Virtue

NM TopSoil 27: Casino World

NM TopSoil 26: Wuhan Swimp Bod

NM TopSoil 25: One Night in Davos

NM TopSoil 24: Roger Stone's Intern

2019

NM TopSoil 23: Left Pill

NM TopSoil 22: Kim Bong-Un

NM TopSoil 21: This Machine Kills Algorithms

NM TopSoil 20: Collective Paranoia w/ Bjarne Melgaard

NM TopSoil 19: Ref Herring

NM TopSoil 18: Voluntourism

NM TopSoil 17: Kokopelli's Girlfriend

NM TopSoil 16: Luckey Strikes w/ Duncan Wilson

NM TopSoil 15: Unhack The Planet

NM TopSoil 14: Anna Got Me Clickin w/ Anna Khachiyan

NM TopSoil 13: Enlightenment Dan

NM TopSoil 12: Doomsday Dan

NM TopSoil 11: Epstein Smile

NM TopSoil 10: Big Face Saddams

NM TopSoil 9: The Real Housewives of Elysium w/ Dean Kissick

NM TopSoil 8: Valley of the Bros

NM TopSoil 7: Centrixxfuge

NM TopSoil 6: The Weirdening

NM TopSoil 5: Eastern Promises w/ Nik Kosmas

NM TopSoil 4: Buried Alive

NM TopSoil 3: Lawful Good

2018

NM TopSoil 2: Confusion

NM TopSoil 1: Internet Primacy Syndrome


NM COLLABS

NM x Society of Scent for Highsnobiety: Internet perfume (2021)
.
NM x Society of Scent - "The Internet" - for Highsnobiety (2021)

Bjarne Melgaard x New Models, Decade Brain, 2020 in Reena Spaulings NYC, "Sewars of Mars," 2020

NM HISTORY


TL;DR

NEW MODELS was founded in Berlin in 2018. It’s initial aim was to create a media space outside of the "physics" of Web 2.0 platforms by hand-aggregating links and seeding a community beyond the feed. In the time since, we have built an international member network and Discord server, staged many IRL and digital/physical events, published swarm-generated content with HighsnobietyKaleidoscope, and Novembre; released an album’s worth of unhinged radio plays by Lil Internet, created an Internet perfume with Society of Scent, and facilitated the creation of an interactive digital glossary (NM Webdex) and a physical book (NMCodex)—both collectively-authored by the NM community—indexing the experience of being online together during the extremely online year of Y2K20.



EXTENDED VERSION

NEW MODELS was founded in Berlin in 2018. Its initial aim was to think outside of Web 2.0 feeds by hand-aggregating a cache of information relevant to the culture sector ...



... particularly the ways in which networked technology was impacting the publishing, art, and music industries. We first used https://newmodels.io, as a kind of alt Drudge Report, with a contuously updated list of links and original commissioned NM content. / Search the NM archive: here.


We also hosted several physical events (many with Berlin's Trauma Bar und Kino, including NM Sim Society on world building and online identity formation and the premier of Richard Kennedy's 2020 opera Fubu Fukú.

NM Sim Society, feat. Joshua Citarella and Cade, Trauma Bar und Kino, Berlin, January 2020



To unpack the themes articulated through the aggregation and editorial, we started an audio stream — the public New Models Podcast, featuring conversations with artists, academics, and other experts. We soon began subscription-gating some of our content via Patreon, introducing the NM TopSoil show for more free-form discussion about current events and radio plays by Lil Internet.




This small barrier (€5 / month) created a subscribing New Models Community... which in turn led to us to start a Discord server. Suddenly, New Models was no longer just a creator-to-audience stream, but a mainframe for processing information free from the extractive properties of Clearnet spaces. We began referring to this ecosystem as a "dark forest." (For more on the interplay of different digital realms, see Caroline Busta's Internet/counterculture text for Document Journal.)


Within the NM Discord, a local language formed — as well as initiatives aimed at "devirtualizing" traces of NM's digital enclave into something physical and therefore less vulnerable to erasure. In 2021, the NM community produced the NM Codex and the NM Webdex.


But throughout the wider sub-Web 2.0 strata, many more online enclaves were emerging. In part this was because the Clearnet space was growing ever more untenable: random account deading, feeds organized by algorithms optmizing for target-margets, wide fluctuations in access and reach. For NM, the problem to solve was no longer exiting legacy media or Web 2 but establishing a new, more resiliant network beyond them.


In late 2020, New Models, in collaboration with Joshua Citarella and Interdpendence Pod (Mat Dryhurst & Holly Herndon), began working with Duncan Wilson, Cullen Miller, and James Geary to develop web3 tools allowing creators to do just that.

Channel, which pre-launched in Jan 2022, is rethinking how content is valued, distributed, and consumed. MVP arriving late 2022.

Jak Ritger, illustration of interconnected dark forest, creator communities spilling into each other, sharing flows of content, 2021.


In equal parts, New Models creates content, community, and the structures that facilitate both. As media evolves, so too will New Models. <3


Channel Season 0 Founder NFT (Team Rolfes)


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SOME LEGACY LINKS (from prev. site)

LEARN: 📈How big is a BILLION?
LEARN: 📡Time-lapse of the Future. Journey to the End of Time
LEARN: 🌍Time-Lapse History MAP of the WORLD
SURF: 💻Society of Control
SURF: 💻What's on 🇨🇳Weibo ...
SURF: 💻A scatter-plot visualization of every music genre Spotify recognizes
SURF: 💻Art collector 🎨database, http://organic.software


SOME LEGACY SOURCES (from prev. NM site)

032C, Berlin
AAAAARG
AFFIDAVIT
AFRICA IS A COUNTRY
ART AGAINST ART, Berlin
ART in AMERICA
ARTFORUM
ART NEWS
ARTNET
BAFFLER
BIDOUN
BOMB, New York
BRAND-NEW-LIFE, Zürich
BROOKLYN RAIL
CIVILIZATION, New York
CREATIVE INDEPENDENT
COMMUNE
CONTEMPORARY ART DAILY
CONTEMPORARY ART WRITING DAILY
DIS.ART
DOCUMENT
DRUDGE REPORT
ECONOMIST
E-FLUX
DISSENT
FAST COMPANY
FILM COMMENT
FINANCIAL TIMES
FAILED ARCHITECTURE
FLASH ART, Milan
FRIEZE
GALAXIA Y2K
GREY ROOM
HACKER NEWS
INTERVIEW
JACOBITE
KALEIDOSCOPE
LA REVIEW of BOOKS
LIBRARY STACK
LOGIC
LONDON REVIEW of BOOKS
MAY REVUE, Paris
NEO-METABOLISM
N+1
NEW INQUIRY
NEW YORKER
NY REVIEW of BOOKS
NOĒMA
NOVEMBRE
OCTOBER
PARIS REVIEW
PIN-UP
POINT
QUIETUS
REAL LIFE
REDDIT
RHIZOME
RIBBON FARM
SELVA
SMALL PRESS
SPEX, Berlin
SPIKE, Berlin/Vienna
STARSHIP, Berlin
STRELKA MAGAZINE, Moscow
TANK, London
TEXTE ZUR KUNST, Berlin
TOPICAL CREAM, New York
TRIPLE CANOPY, New York
UBU WEB
VESTOJ
VIEWPOINT
X-TRA, Los Angeles


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CHANNEL 🌌

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