STEVEN WARWICK, MOI / VIDEO BY DACIO PINHEIRO / PAN, LP & DL 2019
“Do you know who I am? Because I don’t!” teases the Berlin-based British artist Steven Warwick for the second album under his own name. Titling the LP MOI, Warwick (ex-Heatsick) turns the dial another notch making cheeky reference to the culture of "me" that our hyper-personalized media/consumer landscape has brought about.
In the track "Silhouette," which is accompanied by a dark, Dacio Pinheiro-directed music video (premiering here), a deadpan Warwick sing-speaks into the camera, "you said the hills have eyes and that the walls have ears"—relaying the "targeted individual"-style woes that arise when IoT smart devices and algorithmically determined feeds make the "moi" appear to itself as disconcertingly central and inescapably defined.
But like much of Warwick's work and Pinheiro's videos for him (Pinheiro also directed the video for Heatsick's 2011 "Ice Cream on Concrete"), MOI is haunted by 20th century ghosts. "Silhouette," for instance, features sonic elements of UK’s electronic underground but stripped down and transmuted into a lo-fi, dancefloor meditation on paranoia. And in the accompanying Pinheiro-directed video, Warwick enacts a pre-millennial archetype of danger and surveillance—the eyes that peer between the slits of your Venetian blinds. Today the watchers are omnipresent, the “overactive mind” accurate in its paranoia, and the silhouette both that of the surveillant and the surveilled. Do they make Venetian blinds for smartphones?
🔉LISTEN
NM GREENROOM Ep. 1: Steven Warwick discusses MOI (PAN, 2019)
STEVEN WARWICK's MOI is out everywhere November 8th, 2019. (The album is mastered by Jeremy Cox, featuring cover photography by Ilya Lipkin, and layout by Bill Kouligas and Johannes Schnatmann.)
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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
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
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Channelis a decentralized media organization and platform that allows creators to use Web 3 tools to work collectively, bundling content while maintaining distinct communities.
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).
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.
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 Highsnobiety, Kaleidoscope, 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.
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.