DECADE BRAIN registers ten years of collective consciousness, collectively mapped by the NM community in the winter of 2020. It was conceived as a framework for contextualizing the isms, truths, events, and alt-facts of a wildly volatile decade; many dates are approximate, things are mispelled. That spring, New Models invited artist Bjarne Melgaard to overwrite this timeline with his own experience of the 2010s. // Initial concept and development by Bryan Wolff and Marc Vermeeren. Design and layout by Betty Wang. This project was included as part of Reena Spaulings' summer 2020 show "The Sewars of Mars."
NEW MODELS x BJARNE MELGAARD, DECADE BRAIN, 2020 Offset print on newsprint. Ed. 1000 link
NM 🔉 CHANNEL
UNLOCK MEMBER EPISODES...
via Substack $5/mo for 🇺🇸 via Patreon €5/mo (100+ eps) for rest of world via Channel (coming soon)
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
Kaleidoscope, American Memetics (Joshua Citarella, Caroline Busta, Daniel Keller, Lil Internet)
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.