New Models

Gavin Brown, Caroline Busta, Joshua Citarella, Ben Davis, Jason Farago, Tobias Spichtig and Lloyd Wise read their contributions to “What Is Contemporary Art For Today?" (Perić Collection, 2025) This is a preview — for the full episode (released 08/13/2025), including a conversation with the book's editors, Matt Moravec, Eleonore Hugendubel, and Dean Kissick, subscribe: patreon.com/newmodels newmodels.substack.com From January 2023 to January 2024, the Perić Collection funded a series of informal, highly attended talks about the state of Contemporary Art. Hosted by Dean Kissick and coordinated & commissioned by Eleonore Hugendubel and Matt Moravec, the monthly event, known as the Seaport Talks, took place in Downtown Manhattan. As a kind of coda to this series, Matt, Eleonore, and Dean created a correlating reader (likewise supported by Perić) featuring texts by 25 contributors who have spent some significant part of their life in the art world. Each writer was asked to briefly respond to the book’s titular question: “What is contemporary art for Today? And what should it be for, if anything?” For this special episode, we bring you a selection of the answers. For more: https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/product/what-contemporary-art-today

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com Our guest is American media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. He is the author of such seminal books on digital culture and networked communication as Cyberia (1994), Media Virus (1995), and Coercion (1999); and numerous further titles including, Program or Be Programmed (2010/2025) and Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022). He is also the host of Team Human and a professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics as CUNY/Queens. On this episode, Doug speaks with us about the evolution (and devolution) of digital culture across web 1, 2, 3, and beyond via a synthesis of media theory, psychedelic thinking, and practical wisdom for navigating our contemporary networks. Names cited: Adam Curtis, Alex Garland, Allan Kaprow, Amazon, Art Bell, AT&T, Bernie Madoff, CNN, Cyberia, CVS, Dan Rather, Daniel Dennett, David Bowie, David Hershkovitz, David Lynch, Donna Haraway, Douglas Rushkoff, Elon Musk, Emmanuel Levinas, Francis Bacon, Genesis P-Orridge, Jake Tapper, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jesse Armstrong, Joe Rogan, John Brockman, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Chaikin, Kamala Harris, Lauren Sanchez, Louis Rossetto, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Madonna, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, Media Virus, Michael Jackson, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, Neil Simon, New Models, New York Times, Norbert Wiener, Orit Halpern, Paper Magazine, Peter Thiel, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Present Shock, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Dawkins, Robert Anton Wilson, Ross Douthat, Skinny Puppy, Spinoza, Star Trek, Team Human, Temple of Psychic Youth, The Long Boom, The Process Church, The Simpsons, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Walter Benjamin, William S. Burroughs, Wired Magazine

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com Our guest is Orit Halpern: co-author of The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press, 2023); author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke, 2014); and Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. Often in discussions about machine learning and smartness, AI is presented as the natural path of human progress, an evolutionary – almost biological – development that emerged out of human communication systems and that has the potential to far exceed them. But as Orit argues, these technologies are neither inevitable nor inhuman. Rather they are the result of a particular intersection of neoliberal theory, psychology, and computer science that generated the economic incentives, political will, and public desire for AI to exist in the specific form we have now. On this episode, Orit animates the technological imaginary that gave rise to our culture of AI, asking, among other things, how a highly adaptive, machine-learning enabled world changes the terms of political possibility and human revolution. For more: https://orithalpern.net
 “Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Markets & Machines“ https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/on-models/519993/financializing-intelligence-on-the-integration-of-machines-and-markets/ “Futures of Cybernetic Urbanism” in "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective" catalogue of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale (2025) Counter-Practices and The Image of Thought https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29768640251335679 Planetary Infrastructure https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-658-38128-8_1-1 - Episode image adapted from: Marco Zorzanello photo of the installation TERMS AND CONDITIONS by Transsolar, Bilge Kobas, Daniel A. Barber, and Sonia Seneviratne at La Biennale di Venezia, 2025

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com On this ep, NM is joined by filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko, who you may know as the director of films such as 0s and 1s, Wobble Palace, Spree, and most recently, The Code, which stars Peter Vack & Dasha Nekrasova and is currently streaming on Mubi.  Like much of Eugene’s work, The Code understands itself both as entertainment and as cinema — cinema-in-a-time-when everyone is an editor, cinema-in-a-time-when content has become infinite, which is to say empty, a site of projection for viewers-turned-users. We talk about The Code on this episode and about the industry, about virality, idenity, authoritarianism, slop, empathy. comedy, and success. For more: https://www.instagram.com/madabouteug (IG) Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/directorscommentary Site: https://www.everybodyloves.me   Watch “The Code” MUBI: https://mubi.com/en/de/films/the-code-2024 LA: https://lumierecinemala.com/film-the-code-2024/ NYC: https://www.roxycinemanewyork.com/screenings/the-code-3-2-3-2/

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://newmodels.io or https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com In town for an event with Matt Copson at Berlin’s KW, Dean Kissick stops by the show to talk about art, criticism, and self-performance as well as fire punks, AI monsters, vulgarity, Ye, and the death of the hot take. Now based in London following a decade-long tenure in Downtown New York, Dean is a writer with recent and forthcoming work in Spike, Heavy Traffic, and Civilization. His essay, “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art” appeared in the December 2024 issue of Harper’s. For more: @deankissick IG & X

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com Gideon Jacobs joins NM to discuss his latest piece for the LA Review of Books, “Player One and Main Character,” which explores the logic of power in a time when some of its key agents are no longer operating in base reality. Related: Lil Internet’s “Hallucinator’s Dice” (unlocked) https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/hallucinators-dice See also: 
 "Player One and Main Character" (LARB, Apr 2025) https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/player-one-and-main-character/ “Trump l’Oeil,” (LARB, Nov 2024) https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trump-loeil/ NM Talkcore w/ Gideon Jacobs on Trump as Image (Nov 2024) https://on.soundcloud.com/kC8NzddUcGynZyZj6 Episode image adapted from photo by Daniel Arnold for Document Journal of Gideon Jacobs as the character Father Bartholomew Mary, 2025.

Unlocked (first released to subscribers 17 March 2025) --> https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com https://newmodels.io Lil Internet purges his Musk Derangement Syndrome one last time in a monologue that could have been titled “Ket, Lies, and Video Games”—until a decades-long shift in base reality is revealed by dice in a Hong Kong bar. - [Excerpt from monologue]: “A very brief review of what everyone knows but might not think about all at once: Elon Musk bought Twitter, the most influential social media platform in the world, and promised to make it ”politically neutral.” He then renamed it X, which, in mathematics and logic stands for any arbitrary thing you want, and turned the entire platform towards boosting far right parties across the globe. He controls what does and doesn’t appear on your feed, what does or doesn’t get fact checked, and bans users on a whim. He owns Starlink, a satellite ISP that allows him to monitor traffic or sever a home’s entire internet connection at any time. He owns SpaceX, which is building a classified satellite network called Starshield for the National Reconnaissance Office of the US Military that will allow 24/7, real-time images and AI-powered intelligence gathering across the entire surface of the planet. He owns xAI, which is building the world’s most powerful supercomputer to achieve AGI and have it run the US government. He owns Tesla, which sells cars that he can control, shut down, or render permanently inoperable via satellite, and builds humanoid robots explicitly for replacing human jobs. And then there’s Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company that is literally implanting thought-reading microchips in people’s brains. This is all basic public knowledge, and yet people who swore Bill Gates was putting 5G microchips in the vaccines seem to be totally fine with an even richer guy controlling their social media, internet access, and car while building robots to replace their jobs, putting every square inch of Earth under 24/7 surveillance, and implanting microchips in people’s brains. Elon Musk has openly, transparently, turned every conspiracy theory trope into a business he directly owns. He is openly, transparently, every dystopian fear embodied within a single man. Yet the paranoid and the conspiratorial are most likely to support him. Why? I think it’s because transparency has replaced truth and trust in society, and with Elon transparently the most dangerous man to ever exist, truth and trust have become irrelevant.”

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe | https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com - Writer and Nymphet Alumni co-host Biz Sherbert joins NM following the launch of her newsletter, American Style. Its premise is simple — travel around the country and talk to people about what they are wearing and why. On the show, we chat with Biz about the transmission of style today, particularly in the USA, and whether personal aesthetic transformations may be a stand-in for pursuing the erstwhile American Dream. For more: https://instagram.com/bizsherbert https://bizsherbert.substack.com/about Nymphet Alumni Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/65CYBeAlLNevYAdW0YgyD1 See also: “What Does Beauty Look Like in the Age of Trump?” AnOther (Feb 2025) https://www.anothermag.com/fashion-beauty/16218/what-does-beauty-look-like-in-the-trump-era-anna-claire-howland-addison-rae “On the Fashion Philosophy of the Crypto Bro,” Zora (June 2023) https://zine.zora.co/biz-sherbert-crypto-style Biz Sherbert x Emma Chamberlain, The Face (Sept 2024) https://theface.com/culture/emma-chamberlain-style-voice-of-a-generation-young-people-social-media-famous Nicole Kidman shot by Petra Collins for Time Woman of the Year, 2025 https://time.com/7216403/nicole-kidman-interview/

First published in Heavy Traffic V (Fall 2024), Mark Leckey's kaleidoscopic, transhistorical sojourn into the Eikonomachia (the 'image struggle') is presented here in radio play form w/ sound design and production also by Leckey. This reading is part of Heavy Traffic’s New Models residency, which features pieces from the magazine read aloud by their authors. Heavy Traffic V of is out now. https://heavytrafficmagazine.com See also:  📹 "Enter Through Medieval Wounds" video version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyi-ZRJj7mI 🔉NM Greenroom | Mark Leckey (2025) https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/preview-nm-greenroom-mark-leckey-2025? 🔉NM75 | w/ Heavy Traffic editor/publisher Patrick McGraw https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/mcgraw-heavytraffic-nm75/s-VB0sQZYweL0 🖼️ 3 Songs from the Liver,” Gladstone Gallery, NYC (2024-25) https://www.gladstonegallery.com/exhibition/13694/3-songs-from-the-liver/installation-views

Unlocked (first released to subscribers 19 March 2024) --> https://newmodels.io _ How does media actually work in 2024, which is to say in a time of omnipresent AI? And what kind of subject is this era of media producing? On this ep, we speak with K Allado-McDowell—the author, with GPT-3, of Pharmako-AI, Amor Cringe, and Air Age Blueprint, and founder of the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI—about how media is evolving. Specifically, we ask about rise of “neural media,” which K has theorized as developing out of network media in the mid-2010s amid increasing human-AI interaction. Hearing K describe neural media's mechanics, it seems inevitable that our ideas of individuality and identity formation, even what it means to communicate as a human (among other living beings) are about to be majorly recalibrated. For more: @kalladomcdowell (IG & X)
 “Designing Neural Media” (2023), Gropius Bau Journal https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/gropius-bau/programm/journal/2023/k-allado-mcdowell-designing-neural-media "Am I slop? Am I Agentic? Am I Earth" (2025), The Long Now https://longnow.org/ideas/identity-neural-media-ai/

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe. | https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com _ British artist Mark Leckey — creator of famed club culture docu-hallucination, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), winner of the 2008 Turner Prize, and longtime NTS Radio host — discusses the terms of art-making in our technological present and our increasingly medieval relationship to representation. His show “3 Songs from the Liver” was on view at Gladstone Gallery, NY, Nov 2024 - Feb 2025. “AI outputs are not “images” as we know them. And if we try to understand them in that way, then we’re really…. f*cked, you know?” Following this conversation, keep listening for “Enter Through Medieval Wounds” a radio play by Mark Leckey, which first appeared in essay form in Heavy Traffic V (Fall 2024). For more: https://markleckey.com https://www.nts.live/shows/mark-leckey https://www.gladstonegallery.com/exhibition/13694/3-songs-from-the-liver/installation-views Episode image adapted from Mark Leckey, "Carry Me into The Wilderness" (Icon), 2022

This is a preview | Full episode released to subscribers: 13 Feb 2025 | Subscribe --> https://newmodels.io Part 2 of this NM Greenroom features Amnesia Scanner's Ville Haimala & French artist Freeka Tet discussing the work they do in parallel to their AS collaboration. For Ville, this includes developing scores and sound design with Anne Imhof for her monumental performance-installations; while Freeka discusses his recent music video for The Weeknd. In Part 1 (released 9 Feb 2025) AS's Ville Haimala & Martti Kalliala, together with regular collaborator Freeka Tet speak about their most recent release, AS HOAX (PAN, 2024) and the project's innovations within the post-streaming subcultural industrial complex. For more: 
@amensiascanner @freekatet @villehaimala (IG) https://p-a-n.org/product/amnesia-scanner-freeka-tet-hoax-pan-148/

This is a preview | Full episode released to subscribers: 9 Feb 2025 | Subscribe --> https://newmodels.io _ Ville Haimala & Martti Kalliala of the experimental music duo @amnesia-scanner & regular collaborator Freeka Tet join NM to discuss AS HOAX (@pan_hq 2024) — both the making-of and the world into which the dual record project was released.  This is Part 1 of 2. It focuses on the Amnesia + Freeka project and its innovations within the post-streaming subcultural industrial complex. Part 2 (coming soon) expands to Ville & Freeka’s activity outside of Amnesia Scanner, including recent work with artists Anne Imhof and The Weeknd. Recorded at the end of 2024, the conversation presciently channels the noise, distortion, and attentional overload that has quickly come to characterize the info-sphere of 2025. For more: HOAX (PAN, 2024) https://p-a-n.org/product/amnesia-scanner-freeka-tet-hoax-pan-148/ Related:
 Joshua Citarella, Doomscroll: Trevor Paglen: Mind Hacking, AI and Psyops Capitalism,” 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--0kYOwOoDQ Joshua Citarella, Doomscroll: Matty Healy: Pop Culture in the 21st Century, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdCdpnz0wDU&t=1732s

This is a preview | Full episode released to subscribers: 29 Jan 2024 | Subscribe --> https://newmodels.io // One week after the 2025 US presidential inauguration and less than a month since fires devastated LA, American journalist James Pogue and energy specialist Ellie Holbrook talk us through the current political terrain. James has been covering the New Right since the early 2010s. His back-to-back features this month on the Republican party’s uneasy Tech/MAGA alliance (NYTimes) and the demise of the Dems (Vanity Fair) are, together, an essential primer for how power works today. With literal power (fuel) being part of this equation, Ellie shares her knowledge on the energy trade and LNG markets in particular. What follows in an orientation for our strange new real. See also: 
@hellholbrook (IG)
@jhenseonpogue (x) Forthcoming: James Pogue, The Natural Division (Pantheon) is “a first-person journey deep into a region at the epicenter of both America’s megafires and militia politics, told through California’s far-flung northern State of Jefferson.” NM82: James Pogue on American Futures (2024)
https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/prvw-nm82-james-pogue-on-american-futures NM54: Damn Nation w/ James Pogue (2022) https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/damn-nation-james-pogue-nm54

This is a preview | Full episode released to subscribers: 27 Oct 2024 | Subscribe --> https://newmodels.io Jay Springett is a writer, researcher, consultant, musician, podcaster, Royal Society of Arts Fellow, New Centre instructor, and decade long admin of solarpunks.net. Currently at work on a book exploring the history of Dungeons & Dragons (the so-called metaverse), Jay joins New Models to speak about the proliferation of “worlds” (perhaps in lieu of the 20th century public sphere) and strategies for existing within them. For more: thejaymo.net Jay’s podcasts: https://thejaymo.net/permanentlymoved/ & https://experience.computer/