As DIS returns to Germany for the first time since members Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro curated 2016’s hotly contested Berlin Biennale 9, Boyle joins New Models to talk about the generation-defining project’s trajectory since its inception in the late-’00s, its recent film installation Everything But The World (on view through Feb 26 at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin), and its future vision. Along the way we discuss: subculture, pop culture, mass media, digital rot, and Gens X, Y, Z, and A.

Cultural savants Shumon Basar (The Extreme Self & The Age of Earthquakes) and Dean Kissick (NY editor of Spike Art Magazine) join the show during Berlin Art Week for a sprawling, late-night convo on communication and creative production in year 2022. Along the way, we note the accelerating pace of decades, revisit Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 mass-media glow-up, log a veritable dictionary of neologisms, consider whether the art market as we know is a historically bound concept, and ask if we’ve possibly reached the end of clear-cut, market-ready “generations.” Also: mid-ification, zentrism, eNFT portals, and adult drainers.

Scholar of media studies and Chernobyl expert Svitlana Matviyenko joins us from Kamyanets Podilskyi, Ukraine to discuss critical infrastructure security and the imminence of cyberwarfare. On this episode, Svitlana, who is also the co-author of Cyberwar & Revolution: Digital Subterfuge of Global Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) gives an expanded definition of “cybernetic warfare” and what she calls “communicative militarism”; connects psychological-operations with the post-war “commercial seduction of the subject”; reveals present-day strategies of “audience production,” and unpacks the post-digital terms of mutually assured destruction.

New Models speaks with Z, founder of the BLACK SOCIALISTS of AMERICA (BSA), an online channel turned IRL organization providing a forum and voice for black American leftists as well as education around the values of socialism (per Marx). In this episode, we discuss the inherent racism of the “American Dream” (i.e., capitalism), the promise of worker co-ops, identity politics’ tactical deficiencies in big stack activism, and how to leverage online traction to effect real world political change. This item is publicly available as part of the Library Stack Public Branch at NN Contemporary Art.

Recorded mid-“Future of Critique”-conference in the former West German capital of Bonn, this conversation with New York-based artist & consultant DENA YAGO (formerly K-HOLE) and artist JOSHUA CITARELLA real-talk-debriefs some of the structural models on which legacy criticism built its house. Topics include: the museum’s changing cultural status, the knock-on effects of “anti-gatekeeping” discourse, speculative near-future museum defense strategies, the alt paths of younger artists, and what publishing models stand a chance post-2022.

Political scientist Kevin Munger joins NM to discuss his new book Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2022). Along the way Kevin demystifies the hippie to yuppie pipeline, sheds light on the changing intergenerational contract, explains the origins of the concept of “generations,” and considers what may happen when Boomers’ outsize influence wanes.

Choose Your Future, 2021, is part of KW Digital: Open Secret, 16 July – 31 December. In 2021, I commissioned a group of artists and memers to write short wiki-style descriptions of fantastical future scenarios. Writers were instructed to copy/paste existing wikipedia entries and “play mad libs” with the nouns and dates. Drawing on movements from the past, these short stories recombine political history to anticipate long tail ideologies and factions that may soon emerge. Choose Your Future takes the hyperbolic imaginings of young people, raised on the internet, and puts their words directly into the mouths of content creators. In this ...

Dubbed the “busiest man on the internet,” polymath TIM HWANG, currently a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University, visits the NM pod to discuss his new book, Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (FSG, 2020). We also talk GPT-3, predictive policing, DIY platforms, and founding the first-ever conference on memes.

Artists JOSHUA CITARELLA & RACHEL ROSSIN join NM for a freestyle audit of the 2022 art ecosystem. We discuss how the economy of cultural production, both on-platform and off, is evolving post peak-lockdown.

What exists beyond America’s blue-checkmark core? Journalist JAMES POGUE (Harper’s, New Yorker, American Conservative, plus author of the 2022 Vanity Fair chartbuster “Inside the New Right: Where Peter Thiel is Placing His Biggest Bets,” as well as his 2018 book, Chosen Country) joins NM just before the 2022 midterm elections to sketch out the emergent USA he sees. Along the way, we talk localism v. globalism vis-a-vis 18th-century politics, 20th-century media, and the likelihood of 21st-century American civil war.

NM speaks with Kevin Driscoll, author of The Modem World: A Pre-history of Social Media (Yale University Press, 2022), which examines the physical — and social — technology that underpinned the DIY side of networked technology’s evolution in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Parallel to institutional network culture were the proto-dark-forest communities of BBS networks and other pre-www systems. From FidoNet to De Digitale Stad (DDS) Netherlands, Kevin maps out this early territory, with a brief history of the French Minitel system along the way. Through his work, Kevin asks us to consider what it really means to be “autonomous” online and what ...

When Spotify was founded in 2006, it aimed to solve the problem of online music distribution, remunerating artists for plays. 13 years on, it is a massive data node that is having a profound effect on how artists and audiences connect. In this cast, New Models speaks with music journalist Liz Pelly, who has written extensively on Spotify, particularly its impact on independent music. She talks to us, here, about Spotify’s structure, how it nudges artists to optimize their acts through metrics, and what it understands “music” (let alone “independent”) culture to be. Liz also gives an update on community ...