Civilization is an occasional broadsheet newspaper founded in New York in 2018 by Richard Turley, Lucas Mascatello, and Mia Kerin. What began as a personal project about living in the city gradually morphed into an art project probing how language (messy, overheard, interrupted, charged), is used and experienced in public and private spaces. Its content emerged from secretly recorded moments and conversations on cell phones at parties, offices, sidewalks, and subways, powered by the arrival of low-cost transcription software that enabled rapid capture and remixing. This process lent Civilization its distinctive rhythm, density, and immediacy.

Before most others, the publication experimented with AI; feeding earlier issues into primitive large-language models to generate new content, making it one of the first to treat machine learning as a creative collaborator. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Civilization published Lockdown Letters: five hand-mailed bundles composed in spring 2020. These featured postcards, recipes, mood fragments, stickers, and contributions from artists and writers, like dispatches from a sealed world. 

Beyond its newspapers, Civilization has a radio show on NTS and has produced small editions, t-shirts, posters, and collaborated with brands including Calvin Klein and Junya Watanabe, embedding the publication’s conversational textures into fashion. Contributors have included: Aaron Maine, Alis Atwell, Amos Poe, Amalia Ulman, Anna Khachiyan, Aria Dean, Alicia Novella Vasquez, Bill Drummond, Biz Sherbert, Babak Radboy, Carly Busta, Dasha Nekrasova, Darcie Wilder, Dean Kissick, Echo Wu, Ella Plevin, Eric Johnson, Honor Levy, Iris Luz, Mel Ottenberg, Isabelle Rea, Joey LaBeija, Jordan Barse, Lovefoxx, Maddie Quinn, Patrick McMullan, Rachel Rabbit White, Sybil Prentice, Thom Bettridge, and Zans Brady Krohn.