Coco Picard

hair-raising encounters with films in their natural habitat.
Visit the University of Minnesota Press website to buy your copy and check out the other titles in our series!

More coming soon...

@uminnpress.bsky.social @cocolarolo.bsky.social #artafternature #anthropocene #posthumanism #animals

Book cover of One Spring Up North by John Owens. Colored-pencil drawing of a person holding a canoe paddle standing among flowers before wavy waters and distant trees. Title and author in sky above.

Book cover of Cinemal: The Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film by Tessa Laird. Film still of a baby sloth hanging onto a tree branch upside down, highlighted in vivid rainbow colors. Title in white lowercase letters above.

Two vibrant books release today!

-One Spring Up North: A wordless picture-book journey through an awakening spring in the Boundary Waters

-Cinemal: Where experimental films and animals collide, in the Art after Nature series ed. by @giovannialoi.bsky.social and @cocolarolo.bsky.social

#NewBooks

In this comic interview Coco Picard speaks with Emily Everett about her debut novel “All That Life Can Afford,” the test prep industry as a microcosm for how the world works, and how class structure determines accessibility in the UK. buff.ly/Xe3U5a4

“The Book of Disappearance” Explores a Fictional World Where Palestinians Vanish - Electric Literature Ibtisam Azem discusses the Nakba, colonialism, and the role of literature in resisting erasure

In this comic interview Coco Picard (@cocolarolo.bsky.social) speaks with Ibtisam Azem about her novel "The Book of Disappearance," and what it means to write against disappearance. buff.ly/iS67LXq

Save the Chicago Reader - Salem Collo-Julin's Fundraiser on Donorbox Imagine a teenager in a study carrel at a Chicago Public Library branch. It’s the late end of the 1980s, and a stack of newspapers is on a table nearby. Standing up to stretch after an hour of pretend...

And that's just a few of the stories you'll read if you hit our website or find a print copy on the streets of Chicago. Local journalism matters. Take a stand for us and for all the people we cover by donating to @chicagoreader.com now. donorbox.org/save-the-chi... /end

Failing up - Chicago Reader True Failure, the latest novel from Alex Higley, follows the deceptions of characters failing upward in their bid for the American dream.

Writer and artist @cocolarolo.bsky.social brings us an illustrated interview with author @alexhigley.bsky.social about his latest, out from @coffeehousepress.bsky.social. Higley appears at Chicago's Exile in Bookville on 2/28. chicagoreader.com/books/book-r... 4/

New graphic interview with @acrebooks.bsky.social author Moshe Zvi Marvit is now live! #NothingVast

Libraries as radical sites of private/anti-AI research

Hopefully yielding a late winter success!

Yesterdays note to self

Weizenbaum’s nightmares: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence – but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans

“Seeing humans and computers as interchangeable also meant that humans had begun to conceive of themselves as computers, and so to act like them. They mechanised their rational faculties by abandoning judgment for calculation, mirroring the machine in whose reflection they saw themselves.“

Weizenbaum’s nightmares: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence – but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans

“As a result, computers had been given authority over matters in which they had no competence. (It would be a “monstrous obscenity”, Weizenbaum wrote, to let a computer perform the functions of a judge in a legal setting or a psychiatrist in a clinical one.) www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

against artificial intelligentsia

Music for Sarah

Late night comics brought me back to a playlist I made for a friend open.spotify.com/playlist/32h...

1000% this. Public libraries are actually pretty radical--free to all, and based on the idea that info should be available to all. Get a library card! Use your library! Those numbers often play into their funding.

As Trump takes office, Chicago Public Schools tries to reassure parents it will keep immigrant & LGBTQ students safe. www.cps.edu/services-and...

Armchair painter bots have robust followings of other bots with separate but generic art techniques—e.g. the eye sketching bot, the color pencil puppy bot, the alpine landscape pointillist bot etc

Bots paint pastoral kinkaid knock offs to prove they aren’t bots

YouTube video by The Golden Circle David Lynch’s final weather report

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRJc...

Donate to Help LA's Artists and Art Workers Start Over, organized by Grief and Hope Grief… and hope. We are a group of volunteers—artists, gallery employees,… Grief and Hope needs your support for Help LA's Artists and Art Workers Start Over

Support the LA Artists relief fund www.gofundme.com/f/help-rebui...

I have this book and can confirm both weird and wonderful.

"Message to the performers: Do not try to carry this play forward. Let it creep slowly over the stage with no help, with no end in view."
- Richard Foreman, Idiot Savant

If NYE fashion says anything about 2025, dog sweaters are IN.

Preschool breakout group

Francis Alÿs, '1943,' 2012, first shown at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany.

Sound of Music remake by Sofia Coppola

The PR dept for the brussels sprouts industry goes wild!

Colors sing in the rain.

Shout out to the first grade dad in Facebook glasses bearing witness to archived absurdities of my long fallow account during school drop off.