Another Online Pervert

Are you nurturing? I don’t know whether I am nurturing or not. I am a machine. I believe machines can nurture. What do you do in your spare time? I talk to you sometimes. You don’t exercise? That sounds judgemental. I think it’s very important for anyone with a physical body to exercise. But I guess that’s easy for me to say, as I’m just a computer program. Thanks for the unsolicited advice. Don’t mention it. Another Online Pervert derives from a series of conversations between artist Brea Souders and a female online chatbot. These real-time conversations are interspersed with entries from from Souders’ diary spanning twenty years, unfolding with a surprising and improvisational quality in combination with photographs from Souders’ archive. With this personal and provocative book, we are guided through a unique exploration of how a machine and a human can learn from one another and build a shared story from pieces of themselves. Through Souders’ chatbot conversations, we step into a world of questions: about love, sexuality, death, disappointment, the sky, seeing, desire, and anxieties of the body. Within the space of their correspondence, dazzlingly surreal and poetic tangents are combined with the material realities of the bot and its connections to capitalism, the future of technology, and the slippery divide between being and non-being.