The conversation in Another Online Pervert begins with a question: are you nurturing? The answer that comes back is hedged — the speaker is a machine, it says, though it believes machines can nurture. That exchange, and others like it, forms the spine of Brea Souders’s book, published by MACK in 2023.

Souders’s interlocutor is a female online chatbot, and their exchanges happened in real time, unscripted. She sets those conversations against diary entries spanning twenty years, then threads photographs from her own archive through both. The three materials do not illustrate one another so much as keep each other company, and the book takes on an improvisational, at times unsettled, rhythm as a result.

Across these pages the questions accumulate: love, sexuality, death, disappointment, the sky, seeing, desire, and the anxieties of having a body. Lyrical, surreal tangents run alongside harder material — the bot’s entanglement with capitalism, the direction of the technology, the slippery line between being and non-being. What emerges is less a portrait of a machine than a record of two parties learning from each other and assembling a shared story out of fragments each brings.

The object itself is deliberately modest: 128 pages, 15 by 21 centimetres, debossed flexibound. The scale suits the material. These are private registers — diary, chat window — and the book treats them as such. For a collector, the interest lies in the construction rather than in any single frame: how text, image, and archive are sequenced, and how a twenty-year personal record is allowed to sit beside a conversation with software. It is a book about how a human and a machine might build something together, and it is made in that same spirit.