Dylan Horrocks

@dylanhorrocks

Spills ink, rolls dice. hicksvillecomics.com

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Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jul 1

There's also an Auckland launch this Sunday, on Len's *actual* birthday: 5th July, 3:30pm, at Lamplight Books. Happy Moments for all!

BOOK LAUNCH
The Len Lye Foundation and Roger Horrocks are pleased to invite you, together with friends, family &c. to the launch of Happy Moments by Len Lye: Len Lye’s memories of his childhood and adolescence, and how he became an artist. In celebration of the 125th anniversary of Lye’s birthday.
Lamplight Books — G01/100 Parnell Road, Parnell
3.30pm — Sunday 5 July
Introduction and Refreshments
ALL WELCOME

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jul 1

Once again, my fab dad Roger Horrocks has a new book coming out! It's about Len Lye's early years, from childhood to becoming an artist. There's a launch event at Unity Books in Wellington on Sunday 19th July, at 5pm. Come celebrate Len's 125th birthday with great words & happy moments!

BOOK LAUNCH
The Len Lye Foundation and Roger Horrocks are pleased to invite you, together with friends, family etc. to the launch of Happy Moments by Len Lye (edited by Roger Horrocks): Len Lye’s memories of his childhood and adolescence, and how he became an artist. In celebration of the 125th anniversary of Lye’s birthday.
Unity Books — 57 Willis Street, Wellington Central
5pm — Sunday 19 July
Introduction and Refreshments
ALL WELCOME

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jun 1

This book is a total heartbreaker. So beautiful, so sad... 💔 @fantagraphics.bsky.social

The cover of the graphic novel Return to Eden by Paco Roca.

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· May 10

Have you read Lynda Barry's Picture This? It goes deep into this vibe

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Apr 19

Awkward news feed juxtaposition of the day

Screengrab of RNZ news feed. At the top: LIVE: AUCKLAND HOUSE SET ALIIGHT BY LIGHTNING STRIKE. Next headline: 'Electrify everything we can': Greens isdue warning in State of the Planet' address

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Mar 12

If you're in Wellington tonight, come see what our MFA in Visual Narrative students made! Comics, animation, concept art, hybrid literature, visual novels, games! THISTLE HALL (upstairs) 293 Cuba St Friday 13 March, 5pm-10pm (tonight only!) www.visualnarrativelab.com/.../the-ever...

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Mar 11

Light reading #gamestudies #TTRPGs

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Feb 23

And some experimental (queer) games... My favourite Avery Alder book (Canada): buriedwithoutceremony.com/variations-o... An autobiographical solo game by Logan Timmins (Australia): breathingstories.itch.io/logan Smart, provocative game zines by Riwhi Kenny (from Aotearoa NZ): takataapui.itch.io

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Feb 23

And comics...! Two books that gave me a feeling of vertigo - in the best possible way (Olivier Schrauwen's Sunday & Anders Nilsen's Tongues)

Olivier Schrauwen's graphic novel Sunday (from Fantagraphics)

Anders Nilsen's graphic novel Tongues (from Pantheon)

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Feb 23

Meghan O'Gieblyn's God, Human, Animal, Machine - I read this a couple of years ago, but have been thinking about it a lot recently (for obvious reasons).

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Feb 2

A reminder that Minneapolis-St Paul is where modern RPGs were born, via David Wesely's Braunstein & Dave Arneson's Blackmoor (which became D&D). This month, MN-based @atlasgames.bsky.social is raising money to help Minnesotans affected by ICE's campaign of terror. www.atlas-games.com/news/post?s=...

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jan 31

Bluesky post by @trungles.com: "It always feels like all the wrong people die, but I think it's because there are far more beloved people than there are bastards."

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jan 28

(lovingly drawn at least 11 years ago)

A highly respectful sketch-portrait of NZ's favourite public servant, with the caption: On a typical day, Hon. Judith Collins, M.P., radiates sufficient hatred to power two medium-sized cities.

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Nov 17

My fabulous Dad, Roger Horrocks, has a brand new book out, with launch events in Auckland (this Sunday 23 November) and Wellington (Sunday 30 November). If you're into music, sound, listening, thinking, or reading, this book is for you! 🎶 atuanuipress.co.nz/product/musi...

Book launch for Music Without End: a Book of Listening, by Roger Horrocks. At Lamplight Books, G01/100 Parnell Road, Parnell. 3:30pm, Sunday 23 November. Introduced by Wystan Curnow. All welcome

Book launch for Music Without End: a Book of Listening, by Roger Horrocks. At Unity Books, 57 Willis St, Wellington. 5pm, Sunday 30 November. Introduced by Chris Bourke. All welcome

Back over of Music Without End: a Book of Listening, by Roger Horrocks.
What is listening? How does music work?
Music Without End: A Book of Listening will introduce you to unfamiliar
areas of music and spark new insights into the nature and pleasures of
listening.
Besides providing an unusually wide-ranging, accessible survey of the
landscape of music, and the various ways we listen, it features interviews with ten people deeply involved in the field – composers, singers, and sound specialists – working in popular, jazz, classical, experimental or global music. If you’re a listener who enjoys only some of those genres, this book can revolutionize your interest in them all.
“This book is a must read for anyone with music in their lives. Horrocks’s passion for music in its broadest spectrum is inspiration to get out there and hear what’s going on. You don’t know what you are missing! It’s an insightful exploration through time and location of that amazing phenomenon we call music.”
– Peter Scholes (composer, performer, conductor)
“Roger Horrocks is up with the zeitgeist, from esoteric punk to arcane
European avant-garde. He has kept me happily guessing for decades by suggesting new music names to me. From Ars Subtilior to Wandelweiser, Horrocks leads the reader gently by the ear into his world of listening, and we’re enchanted.”
– Eve de Castro-Robinson (composer)
This Book of Listening is a sequel to Roger Horrocks’s 2022 Book of Seeing.
Horrocks was the author of Len Lye: A Biography and Song of the Ghost in the Machine, which were both finalists in the NZ Book Awards. He was also the librettist of Len Lye: The Opera.

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Oct 20

Come create your graphic novel, picture book, animation, video game, boardgame, TTRPG, larp, visual novel, fictional world (or other weird & wonderful thing) with us! Apply (by Dec. 1) for the MFA in Visual Narrative at Victoria University of Wellington: visualnarrativelab.nz/study-with-us

A group of eager anthropomorphic artists on a tiny island, hard at work on their visual narrative masterpieces! (cartoon by Dylan Horrocks)

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Sep 26

Was that a spellckeck error?

News headline: Trump orders release of Earheart files

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Sep 9

Chloe's body language says it all.

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Aug 22

It feels like day by day, step by step, the US GOP are incrementally normalising the idea of criminalising all opposition (and using the police & military to enforce that). Each time they get away with one of these actions or statements, the worst becomes a little more credible, more inevitable...

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Aug 2

I'm at a loss to understand how anyone could describe Chris Ware's comics as "cold."* This book's an emotional roller coaster; the last few pages brought me to tears. Roll on volume 2!!! ❤️ *unless they mean it meteorologically; there is, admittedly, an awful lot of snow.

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jul 23

Paris The Man of Plaster, by Glenn Dakin

Monitor (from Mauretania Comics), by Chris Reynolds

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jul 19

Reading Sunday on a Sunday. This is one for the ages.

A photo of a copy of Olivier Schrauwen's graphic novel, Sunday.

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jul 13

Currently reading Jeffrey Ford for the very first time and HOLY SHIT!

Cover of Jeffrey Ford's novel The Shadow Year.

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jun 23

What's a poster you had in your room growing up? (Wish I still had these!!!) (Art by Pauline Baynes)

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jun 23

Forgive me, but the other day I saw a talk that had some AI-generated illustrations and I ended up staring at them for ages, trying to study them *as art*: their mark-making, aesthetics, surface qualities, etc. Curious to know if my observations match yours? (Sorry I don't have the images to share).

The other day I was watching a talk and the slides were illustrated using generative AI images (one that looked like a painting, the other like a drawing). These slides were on the screen for 20 minutes or more and so I found myself studying the illustrations closely (the first time I've examined an individual AI image for so long!). It was fascinating to try and work out what it was that made them recognisably AI-generated and to examine their visual aesthetics (how they actually look, regardless of how they've been made).
At a glance, they were quite attractive and it’s possible many casual viewers wouldn’t realise they were AI-generated—although it was instantly obvious to me and others in the audience; they just had that look. But what is that look? What are those stylistic quirks that told me this was made by a machine?
The longer I studied them, the more I felt there was something really tentative and noncommittal about the mark-making, as though the artist was constantly bluffing, trying to make it look just convincing enough—pixel by pixel—in contrast to the intentional mark-making of a human who knows what they're trying to draw or paint (even if they’re not nailing it all the time). There were whole areas that could have been anything: notably dark, smudgy, or unclear, as if to cover up that the artist has no fucking idea what to put there.

Also, there was no sense of focused attention: for a human artist, parts of an image are more important and meaningful, and their mark-making is (intuitively) organised around those. Elements and details are foregrounded, rendered with care and conviction; while others provide them with support, or recede—even disappear—altogether. The AI has no real sense of what matters in the image (because there's no awareness of meaning at all) and so it's loathe to leave space empty and tends to fill every square centimetre with something, and every detail is rendered with the same level (or lack) of attention.
It made me think of a (fake) mind-reader or psychic, who puts out a flurry of vague statements, watching to see which ones get a positive reaction, adjusting what they're saying based on our reactions, bluffing that they know what they're talking about even though they're really only filling a blank space with an illusion of meaning, just convincing enough to get away with it.
The end result can be visually compelling and persuasive, but I'm struck by that underlying lack of conviction and awareness: the tentativeness, the sense of bluff, illusion, fakery. It's in the very surface and texture of the image.
Of course, who knows what AI art will look like in a few years (I'm guessing some of the output will be better at hiding the bluff, while a lot will look even more soulless and fake—but really, who the hell knows!).

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jun 23

This is one of my favourite comics ever - and definitely my favourite manga (with Sunny a very close second). ❤️❤️❤️ #TaiyoMatsumoto

Taiyo Matsumoto's 3-volume manga, Tokyo These Days.

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jun 16

Oh and Brian Chippendale's strange and beautiful Maggots is partly inspired by playing D&D (he even named his band after a D&D spell): books.google.co.nz/books/about/... & madinkbeard.com/archives/mag...

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jun 16

Donjon (so many books!) by Sfaar, Trondheim, et al!

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jun 16

Dungeon Quest (3 volumes) by Joe Daly

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jun 13

The world is on fire, but while it burns, why not read Ned Wenlock's award-winning (Kiwi) graphic novel Tsunami, out now in North America (in English or French editions) from Editions Pow Pow: editionspowpow.com/en/products/...

Dylan Horrocks@dylanhorrocks· Jun 11

If you're in Pōneke, come see this exhibition (opens tonight, up till 22 June) - a fundraiser in support of a wonderful local artist's gender affirming surgery. Loads of work for sale: paintings, prints, pottery. And from me: some original art from the Magic Pen, framed prints, and books.