Coyote Time Reading Club

The Coyote Time Reading Club is a serial program that will run from June 2026 through December 2026. The Coyote Time Reading Club meets once a month and we will read a different text provided by the curatorial team. Each selected text was in some way inspirational or foundational to the framing of our upcoming exhibition, Coyote Time. Attendees will be able to engage deeper with the themes of the exhibition–including climate action, interconnection, and intergenerational learning.

The Reading Club will take place, in-person only, on the third Tuesday of the month.

When: 5:30–7pm on Tuesday, November 17th

Where: Counterpublic Carriage House, 3733 Washington Ave

Text: The Vicarious Brain by Alain Berthoz, selected by curator Nora N. Khan.

Read the prologue, chapter 1, and chapter 2 for discussion. Please bring a printed copy or the virtual version to our meetup.

Curator Nora N. Khan chose these excerpts from The Vicarious Brain because they lay out Berthoz’s core proposition, namely that vicariance, the substitution of one process for another to reach the same goal, is a fundamental mechanism of life, and “the key to the human faculty for creating imaginary worlds.” That claim maps directly onto the wager of Coyote Time, around the suspended moment of the leap, where no single path is fixed and the platform hasn’t yet appeared. This is the condition in which the brain improvises a substitute route.

The prologue frames vicariance against a present flattened by standardization and “process,” insisting, instead, on the freedom to create. This resonates with our edition’s insistence on jumping “with faith, purpose, and intentionality” while protections are being stripped away. Chapter 1 gives conceptual ground (vicarious usage; the many worlds a single object can hold), letting us think about how the coyote — adaptive, interstitial, moving fluidly between built and natural worlds — is itself a figure of vicarious usage, reading multiple functions into the same terrain. Chapter 2 (“Perceiving and Acting”) grounds all of this effort in the body: sensory substitution, the vicarious gesture, and creation of internal models that let us simulate and speculate before acting.

These excerpts move from provocation, to concept, to embodiment. One can find, in them, a bit of shared vocabulary for the exhibition’s central question around “what worlds are made in the space of the leap,” and further, how, and by what improvised means.