Ilan Manouach is a conceptual comics artist, a book publisher and a strategy consultant for Onassis Publications. He completed a PhD at Aalto University on comics epistemology exploring the effects of frontier technologies, synthetic media, fintech and globalized logistics on the comics industry.
He is mostly known for Shapereader, a system for tactile storytelling initially designed for people with visual disabilities. He is the founder of Echo Chamber, a Brussels-based non-profit organization with the mission to produce, fundraise, document and archive radical and speculative artistic practices in contemporary comics. and the director of Futures of Comics, an international research programme that examines the ongoing historic mutations of the comics industry in the midst of increasingly financialized, globalized and technological affordances. With Kenneth Goldsmith, he co-curated Shadow Libraries, a festival that probed the conceptual consistency and the ethics of digital preservation and distribution in web libraries, through the lens of its users and makers. He is also the curator for the collections of Conceptual Comics for Ubuweb and Monoskop.
For more information on Ilan’s work, please visit or write to the Brussels-based non-profit organization EchoChamber.
Latest books:
• Chimeras. Inventory of Synthetic Cognition (2022) A collective glossary on AI, with 160 contributors exploring the synthetic nature of cognition from a variety of perspectives: interspecies, crip, monstrous, feminist, distributed, and decolonial, among others, (coedited with Anna Engelhardt).
