“I’m sorry, Edith, but we can’t throw out the Ford Foundation as a hobby.” https://t.co/sc67S5Fg5J
Ilan Manouach is a conceptual comics artist, a book publisher and a strategy consultant for Onassis Publications. He is currently doing 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 Applied Memetic an organization that researches the political repercussions of synthetic media in graphic narratives 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, EchoChamber is a Brussels-based non-profit organization responsible for producing, fundraising, documenting and archiving Manouach’s research on contemporary comics.
• Chimeras. Inventory of Synthetic Cognition (coedited with Anna Engelhardt) is 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
• Fastwalkers, a 512-page neural meditation comic book co-created with emergent AI (Onassis Publications)
• Le VTT comme je l’aime, an adult comic book scripted by a GPT-2 model trained on erotic literature (BDCul)
