• affiliate Metalab at Harvard • affiliate Labo Paragraphe at Paris 8 • visiting professor at the University of Uppsala
Ilan Manouach is a researcher, a conceptual comics artist and a book publisher. He completed a PhD at Aalto University on comics epistemology (2022).
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 non-profit organization dedicated to comics research (part of the Creative Europe consortium of Expanded Publishing), and Futures of Comics, an international research programme for comics professionals. He is the founder of Topovoros Books, a Greek publishing house spearheading translations of cornerstone essays in humanities and the curator for the collections of Conceptual Comics for Ubuweb and Monoskop. His work is the subject of a dedicated Routledge critical anthology and his latest book, Out Side, is a collaboration with K Allado-McDowell.
Latest books:
•Out Side(JBE, 2024) a comic book co-authored with K Allado-McDowell exploring the boundaries of post-Internet art and artificial intelligence.
•Reading(Belgium: La Cinquieme Couche, France: L’Endroit, 2024) a compendium that reveals the remarkable potential of letters as a catalyst for introspection, character development, and unexpected plot twists in Disney comics.
• ONEPIECE(JBE, 2022) consists of all the volumes of the worldwide bestseller One Piece, assembled into a single book of 21.540 pages. ONEPIECE exists only as an object of pure speculation.
• Fastwalkers(Belgium: La Cinquieme Couche, Portugal:CCC, Italy: D Editore, 2022) The first synthetic comic book written with emerging AI, Fastwalkers is a nonlinear meditation on deep learning that celebrates the unexpected poetics of generative computing and explores its potential to form new reader sensibilities.
• Chimeras. Inventory of Synthetic Cognition (ed. Onassis, 2022) A collective glossary on AI, with 150 contributors exploring the synthetic nature of cognition from a variety of perspectives: interspecies, crip, monstrous, feminist, distributed, and decolonial, among others.
