Peanuts minus Schulz brings together a selection of comic strips home brewed by over one thousand deskilled microworkers from twenty different countries commissioned through digital labor services. The operation consists in the reproduction of iconic comic strips using a number of variations devised by Ilan Manouach. Artist and researcher Ilan Manouach advances conceptual comics as an artistic practice devised to disrupt the myth of the solitary genius through the glorification of craftsmanship and fictions of artistic ethos and integrity. Conceptual comics aims to distance source artworks to make the claim for an expanded agency, in this case for the sake of microworkers as a whole. The operation Peanuts minus Schulz reveals the mechanisms at work behind creativity in the making and the potential of the art form in flux when it is informed by the peripheral vision of the interconnected precariat.
«The objectives and outcomes are light years away from what is generally discussed in the context of digital comics. (…) It is the tremendous merit of Ilan Manouach to help focus on the real stakes of the digital turn in comics (and art in general), which are not technological but cultural, that is artistic, social, economic and political.» – Jan Baetens, Leonardo Reviews
France: JBE | 700 pages | softcover edition with flaps | 2021 | 225mm x 160mm
