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Abstract :
[en] While speculations about the growing role of machines in artistic production have been a consistent trope in modern and contemporary art debates throughout the 20th century, comics from their early beginnings, have been symbiotically expanding with the development of printing, distribution, communication and media technologies. These industrial processes of completion based on generalized automation, standardization practices and an orchestrated division of labour are so embedded in the ways we understand and consume comics that have become an essential feature for the conceptualization of artistic practices in the medium. A typical production line of manga comics, for instance, involves dozens of people handling specialized roles in a quasi-taylorist production belt, often in ways that have been criticized for resembling a sweat shop, while distribution has been increasingly involving massively digitized operations of logistics and global supply chains. Comics is an industrial form of artistic expression.
At the same time, the comics industry has been quite reticent in embracing the complex nature of technological developments in automation and especially in artificial intelligence. Synthetic and generative processes might soon reshape the ways we produce, consume, archive and distribute comics artefacts. A more wide adoption of artificial intelligence in different strata of the industry might reconfigure existing readership(s) market(s) and will ultimately force a radical realignement for the practitioners’ artistic ethos and contribute to the formation of new reader sensibilities.
During my talk, I would like to present two published book projects I did, that used different processes of automation, and a third one on the making.
The research for this talk was supported by the Onassis Digital Residency Program (Athens), the Kone Foundation (Helsinki) and the Federation Wallonie Bruxelles – soutien a la bande dessinee program (Brussels).
