Ilan Manouach presents his work with AI and Chat GPT

Images created by artificial intelligence (AI) have created concerns and fears in the art world. Meet the controversial conceptual comics artist Ilan Manouach in a conversation about "synthetic comics".

While speculations about the growing role of automation in artistic production have been a consistent trope in modern and contemporary art debates throughout the mid-twentieth century, in comics, industrial manufacturing, automation and scalability are hard-coded features of the medium’s production routines. Focusing on a rapidly moving target, this talk situates the introduction of AI technologies in comics against the background of a massive digitization of printed comics and new forms of semi-professional labor and digital mediation. With the term “synthetic comics,” Manouach proposes to describe comics content that was generated, modified or manipulated in a highly automated manner by way of generative algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Tha artist will be presenting some of his earlier published work of conceptual comics, and more recent work that was co-created with emergent AI.

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Ilan Manouach is a researcher, a musician and a multidisciplinary artist with a specific interest in conceptual and post-digital comics. Currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Ilan has a PhD from Aalto University in Helsinki where he examined how this century’s frontier technologies such as AI, financial technologies and globalized logistics reshape the comics industry. He is mostly known for Shapereader, a system for tactile storytelling specifically designed for blind and partially sighted readers/makers of comics. 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.

The Comics Journal called him “one of the most critical contemporary cartoonists and thinkers working today” and Kenneth Goldsmith described him as “the most provocative, critical, and intelligent comic artist alive”.