Comics For Cyborgs: On AI and comics with Ilan Manouach

Images created by artificial intelligence (AI) have created concerns and fears in the art world. Meet the controversial 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. Images created by artificial intelligence (AI) have created concerns and fears in the art world, but there are other inputs to the subject.

Focusing on a rapidly moving target, Ilan Manouach 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.

On stage with Manouach will be Catherine Anyango Grünewald, artist, comics creator and Senior Lecturer at Konstfack.