Ilan Manouach

Ilan Manouach is a conceptual comics artist, an AI entrepreneur and a strategy consultant for Onassis Publications. He is currently an affiliate scholar at Harvard metaLAB (within Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society); postdoctoral scholar on “Computational Creativity” (University of Liège) and obtained his PhD at Aalto University on comics epistemology exploring the effects of frontier technologies, synthetic media, fintech and globalized logistics on the comics industry. He is mostly known for Shapereader, a system for tactile storytelling initially designed for peοple with visual disabilities. He is the founder of Applied Memetic an organization that researches the political repercussions of synthetic media in graphic narratives and the director of Futures of Comics, an international research program that examines the ongoing historic mutations of the comics industry in the midst of increasingly financialized, globalized and technological affordances. With Kenneth Goldsmith, he co-curated Shadow Libraries, a festival that probed the conceptual consistency and the ethics of digital preservation and distribution in web libraries, through the lens of its users and makers. He is also the curator for the collections of Conceptual Comics for Ubuweb and Monoskop. For more information, Echo Chamber is a Brussels-based non-profit organization responsible for producing, fundraising, documenting and archiving Manouach’s research on contemporary comics. His latest books are “Peanuts Minus Schulz” (2021) and “The Cubicle Island” (2020) and he is currently coediting a glossary on AI, approaching the alien nature of cognition, as distributed, non-Western, interspecies and feminist and Fastwalkers, the first synthetic comic book using GANs and GTP3.

Learn more about Ilan Manouach’s written MA thesis (DAI, 2017): cc, “The Future of Comics Is In the Trash Can.”

Learn more about Ilan Manouach’s 20 minute presentation Possible Languages for Maelstrom Slow Dance - DAI's 3 day lecture-performance marathon, June 2017

Follow Ilan’s "Life after DAI" by means of his website