- On Tuesday 2/4, I am giving a talk/workshop at the School of the Chicago Art Institute about the Shapereader project, in Chicago, Illinois.

- On Thursday 4/4, I am presenting a paper on User Diversity in Contemporary Comics at the International Comics Art Forum at the St.Ambroise University in Davenport, Iowa.

- From 7-14, I will be curating during the Fumetto Festival in Luzern, Switzerland the research program Futures of Comics. Through reading sessions, artist talks, various workshops open to the general public, a symposium and the production of a temporary library / reading space, Futures of Comics and its international guests attempt to document and reflect on contemporary artistic practices with the goal to provide a resonating chamber for works and practices that are little known outside of comics communities. https://futuresofcomics.or

Ilan Manouach (Athens, 1980) is a musician, a book publisher and a multidisciplinary artist with a specific interest in conceptual and post-digital comics. He currently holds a PhD researcher position at the Aalto University in Helsinki (adv. Craig Dworkin) where he examines the intersections of contemporary comics, art and poetry. His work claims for the importance of comics as a materially self-reflexive medium, unaffiliated to any general art history. He has more than twenty published bookworks under his belt, solo exhibitions to important festivals, museums and galleries worldwide, and his work features in the Ubuweb archive. He is mostly known for Shapereader, a tactile system of communication for comics artists with visual disabilities. His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, New YorkMagazine, World Literature Today, Wired, LeMonde, The Comics Journal, du9, 50watts and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Wasting Time on the Internet and his works are also part of the Ubuweb online contemporary art archive.

He was the curator of the Festival Shadow Libraries: Ubuweb in Athens, that proposed to examine the uses of the archive in regards to artistic production and explore the conceptual consistency and the ethics of digital preservation and distribution in web libraries, through the lens of its users and makers. The festival consisted of two symposia, four workshops, a media show and a 24h video programme and took place in the Onassis Cultural Centre in March 2018.

In 2019, Manouach is currently working for an online collection of conceptual comics for Monoskop. The collection explores and documentes materialist practices in experimental comics that engage the reader to interact with the works in nonspecified, at times forensic, ways of examination. In April 2019, he will also present the project The Futures of Comics, an international symposium / itinerant library that reflects on archival practices in regards to contemporary comics (Fumetto, Luzern),