Postdoctoral FNRS fellow at the Université de Liège | affiliate Metalab at Harvard | affiliate Laboratoire Paragraphe at Université Paris 8.
Ilan Manouach is a conceptual comics artist, a book publisher and a strategy consultant for Onassis Publications. He completed a 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 people with visual disabilities. 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, and the director of Futures of Comics, an international research programme 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 on Ilan’s work, please visit or write to the Brussels-based non-profit organization EchoChamber.
Latest books:
•Out Side(JBE, 2024) a comic book co-authored with K Allado-McDowell exploring the boundaries of post-Internet art and artificial intelligence.
•Reading(Belgium: La Cinquieme Couche, France: L’Endroit, 2024) a compendium that reveals the remarkable potential of letters as a catalyst for introspection, character development, and unexpected plot twists in Disney comics.
• ONEPIECE(JBE, 2022) consists of all the volumes of the worldwide bestseller One Piece, assembled into a single book of 21.540 pages. ONEPIECE exists only as an object of pure speculation.
• Fastwalkers(Belgium: La Cinquieme Couche, Portugal:CCC, Italy: D Editore, 2022) The first synthetic comic book written with emerging AI, Fastwalkers is a nonlinear meditation on deep learning that celebrates the unexpected poetics of generative computing and explores its potential to form new reader sensibilities.
• Chimeras. Inventory of Synthetic Cognition (ed. Onassis, 2022) A collective glossary on AI, with 150 contributors exploring the synthetic nature of cognition from a variety of perspectives: interspecies, crip, monstrous, feminist, distributed, and decolonial, among others.
