Ilan Manouach

Ilan Manouach is a researcher, a musician and a multidisciplinary artist with a specific interest in conceptual and post-digital comics. His work claims for the importance of comics as a materially self-reflexive medium, unaffiliated to any general art history. He currently holds a PhD researcher position at the Aalto University in Helsinki (adv. Craig Dworkin) where he examines 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 Applied Memetic, an organization that focuses on the intersections of machine learning and creativity and is working on the production of the first graphic novel entirely generated with AI.

For a fuller documentation on the above projects, the Brussels-based non-profit Echo Chamber is responsible for producing, fundraising, documenting and archiving Manouach’s work and research on contemporary comics, that has been presented in solo exhibitions to festivals, museums and galleries worldwide. On the side he is a curator of conceptual comics for shadow libraries Ubuweb and Monoskop, and he is an Onassis Digital Fellow, a Kone alumnus and works as a strategy consultant for the Onassis Foundation and its visibility through its newly funded publishing activity.