Estranging Comics

Since its beginnings in the late 19th century the comics industry has expanded symbiotically alongside the development of printing, distribution, and communication technologies. As a highly digitized medium with active online communities, comics lend themselves to the programmatic processes that define machine learning and today, synthetic processes are reshaping how we produce, consume, archive and understand all media, including comics. Contemporary comics are computational objects whose operational intensity is considerably shaped by the comics industry’s mutating infrastructure and the crossings and multiplications of information flows. The talk will focus on two recently published works, the book Fastwalkers (Onassis Publications) and the twitterbot, The Neural Yorker. It will explore the expansion of conceptual and “uncreative” practices, the uses and the ethics of synthetic media and generative algorithms in the medium, and the emergence of otherly subjectivities in the production of comics works.