[Comicsstudiessociety] CFP - Comics as Computation

[Benoît Crucifix]

Dear all,

Apologies for cross-posting.
I would like to share a call for chapters for a volume edited by Ilan
Manouach and myself. Don't hesitate to circulate - the call is also
attached for your convenience to this email.

Wishes for an excellent summer,



*Comics as Computation:**An uninterrupted thread of operational intensity*

edited by
Ilan Manouach (FNRS, ULiège, Metalab at Harvard)
& Benoît Crucifix (KU Leuven, KBR)

While considerations of the growing role of automation in artistic
production have been a consistent trope in modern and contemporary art
debates since the mid-twentieth century (from Siegfried Giedion to Jack
Burnham and Rosalind Krauss), in comics, industrial manufacturing,
automation and scalability are hard-coded features of the medium’s
production routines. Concepts such as efficiency, marginal utility, and
computability hold significant conceptual and technical importance in
comics. As a medium, comics have developed within a dense information
economy driven by the standardization of best practices for the
transformation of craft into mass production. The industrial scale of these
operations, from the early stages of ideation down to the last-minute
editorial revisions, relies on a carefully orchestrated labor and an
operative architecture of human/machinic determination. Their production
depends on sets of discrete, decentralized and somewhat asynchronous
operations that should be captured in terms of what computer scientist Rudy
Rucker describes as computation; any “process that obeys finitely
describable rules,” involving operations of calculating, processing and
transforming information employing diverse substrates, digital or otherwise.
This collective volume aims to provide a historical understanding of the
intensification of automation in the comics industry, leading to today’s
integration of algorithmic tools for the production of comics. It has the
goal to examine to which extent comics are the direct output of industrial
processes of completion based on instituted sets of standardization
practices and how deeply automation is embedded in the conceptualization of
artistic practices in the medium. *Comics as Computation* ambitions to
analyze how the integration of computational processes for the production
of contemporary comics is consistent with the industry’s early experiments
in automation. By tracing an account of the medium’s very early attempts to
industrialize and automate its production, and by identifying the
precedents foregrounding the importance of human-machine relationships in
comics from early on, *Comics as Computation* reshifts the understanding of
comics craftsmanship as a symbiotic expansion alongside the early
development of printing, distribution, and communication technologies. This
volume should be positioned to suggest historical continuities by following
the uninterrupted thread of the same operational intensity with today’s
synthetic comics and generalized adoption of computational tools such as
Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, chatgpt, Hugging Face, among many others.

In the present volume, we are particularly interested in contributions
examining the following research areas:

   - scalability and efficiency in comics and comics craft
   - international perspectives on formats, production procedures, best
   practices and standardization
   - comics as data
   - (dis)similarities between AI-assisted creation and standardized
   drawing methods
   - longer history of computational tools
   - historical perspectives on the role of engineering and its impact on
   comics craft
   - role of audiences and users in practices of automation and
   standardization; forms of (digital) playbor
   - data-mining techniques in the (re)circulation of comics
   - informatization and discretization of comics archives
   - integration of machine learning tools for comics artists
   - against automation: resistance and discontent to increased
   technological mediation in the production of comics

The volume is particularly open to international contributions; we are
happy to consider translation possibilities. Based on the selected
abstracts, the volume will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed
book series with an international academic publisher. More details will
follow based on proposals.

Abstract length : *250 words *
Short bio (150 words)
Deadline for abstracts: *1st November 2023*
Notifications of acceptance: 30th November 2023
Send to reader at echochamber.be
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