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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
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<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><div class="gmail_default"><div style="text-align:left"><font size="2">Dear all,</font></div><div style="text-align:left"><font size="2"><br></font></div><div style="text-align:left"><font size="2">Apologies for cross-posting.<br></font></div><div style="text-align:left"><font size="2">I would like to share a call for chapters for a volume edited by<span> Ilan Manouach and myself. Don't hesitate to circulate - </span><span>the call is also attached for your convenience to this email</span><span>.</span></font></div><div style="text-align:left"><font size="2"><span><br></span></font></div><div style="text-align:left"><font size="2">Wishes for an excellent summer,</font></div><div style="text-align:center"><font size="2"><br></font></div><div style="text-align:center"><font size="2"><br></font></div><div style="font-family:"times new roman",serif;text-align:center"><font size="2"><b>Comics as Computation:<br></b><b>An uninterrupted thread of operational intensity</b></font></div><div style="font-family:"times new roman",serif;text-align:center"><font size="2"><b><br></b></font></div><div style="text-align:center"><font size="2"><span style="font-family:"times new roman",serif">edited by</span><br></font></div><font size="2"><span style="font-family:"times new roman",serif"><div style="text-align:center">Ilan Manouach (FNRS, ULiège, Metalab at Harvard)</div></span><span style="font-family:"times new roman",serif"><div style="text-align:center">& Benoît Crucifix (KU Leuven, KBR)</div></span><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">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.<br>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. <i>Comics as Computation</i> 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, <i>Comics as Computation</i>
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.<br></font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">In the present volume, we are particularly interested in contributions examining the following research areas:<br></font><ul><li><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">scalability and efficiency in comics and comics craft</font></li><li><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">international perspectives on formats, production procedures, best practices and standardization</font></li><li><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">comics as data</font></li><li><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">(dis)similarities between AI-assisted creation and standardized drawing methods</font></li><li><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">longer history of computational tools</font></li><li><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">historical perspectives on the role of engineering and its impact on comics craft </font></li><li><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">role of audiences and users in practices of automation and standardization; forms of (digital) playbor</font></li><li><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">data-mining techniques in the (re)circulation of comics </font></li><li><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">informatization and discretization of comics archives</font></li><li><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">integration of machine learning tools for comics artists </font></li><li><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">against automation: resistance and discontent to increased technological mediation in the production of comics </font></li></ul><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif">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.<br><br>Abstract length : <b>250 words </b><br>Short bio (150 words)<br>Deadline for abstracts: <b>1st November 2023</b><br>Notifications of acceptance: 30th November 2023<br>Send to <a href="mailto:reader@echochamber.be" target="_blank">reader@echochamber.be</a><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font size="2" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div></div></div>