The Context not the Content

The once prevalent availability of comics in physical spaces, exemplified by archival press photos of of pulp kiosks located in high-traffic areas bursting with a diverse offer of comics, has experienced a marked decline, reflecting a significant shift in the medium's accessibility and consumption patterns; comics are less frequently gracing the shelves of newsstands, often require special orders in brick-and-mortar bookstores, and appear only sporadically in community libraries or reading clubs. Comics may “have left the building.” They are taking on new forms and shapes, breaking free from their physical confines of paper pulp. Digital platforms now have emerged as the primary channels for distribution, relegating the physical circulation of comics to a more exclusive status. The talk “The Context not the Content” introduces the idea that comics when the become machine-interpretable information they may no longer be contained exclusively in the art domain. The medium’s informatization has important cultural and economic considerations, intensely more so in countries where comics is an essential part of their popular cultural heritage, and where there is a collective stake in what its future(s) would look like. Ilan will also be presenting some of his earlier published work of conceptual comics, and more recent work that was co-created with emergent AI such as Out Side, Fastwalkers, the Neural Yorker and Chimeras (ed.).