Wednesday, November 30, 6PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Penthouse Room 901
Please join us for an OPC talk by visiting artist, Ilan Manouach followed by a group discussion with University members Brian Callender, Zoë Cary-Beckett, and Matthew Jesse Jackson.
Ilan Manouach is a researcher, a musician and a multidisciplinary artist with a specific interest in conceptual and post-digital comics. Currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Ilan has a PhD from Aalto University in Helsinki where he examined 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 Echo Chamber, a Brussels-based non-profit organization with the mission to produce, fundraise, document and archive radical and speculative artistic practices in contemporary comics. The topics of his research and artistic practice include conceptual comics, post-internet publishing, and synthetic media and AI. On the side, Ilan works as a pirate/librarian for the Conceptual Comics Collections at Ubuweb and Monoskop, is an appointed expert in experimental comics for the Belgian government for its national public funding program (CCAP) and works as a strategy consultant for the Onassis Foundation and its visibility through its new publishing activity. The Comics Journal called him “one of the most critical contemporary cartoonists and thinkers working today” and Kenneth Goldsmith described him as “the most provocative, critical, and intelligent comic artist alive”
**Food and drinks served at 5:30pm. The talk will begin at 6pm.
Presented by the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts
PARTICIPANTS:
Brian Callender is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago. An academic hospitalist, Dr. Callender is interested in how the health humanities can improve the patient experience, provider-patient relationships, and our understanding of the illness experience and the practice of medicine. These interests have led to the development of a number of courses that explore the phenomenology of illness and the visual culture of medicine including: The Body in Medicine and the Performing Arts; The Narratives and Aesthetics of Contagion: Knowledge Formation and the COVID-19 Pandemic; The Art of Healing: Medical Aesthetics in Russia and the US. His interest in the experience of illness and the visual culture of medicine led him to the medium of comics and the field of Graphic Medicine. His exploration of comics within the discourse on health, illness, medicine, and healthcare has resulted in teaching courses on the topic, conducting comics-creating workshops with providers and patients, using comics within patient education, and writing scholarly articles and book chapters on the subject.
Zoë Cary-Beckett received her BA from the University of Chicago in 2016 and is a current graduate student in the Department of English. She studies superhero comics and popular fiction with a focus on genre, storyworlds, and their intersecting ways of making meaning.
Matthew Jesse Jackson is a Professor in the Department of Art History and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts. Jackson earned a Ph.D. in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley, thanks to Anne M. Wagner and T.J. Clark, and is also A.B.D. in Russian Literature, having been awarded M.Phil. and M.A. degrees from Columbia University, where he studied as a President’s Fellow. He teaches courses grounded primarily in the contemplation of cultural experience since 1945.