November 30, 2022
Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago
An OPC talk by visiting artist, Ilan Manouach, on the topics of his research and artistic practice which include: conceptual comics, post-internet publishing, and synthetic media and AI. Manouach is a researcher, a musician and a multidisciplinary artist with a specific interest in conceptual and post-digital comics and 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. A group discussion with University members Brian Callender, Zoë Cary-Beckett, and Matthew Jesse Jackson will follow Manouach's talk.
Respondents:
Brian Callender is an Associate Professor of Medicine here 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. 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 including: 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.