Schedule
April 22, 2026
Print and Cognition at the Biological Computer Lab, 1958–1976
The first study of Heinz von Foerster's Biological Computer Lab zines through a comics lens, revealing how printed image-text functioned as cognitive machines in early cybernetics research.
Atlas Comicus: On Mapping Production and Seriality
Uses cartographic mapping tools inspired by Warburg's Bilderatlas to visualize the circulation and influence of early 1900s newspaper comic strips across the United States.
Comics as By-Product
Argues comics are the productive by-product of mainline image/text technology—from newspapers to Instagram—and that this 'strategic passivity' is the source of their adaptive innovation.
When Comics Chat: a deep prior for text-balloon reading order
Uses deep learning on a corpus of comic text-balloons to learn reading-order priors, then generates endless chats between balloons that never appeared together, making comics speak to itself.
Spatial Practice in Comics at the Era of GenAI, VSI and Mixed Realities
Drawing on Lefebvre and Groensteen, proposes comics as spatial practice reconceived through GenAI, Spatial Vision Intelligence, and Mixed Reality—shifting from temporal 'era' to spatial 'area'.
Comics Pages as Audit Devices for Generative AI: A Gutter/Ghost Framework
Proposes the Gutter/Ghost framework: comics pages as testbeds that expose generative AI's failure at sequential coherence, making visible the hidden labour of AI-assisted comic workflows.
By Andrea Tosti
Whitewash Cartoonization: Accidental Indexicality into Cartoon Space?
Iterative image-to-image diffusion with lossy brightness feedback transforms images into stylized sequential animations with emergent narrative dynamics, arising from a normalization bug.
By Eyal Gruss
Computational Contact Sheets: Synthetic Photography and the Shifting Technical Identity of Comics
Explores synthetic photography via iterative prompting and algorithmic sequencing as a new form of comics—grid-based sequences that reveal machine logics rather than resolve into storylines.
Image GenAI demonstrates the insignificance of writing morphologies outside systematic correspondences to a lexicogrammar
Argues that GenAI's inability to produce writing exposes writing as a systematic correspondence between spatial marks and lexicogrammar—a property GenAI's 'typification engine' cannot replicate.
A Practitioner-Researcher’s Self-Reflective Reflection on the Role of Digital Drawing Tools Used for Comics-Based Research: Characterisation, Concealment, and Transculturality
Reflects on how Photoshop and Procreate function as active research agents in cross-cultural comics scholarship, shaping characterisation, concealing labour, and enabling transcultural practice.
By Yiqi Zhang
The Plotted Narrative: Friction, Code, and Materiality in Computational Comics
Presents a pen-plotter mural created through procedural generation and Axidraw plotters, arguing that friction between digital vector inputs and physical ink outputs defines computational comics.
By A.B Fominaya
Riso Comics – creating narratives in dialogue with the machine
Examines Riso Comics—limited-edition prints made with Risograph digital duplicators—as a hybrid analog-digital practice that treats the printing machine as an iterative creative partner.
April 23, 2026
Drawing in the glow of generative machines: Comics as research method for speculative futures
A cartoonist, geographer, and economist collaborate on narrative maps of Brussels 2050, arguing that comics' capacity to ground data in its material conditions makes it a model speculative method.
Monsters, Mercenaries and Me: Comics Research as Plaited Exegesis
Proposes a hybrid 'Plaited Exegesis' method for comics research that integrates making and reflection, demonstrated through a transmedial adaptation of an urban myth into a Creepypasta comic.
By Ray Whitcher
Comics and/as Mechanics: Intersections between Comics, Zines and Games
Argues that comics possess inherent game mechanics: the inferential gutter as defined by McCloud operates as a mechanic in the MDA framework, linking comics, zines, and game design.
How to talk about technology without talking about technology? A practice-based approach in comics art
Explores how to embed EU democratic values—equity, transparency, autonomy—into fictional comics stories without foregrounding technology, developed through a practice-based rhetorical process.
We Have Always Been Sequential. Comics as Experimental Methodology for Language-based Artistic Research
Investigates comics as posthumanist experimental methodology, using an LLM to transpose literary text into code that remixes speculative atlas drawings with continuous prose.
Speculative Autoethnography Through Comics: Reversing Big Tech’s Gaze and Reclaiming the Story
Proposes speculative autoethnography through ChatGPT-generated comics as a feminist method for conducting fieldwork inside Big Tech, deliberately obscuring traces under corporate surveillance.
Comparative analysis of the uses of AI in comics between the two spheres of production
Compares mass-market and experimental uses of generative AI in comics through the lens of seriality theory, examining what problems AI solves for production and at what creative cost.
Stretching the tension: Alternative comic as a disobedient machine
Argues that experimental minimal comics—stripped of characters, built on sequentiality—function as analog image-generation machines that resist and mirror AI's own logic of visual apparition.
Against the Algos: How Swedish Comic Artists Navigate an Uncertain and Evolving Labor Market in the Age of Digitalization
A three-year Swedish Research Council project mapping how comic artists navigate the labour market amid generative AI, through surveys and interviews across artistic generations.
By Robert Aman and Erik Nylander
Digital handmade: towards a media archeology of graphic tablets and software in comics drawing
A media-archaeological history of graphics tablets and drawing software in comics, tracing from 1984's pixel grids through Wacom, iPad Pro, and AI integration in Photoshop and Procreate.
By Giorgio Busi Rizzi and Claudia Cerulo
Metaphorical Comics at the Interface of AI and Mental Health: Toward Patient-Centered Visual Expression
Proposes using LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation to help mental health patients externalize emotional states through metaphorical comics, bridging graphic medicine and generative AI.
By Jiahao Ji and Jingyao Cai