Stretching the tension: Alternative comic as a disobedient machine

In this presentation, I propose to examine how comics, as a technique for fabricating images, enters into a dialogue with generative AI, and how analysing the most marginal and experimental artistic propositions allows us to reconsider comics within the technological continuum of tools and strategies of seeing — from sacred-image practitioners to the contemporary mass use of image-generation systems. I will devellop the argument of my art+research PHD: comics works as a machine that produces visions, maintaining a close relationship with image-generation devices. Both enable forms of apparition, whether through reading (user experience) or through sequential drawing (creator role). The minimal comics scene (Alexis Beauclair, Sammy Stein, Stefanie Leinhos, Nicolas Nadé, etc.), which resonates with a broader corpus of speculative comics, has for several years produced works without characters—rigid, stripped-down, but deeply rooted in the logics of composition, sequentiality, and the rapid learning of environmental rules inherent to the medium's medial intelligence. Through this radical aporia, experimental comics expose their own structural conditions. The panel becomes a space of apparition, akin to a white cube or black box, augmented by the sequential technology of simulation. The catalogues of imaginary objects and speculative museums that unfold within these works constitute analog databases, close to design fiction. When pushed to its limits, this model reveals an artisanal technology of image-modelling. From the popular attractions of early 1900s American Sunday pages to contemporary sensorial forms, comics appear as a simulation machine at once seduced by and resistant to technological regimes—deeply tied to the logic of authorship, perpetually negotiating tensions with technology, and relying on détournement as a critical strategy for use without ethical or artistic compromise. This produces a tension between formal fascination and radical counter-aesthetics, seeking within software back-ends dissonant visualities far from mass-production pipelines shaped by generative models. Self-published micro-edition thus operates as a counter-device to machinization, while simultaneously making visible the shared structures of two systems of apparition, transformation, and mutation of images.