Spatial Practice in Comics at the Era of GenAI, VSI and Mixed Realities

Since the beginning of 2025, the company World Labs has set a new horizon of expectation in the evolution of networked technologies and artificial intelligence models. Their platform, Marble, currently stands as a unique benchmark, showcasing the simple yet uncanny potential to generate worlds in sequence, solely based on the intuition and intention of users. This way of making worlds—to borrow a phrase from Nelson Goodman (1992)—can be revisited through the lens of comics studies, or by considering comics as a sensitive system of information 'architexture': latent, simultaneous, and dynamic. Thus, we will ask: in the current era, how can comics allow us to envisage, or primarily be thought of, as a new spatial practice that enables us to understand current technologies differently, and above all, the processes and outcomes that emerge in terms of both information and uses? This presentation examines comics as fundamentally spatial practice, drawing on Henri Lefebvre's theory of space production and Thierry Groensteen's spatio-topical system. Building on research from my thesis "Comics and Mixed Reality: Towards New Narrative Spaces," I propose that contemporary spatial technologies—Generative AI, Spatial Vision Intelligence (VSI), and Mixed Reality—invoke a reconceptualisation of comics' relationship through spaces. The presentation concludes by reframing our temporal understanding ("era") as spatial ("area"), proposing comics research must urgently engage these technologies to expand our understanding of sequential art as inhabited, generated, and navigable spatial practice.