We Have Always Been Sequential. Comics as Experimental Methodology for Language-based Artistic Research

This presentation investigates comics as chronotopological sites where distributed agency among human, computational, and environmental actors generates new strategies for artistic research within a posthumanist framework. We understand comics not only as artistic practice but as an experimental methodology for knowledge production and distribution. This view aligns with a posthumanist stance for critical thought through artistic means and experimental research formats in which technology plays a crucial role. We situate our practice within the field of language-based artistic research, understanding writing as embodied and performative action and text as material and spatial practice generating its own medial environment. We have applied these characteristics throughout our joint publications Fauna, Flora, Fiction Fiction (2018, 2020, 2023), where drawing and writing function as intertwined practices with a gradually increasing orientation toward sequential storytelling – a tendency that culminates in our most recent work, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Glitch, which we will present in this talk. The work unfolds through a literary text that flows as continuous consciousness, while the sequential visuality of fictional atlas plates evokes meaning through speculative annotations informed by the text. This transposition between text and drawings involves a computational entity as operative agency: a large language model prompted to transpose the literary text into executable code, remixing it into another aggregation state. In this configuration, the imaginary functions as constitutive element and speculative writing – executed through words, lines, and code – as methodological gesture, demonstrating how sequential practices bridge media history with contemporary artistic research.