Short Description
The field of comics is undergoing a profound transformation characterized by growing heterogeneity in forms, formats, and production processes. As comics expand beyond traditional conceptual and historical frameworks—encompassing synthetic comics, operational images, data-driven visualization, and embodied non-visual formats—existing research models rooted in artisanal craft traditions, narratology, and text-image correlation struggle to account for this rapidly diversifying landscape.
This transformation necessitates a broader redefinition of comics as fundamentally technical objects, where technological processes serve as internal creative engines rather than external influences. The conference organizers position comics as sites where creation becomes entangled with computation, standardization, and new modes of mediation. They argue that understanding comics requires moving beyond narrative and visual storytelling to recognize them as engineered configurations of information and experimental knowledge structures.
Within this expanded computational framework, comics function increasingly as sites of artistic research—experimental configurations that generate knowledge through making. These practices leverage the medium’s inherent capacity for relational thinking to investigate how technical systems reshape creative labor, audience relations, and narrative possibilities.
The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and Uppsala University will host a two-day international conference on April 22-23, 2026, examining these developments. Rather than treating this transformation as a rupture, the conference seeks to situate it within comics’ longer history of engaging with computational rationality, efficiency, and technical constraints.
Abstract length: 250 words
Short bio: 150 words
Submissions are welcomed which address the following areas, among others:
- Histories of automation and engineering in comics production and distribution
- Transformations in formats and workflows driven by technological change
- Comics as data: informatization, discretization, and database design
- Human-machine collaborations in past, present, and speculative comics practice
- Audience and user labor in automated platforms and circulation systems
- Data-mining and recirculation techniques in digital comics ecologies
- Machine subjectivities: authorship, intention, and expression in machinic agents
- Computational archiving practices: scraping, clustering, and vectorization
- Speculative and critical practices addressing automation and machinic mediation
- Industrial logics in comics: international and comparative perspectives
- Resistance to automation: sabotage, slow media, and disobedient design
- Operational aesthetics: the visual and affective languages of automation
- Speculative histories and alternative futures of comics as technical media
- Comics as simulations: diagrams, blueprints, and procedural environments
- Comics as artistic research methodologies: practice-based inquiry and knowledge production where comics are used to interrogate emerging technologies and social systems
Submissions are invited for the following presentation formats:
Research Papers (20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion): Traditional academic presentations suitable for theoretical, historical, or analytical work
Practice-Based Presentations (15 minutes + 15 minutes discussion): Presentations by creators, artists, and practitioners demonstrating work and reflecting on process
Interactive Demonstrations (30 minutes): Hands-on sessions showcasing new tools, platforms, or methodologies
Panel Discussions (90 minutes): Collaborative sessions bringing together multiple perspectives on specific themes
Lightning Talks (5 minutes): Brief presentations ideal for work-in-progress, provocations, or preliminary findings
Workshop Sessions (3 hours): Extended collaborative sessions for skill-sharing and collective exploration of tools and methods
How to Apply
Send your application to conference@echochamber.be
Entry Fee
None
Location
Stockholm, Sweden
Timeline
- Application Deadline: 1 December 2025
Website Link: https://www.echochamber.be/en/opencalls/comics_and_machines/
