Ilan Manouach

Ilan Manouach is a researcher, musician, and multidisciplinary artist with a specific interest in conceptual and post-digital comics. Currently a Metalab fellow and visiting scholar at Harvard University, Ilan has a PhD from Aalto University in Helsinki (adv. Craig Dworkin) where he examined how this century’s frontier technologies such as AI, financial technologies, and globalized logistics reshape the comics industry. He is mostly known for Shapereader, a system for tactile storytelling specifically designed for blind and partially sighted readers/makers of comics. He is the founder of Echo Chamber, a Brussels-based non-profit organization with the mission to produce, fundraise, document, and archive radical and speculative artistic practices in contemporary comics.

The topics of his research and artistic practice include conceptual comics, post-internet publishing, and synthetic media and AI. On the side, Ilan works as a pirate/librarian for the Conceptual Comics Collections at Ubuweb and Monoskop, is an appointed expert in experimental comics for the Belgian government for its national public funding program (CCAP), and has worked as a strategy consultant for the Onassis Foundation and its visibility through its new publishing activity.

Ilan Manouach is a participant of the (Inter)national Residency Program of Onassis AiR 2019-20.

How should we account for affective labor’s precarious underemployment when it has expanded beyond the formal places and the traditional time schedules and when it encompasses other forms of market-driven incentives and self-exploited gift economy elements? Free labor and its uneasy declination of playbor have gradually dissolved the modalities that have conventionally defined most of the professional activities in the arts (but not only), and separated them from the rest: the slippages between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between work and free time, and between producer and client have been re-imposed as political command within the process of valorization. Moreover, the very same spaces that have generally contained and supplied labor have radically changed, sometimes even dematerialized: from the office desk to the cubicle, and from the decentralized workspace and the coffee shop table to the apartment couch, work for ‘creatives’ is always and everywhere.

While formulae of abusive and immaterial labor in the creative industries have been around for quite a while, technology magnifies asymmetrical power configurations with deep changes in the composition, the management and the regulation of the workforce. The Internet as a site of disintermediation and its physics of clicks, contributes in not only reducing the distance between producers and consumers but also provides the backdrop for a flexible, collective intelligence that drives new forms of cultural economy. In advanced capitalist societies, it is the excessive deployment of an overqualified, underpaid, self-employed and zero-hour contract mobile workforce, the unnecessariat that is often construed, from the perspective of venture surveillance capitalism, as a potentially large-scale, connected infrastructure waiting for its networked value to be extracted. The flip side of Jeff Bezos’s human-as-service ethos is the reality of the human-as-wasted-resource: a sense of unfulfilled potential, with the pathos of an empty apartment in an overcrowded city, a set of golf-clubs gathering dust in the closet, or human behavioral surplus partly redeemed into a futures market of predictive products.

The Αthens Data Union was initially outlined by researchers Theodora Kotsaka and Ilan Manouach during Hackathens 2019. Its mission is to contribute into defining, protecting and valorizing the assets of new forms of cognitive work deployed within postindustrial regimes of networked labor management. Strategically based at Onassis ΑiR, the ADU will explore how artists, in spite of arguing for fixed subject positions, have been often complicit in providing and updating a blueprint for precarious and often abusive labor conditions, that can, and has been generalized in other sectors of the economy. Through talks, workshops and semi-public informal discussions, we would like to explore the challenges of a constantly shifting world that increasingly questions the validity of established conventions and professional practices and together try to mitigate the excesses and pitfalls of semiocapitalism.