Ilan Manouach (Athens, 1980) is a musician, a book publisher and a multidisciplinary artist with a specific interest in conceptual and post digital comics. He currently works on his DA at the Media Department of the Aalto University in Helsinki (adv. Craig Dworkin) where he examines the intersections of contemporary comics, art and poetry. His work claims for the importance of comics as a materially self-reflexive medium, unaffiliated to any general art history. He has more than twenty published bookworks under his belt, solo exhibitions to important festivals, museums and galleries worldwide, and his work features in the Ubuweb archive. He is mostly known for Shapereader, a tactile system o fcommunication for the visually impaired.

He currently works as a researcher for the edition of an international anthology entitled Conceptual Comics, Unpopular Practices Within A Marginal Art Form, exploring and documenting materialist practices in experimental comics, engaging the reader to interact with the works in nonspecified, at times forensic, ways of examination.

A second anthology in the works, explores the productions of Brazilian concrete poetry and poema proceso from the lenses of comics historiography. Through field research, interviews and museum visits, the collected material challenges the assumptions and pitfalls of a unified and canonical comics history by exposing and highlighting works that can be construed as the missing link of a modernist lineage in comics. Its goal is to rethink the dimensions of concrete poetry’s panlinguistic agenda and how it can inform contemporary comics productions for the xxi century.

Along with poet Kenneth Goldsmith he is the curator of the Festival Shadow Libraries: Ubuweb in Athens, where it proposes to examine the uses of the archive in regards to artistic production and explore the conceptual consistency and the ethics of digital preservation and distribution in web libraries, through the lens of its users and makers.

His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, New York Magazine,World Literature Today, Wired, Le Monde, The Comics Journal, du9, 50 watts and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Wasting Time on the Internet and his works are also part of the Ubuweb online contemporary art archive.