Submissions are now open for abstracts for the Comics and Machines Conference. The Conference is a two-day international event that will take place on April 22-23, 2026 at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and at Uppsala University. It is dedicated to examine the rapidly evolving landscape of comics.
By Creatives Unite CommunityDeadline for abstracts: 1st December 2025
Organiser: Echo Chamber, Uppsala University & Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm with production support by Src Material
Venue: Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm & Uppsala University, Sweden
Event Dates: 22-23 April, 2026
Read more here
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About Comics and Machines Conference
The Comics and Machines Conference is a two-day international conference that will take place on April 22-23, 2026 at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and at Uppsala University. It is dedicated to examine the rapidly evolving landscape of comics. Rather than framing this transformation solely as a rupture, the conference seeks to situate it within a longer history of computational rationality, a lineage in which the medium has continuously negotiated the demands of efficiency, scalability, and technical constraint. The aim of the conference is to critically rethink comics not as passive recipients of technological change, but as active computational configurations: media fundamentally entangled with systems of automation, standardization, and information processing.
Submission Topics
- 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
Submission instructions and important dates:
- Abstract length : 250 words
- Short bio: 150 words
- Deadline for abstracts: 1st December 2025
- Notifications of acceptance: 30th December 2025
For more information about the presentation formats, please read the official open call for submissions thoroughly on the Conference's official website.
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Main Image: Markus Spiske on Unsplash
