Call for Papers - Comics and Machines Conference (Stockholm)

Announcing a two-day international conference on April 22-23, 2026 at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and at Uppsala University dedicated to examining 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. This conference aims 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.

The following areas are accepted for submissions (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

Requirements

Open to scholars, artists, designers, engineers, librarians/archivists, and practitioners at any career stage. Individual or collective submissions welcome. This conference invites original work (research or practice-based) engaging comics and computation across the listed themes.

Application Instructions

This conference invites submissions 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

Submission instructions:

• Abstract length : 250 words
• Short bio: 150 words
• Deadline for abstracts: 1st December 2025
• Notifications of acceptance: 30th December 2025

Send to conference@echochamber.be