“The most common response to what is called the digital revolution, might be the impulse to not change, no matter how ‘different’ the world out there seems to be”, writes Marjorie Perloff in her study of modern, avant-garde poetry through the lenses and challenges of pop culture and advertisement. Away from the deeply technophobe celebration of the advent of formal medium possibilities, we focus how the technological disruptions in the arts reflect the massive shifts that occur in the reconfiguration of affects for a globally, interconnected precariat of workers. Our research focus specifically on the conceptual ramifications of automation in graphic narratives and examine how technology both allows for more sophisticated uses of machinic production and pushes the boundaries of the medium.
Graphic narratives are not only important in comics or in general domains of artistic expression. They are tools whose multimodal expressive communication has become our primary modality in sharing and shaping representation of our worlds. From data infographics and communication strategies to community building and graphic journalism there is a story to be told. Our skills and acquired sets of knowledges can find multiple applications in a graphic narrative-rich Internet environment. Applied.Memetic is interested instead in harnessing the machinic understanding of graphic narratives through recurrent patterns, probability distributions and outliers in comics language that have been lurking in our pre-attentive reader’s cognition and that we haven’t been able to articulate in words.