Out Side: Between Art and Hallucination

A comic book for the future, created by two pioneers of artificial intelligence

A graphic novel inspired by artbooks, Out Side is a unique collaboration between two leading digital artists: K Allado-McDowell and Ilan Manouach. Together, the two construct an extraordinary pictorial story in the manner of a comic strip, combining the exacting clarity of Allado-McDowell’s post-internet vision with Manouach’s conceptual and formal depth. Manouach has created the images with the help of Midjourney.
In the story, a young painter named Stone navigates the art world–meeting shady dealers and strange collectors–while pining for her long-lost parrot, Petey. Eventually, she finds her way into the upper echelons of technology, working as a VR designer. It is here that she discovers a conspiracy that will shake her understanding of reality itself. Blending layers of dreams, real life and simulation, Out Side explores the possibilities of storytelling with AI: creating a multiverse on the page that infiltrates our own mixed reality.
K Allado-McDowell is a musician and co-author of books in collaboration with GPT-3. In 2016 they created the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI, which they still run today.
Ilan Manouach is an artist, book editor and researcher with a particular interest in conceptual and post-digital comics. He holds a PhD from Aalto University in Helsinki, and is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard Metalab.