AESTHETICS OF THE INVISIBLE
Text topic: Strip and Identity
Text author: Драгана Купрешанин
Definitions of comic media that have been brushed aside over the years and decades in order to define the media as clearly and accurately as possible are being revised due to technological modifications of the comics. Comic authors emerged in the late 1960s in America (and 1970s in Yugoslavia). They were mostly organized in groups who won the stage with experimental approaches and were institutionally accepted. Alternative expression in Serbia has peaked in the 1990s, when that pole of expression overwhelmed almost the entire scene.After the 2000s, when the International Comics Salon was established in Belgrade (in 2003), an important space for action was formed in the field of experimentation, as it established an incentive “prize for innovation in comics” that motivated authors to advance their avantgarde research. Notwithstanding the freshness of ideas throughout the fifteen years of the Salon existence, only a handful of authors have achieved more notable accomplishments: A. Ćurić with the realization of the concept of spatial comics (2007), and A. Gajić who received the Grand Prix for the first time in the history of the Salon for his experimental work “Rewinding” (2012). At the University of Arts in Belgrade, several authors (D. Kuprešanin – Faculty of Fine Arts/Faculty of Applied Arts; V. Veljašević – Faculty of Fine Arts) have developed in their PhD researches similar concepts in different media – comics in space and unnarrative comics. Since 2013, Kuprešanin has also introduces a novelty with the concept of experimental tactile comics.Just like A. Ćurić deletes the concepts of classical media transfers into the structure of comics, so does D. Kuprešanin introduce novelty into the structure of the media with tactility and haptic adaptation(technological innovation) – this novelty is especially important not only because of the new way of structuring of the media itself, but also because it was the first time that the blind and partially sighted audiences were given the opportunity to read comics.