American Academy Lecture

Artificial: A Love Story

Please join us for an evening with New Yorker cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, as she reads from and discusses her most recent graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story, a personal story about the future of the past and an investigation into how art and technology can deepen our quest for meaning and connection.

In Artificial , we meet the Kurzweils, a family of creators who are preserving their history through unusual means. At the center is renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who has long been saving the documents of his deceased father, Fredric, an accomplished conductor and pianist from Vienna who fled the Nazis in 1938. Once, Fred’s life was saved by his art: an American benefactor, impressed by Fred’s musical genius, sponsored his emigration to the United States.  He escaped just one month before Kristallnacht. Now, Fred has returned.  Through AI and salvaged writing, Ray is building a chatbot that writes in Fred’s voice, and he enlists his daughter Amy to help him ensure the immortality of their family’s fraught inheritance. Artificial: A Love Story was a New Yorker Best Book of 2023, an NPR Book We Love, A Powell’s Pick of the Season, a Kirkus Best Nonfiction of 2023 and a Booklist Editors’ Choice Graphic Novel, among other accolades. The German translation will be available in October 2024 with Verlaghaus Jacoby & Stuart.