How do we relate to—and hold—our family’s past? Is it through technology? Through spirit? Art, poetry, music? Or is it through the resonances we look for in ourselves? 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 just 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, cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, to help him ensure the immortality of their family’s fraught inheritance. Amy’s deepening understanding of her family’s traumatic uprooting resonates with the creative life she fights to claim in the present, as Amy and her partner, Jacob, chase jobs, and each other, across the country. Kurzweil evokes an understanding of accomplishment that centers conversation and connection, knowing and being known by others.
Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of two award-winning graphic memoirs. Artificial: A Love Story documents her father’s quest to preserve the identity of his father through AI and was named a best book of 2023 by NPR, The New Yorker, and Kirkus and won the Living Now Book Award. Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir, from 2016, tells the story of three generations of Jewish women in Amy’s family. Amy was the recipient of a 2021 Berlin Prize with The American Academy in Berlin and a Black Mountain Institute Shearing Fellowship, and she has done residencies at Macdowell and Yaddo. Her series with The Believer Magazine, “Technofeelia,” has been nominated for a Reuben Award and an Ignatz award. Her work has also been published in The Verge, The New York Times Book Review, The LA Times, Wired and many other places. She has taught writing and cartooning widely for over a decade.