Amy Kurzweils is a writer and cartoonist from New York. At the Academy, she works on her second book, “Artificial: A Love Story” (forthcoming with Catapult), which she calls “a graphic memoir...

ONLINE
ONLINE: Dirk Ippen Lecture
The Art of Graphic Resurrection
Amy Kurzweil shares her approach to the graphic memoir. Beginning with her first book, Flying Couch (2016), about her maternal grandmother’s escape from the Warsaw ghetto and her family’s Holocaust legacy, Kurzweil then offers a preview of her work-in-progress, Artificial, which documents the life of her paternal grandfather, a Viennese musician who escaped the Nazis in 1938. Artificial explores Kurzweil’s inventor father’s quest to resurrect his late father through artificial intelligence, which leads to a consideration of the central questions that occupy Kurzweil’s work: How is the effort to document her and her family’s lives by hand similar to the preservation abilities of machines and algorithms? How is it different? What do these differences and similarities suggest about the future of the past?
This event took place on October 26, 2021.