"Artificial: A love story"

At the Academy, Kurzweil will work on her second book, “Artificial: A Love Story” (forthcoming with Catapult), which she calls “a graphic memoir about the future of the past.” While “Flying Couch” was about the transmission of memory and trauma across three generations of women in her family, starting with her maternal grandmother’s escape from the Warsaw Ghetto and survival of the Holocaust, “Artificial” will explore her father’s lineage and their Viennese roots. Ray Kurzweil, Amy writes of her father, “is an introverted intellect with a penchant for dad jokes and big dreams.” He is renowned for popularizing the term “The Singularity,” which refers to a theoretical future when technology will merge with humanity, heralding the promise of utopic, immortal life. In “Artificial,” Amy is interested in her father’s ambition to “resurrect” his own father, Frederic Kurzweil, a Viennese musician who narrowly escaped the Holocaust and died of heart disease at 58. Ray has kept a storage unit full of his father’s letters, notes, photos, news clippings, and musical scores. Enlisted to help build a chat bot with these documents as source material, Amy becomes immersed in the life of a grandfather she never knew, a story of artistic passion shadowed by loss. Through this project, and a deepening relationship with her partner, a moral philosopher with a genetic heart condition, Amy confronts her own orientation to close personal relationships and mortal vulnerabilities. While her father uses algorithms to immortalize the past, Amy recreates people in virtual spaces through drawing. “’Artificial’ explores how these varying modes of preservation relate to love, attachment, and anxiety about loss,” she writes. “The book is a metameditation on memory, an investigation into why and how we document our lives, what that process looks like today, and what it might look like tomorrow.”