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NOTICE: Due to a power outage, Oshtemo Branch Library is closed Tuesday, July 21 until further notice.  

Book

Artificial : a love story

Call Number

  • GRAPHIC NOVEL 920 K9699 (CEN, OSH)

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Edition

First Catapult edition.

Publication Information

New York, NY : Catapult, 2023.

Physical Description

329 pages, 28 unnumbered pages : illustrations ; 26 cm

Summary

A visionary story of three generations of artists whose search for meaning and connection transcends the limits of life. 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 this book, 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, 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. With the cartoonist's signature humanity and humor, in boundary-pushing, gorgeous handmade drawings, this book guides readers through nuanced questions about art, memory, and technology, demonstrating that love, a process of focused attention, is what grounds a meaningful life.

Contents

  • Pattern recognition
  • Immortal virtue
  • How do you know?
  • To eat and drink
  • Heartstrings
  • Through the looking glass
  • Exponential growth
  • Con espressione e semplice.

Subjects