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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 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, 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 Kurzweil's signature humanity and humor, in boundary-pushing, gorgeous handmade drawings, Artificial guides us through nuanced questions about art, memory, and technology, demonstrating that love, a process of focused attention, is what grounds a meaningful life. --… (meer)
In her other book, Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir, Amy Kurzweil looked at the lives of her mother and maternal grandmother in way I found sloppy and unstructured. Here it's the lives of her father and paternal grandfather that Amy skitters between in her unfocused, disordered manner.
Her father is Ray Kurzweil, who is apparently a famous inventor and futurist. I was previously unfamiliar with him, but he comes off here as a real crackpot with daddy issues, obsessed with his own immortality and the resurrection of his father, Fredric, in some form of artificial intelligence, starting with the pretty dicey chatbot featured extensively in this book. Amy enables and caters to Ray's projects in hopes of connecting better with Fredric herself, but he pretty much remains a cipher throughout.
I was bored with all the jumbled details of her family and the flights of philosophical fancy they inspired in her. And I was annoyed that some proofreader didn't catch the misspellings of the names of Bess Myerson and Karel Čapek.
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 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, 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 Kurzweil's signature humanity and humor, in boundary-pushing, gorgeous handmade drawings, Artificial guides us through nuanced questions about art, memory, and technology, demonstrating that love, a process of focused attention, is what grounds a meaningful life. --
Google Books — Bezig met laden...
(3.25)
1
Her father is Ray Kurzweil, who is apparently a famous inventor and futurist. I was previously unfamiliar with him, but he comes off here as a real crackpot with daddy issues, obsessed with his own immortality and the resurrection of his father, Fredric, in some form of artificial intelligence, starting with the pretty dicey chatbot featured extensively in this book. Amy enables and caters to Ray's projects in hopes of connecting better with Fredric herself, but he pretty much remains a cipher throughout.
I was bored with all the jumbled details of her family and the flights of philosophical fancy they inspired in her. And I was annoyed that some proofreader didn't catch the misspellings of the names of Bess Myerson and Karel Čapek.
(Best of 2023 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto NPR's Books We Love 2023: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels list.) (