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Can we preserve family history through artificial intelligence? What happens when we try to recreate and "bring back" loved ones through technology? In her graphic novel Artificial: A Love Story, American comic artist Amy Kurzweil documents the attempt by her famous father, Ray Kurzweil (pioneer of optical speech detection technologies), to make the family's history accessible again with the help of a chatbot that mimics the voice of her deceased grandfather—a story about immortality, Jewish heritage, and the relationship between humans and Artificial Intelligence.
In this conversation, Amy Kurzweil meets Austrian author and literary scholar Ann Cotten, who was born in the USA. Together, they explore the boundaries between artificial and human creativity, memory, and digital immortality. Ann Cotten is the editor of the anthology Schreiben nach KI (Writing After AI, Matthes & Seitz, 2025) and works with an AI tool that is trained on her texts.
This event is in collaboration with the German-American Institute Heidelberg as part of the "Art and AI" series.
Biographies
Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of two acclaimed graphic memoirs: Artificial: A Love Story (2023) and Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir (2016). Kurzweil was the recipient of a 2021 Berlin Prize and a 2019 Shearing Fellowship and has been awarded residencies from Macdowell and Yaddo, among others. Her series for the The Believer, “Technofeelia,” has been nominated for both Reuben and Ignatz awards. Her work has also been published in The Verge, New York Times Book Review, LA Times, Wired, Longreads, and Literary Hub. Kurzweil has taught writing and cartooning for over a decade.
Ann Cotten is an author, translator, and literary theorist living in Vienna and Berlin. She has published numerous volumes of poetry: Fremdwörterbuchsonette (2007), Florida- Räume (2010), I, Coleoptile (2010), Hauptwerk. Softsoftporn (2013), and Lather in Heaven! (2016); short stories: "Der schaudernde Fächer" (2013) and "Lyophilia" (2019); and epic poetry: Das Pferd (2009) and Verbannt! (2016), for which she received numerous prizes. In 2018 she was admit- ted to the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Her translations of Isabel Waidner, Joe Wenderoth, and Mary MacLane were published in 2019, two translations of Rosmarie Waldrop in 2020. She was a Fellow at IFK (Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Kunstuniversität Linz in Vienna), researching the recyclability of humanistic theories with regard to an aesthetics which is comprehensible for machines, too.
Can we preserve family history through artificial intelligence? What happens when we try to recreate and "bring back" loved ones through technology? In her graphic novel Artificial: A Love Story, American comic artist Amy Kurzweil documents the attempt by her famous father, Ray Kurzweil (pioneer of optical speech detection technologies), to make the family's history accessible again with the help of a chatbot that mimics the voice of her deceased grandfather—a story about immortality, Jewish heritage, and the relationship between humans and Artificial Intelligence.
In this conversation, Amy Kurzweil meets Austrian author and literary scholar Ann Cotten, who was born in the USA. Together, they explore the boundaries between artificial and human creativity, memory, and digital immortality. Ann Cotten is the editor of the anthology Schreiben nach KI (Writing After AI, Matthes & Seitz, 2025) and works with an AI tool that is trained on her texts.
This event is in collaboration with the German-American Institute Heidelberg as part of the "Art and AI" series.
Biographies
Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of two acclaimed graphic memoirs: Artificial: A Love Story (2023) and Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir (2016). Kurzweil was the recipient of a 2021 Berlin Prize and a 2019 Shearing Fellowship and has been awarded residencies from Macdowell and Yaddo, among others. Her series for the The Believer, “Technofeelia,” has been nominated for both Reuben and Ignatz awards. Her work has also been published in The Verge, New York Times Book Review, LA Times, Wired, Longreads, and Literary Hub. Kurzweil has taught writing and cartooning for over a decade.
Ann Cotten is an author, translator, and literary theorist living in Vienna and Berlin. She has published numerous volumes of poetry: Fremdwörterbuchsonette (2007), Florida- Räume (2010), I, Coleoptile (2010), Hauptwerk. Softsoftporn (2013), and Lather in Heaven! (2016); short stories: "Der schaudernde Fächer" (2013) and "Lyophilia" (2019); and epic poetry: Das Pferd (2009) and Verbannt! (2016), for which she received numerous prizes. In 2018 she was admit- ted to the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Her translations of Isabel Waidner, Joe Wenderoth, and Mary MacLane were published in 2019, two translations of Rosmarie Waldrop in 2020. She was a Fellow at IFK (Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Kunstuniversität Linz in Vienna), researching the recyclability of humanistic theories with regard to an aesthetics which is comprehensible for machines, too.
Can we preserve family history through artificial intelligence? What happens when we try to recreate and "bring back" loved ones through technology? In her graphic novel Artificial: A Love Story, American comic artist Amy Kurzweil documents the attempt by her famous father, Ray Kurzweil (pioneer of optical speech detection technologies), to make the family's history accessible again with the help of a chatbot that mimics the voice of her deceased grandfather—a story about immortality, Jewish heritage, and the relationship between humans and Artificial Intelligence.
In this conversation, Amy Kurzweil meets Austrian author and literary scholar Ann Cotten, who was born in the USA. Together, they explore the boundaries between artificial and human creativity, memory, and digital immortality. Ann Cotten is the editor of the anthology Schreiben nach KI (Writing After AI, Matthes & Seitz, 2025) and works with an AI tool that is trained on her texts.
This event is in collaboration with the German-American Institute Heidelberg as part of the "Art and AI" series.
Biographies
Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of two acclaimed graphic memoirs: Artificial: A Love Story (2023) and Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir (2016). Kurzweil was the recipient of a 2021 Berlin Prize and a 2019 Shearing Fellowship and has been awarded residencies from Macdowell and Yaddo, among others. Her series for the The Believer, “Technofeelia,” has been nominated for both Reuben and Ignatz awards. Her work has also been published in The Verge, New York Times Book Review, LA Times, Wired, Longreads, and Literary Hub. Kurzweil has taught writing and cartooning for over a decade.
Ann Cotten is an author, translator, and literary theorist living in Vienna and Berlin. She has published numerous volumes of poetry: Fremdwörterbuchsonette (2007), Florida- Räume (2010), I, Coleoptile (2010), Hauptwerk. Softsoftporn (2013), and Lather in Heaven! (2016); short stories: "Der schaudernde Fächer" (2013) and "Lyophilia" (2019); and epic poetry: Das Pferd (2009) and Verbannt! (2016), for which she received numerous prizes. In 2018 she was admit- ted to the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Her translations of Isabel Waidner, Joe Wenderoth, and Mary MacLane were published in 2019, two translations of Rosmarie Waldrop in 2020. She was a Fellow at IFK (Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Kunstuniversität Linz in Vienna), researching the recyclability of humanistic theories with regard to an aesthetics which is comprehensible for machines, too.
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