ART & ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - AMY KURZWEIL & SEAN MICHAELS

Mon Feb 12, 8:00pm    $18

AMY KURZWEIL / Artificial: A Love Story

A visionary story of three generations of creators whose search for meaning and connection transcends the limits of life.

In the graphic novel/memoir Artificial, we meet the Kurzweils, a family of artists who are preserving their history through unusual means. At the centre 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.

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 KURZWEIL is an American cartoonist and writer. Her first book was the graphic memoir Flying Couch. She draws cartoons for The New Yorker.

SEAN MICHAELS / Do You Remember Being Born?
Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner Sean Michaels’ luminous new novel takes readers on a lyrical joy ride—seven, epic days in Silicon Valley with a tall, formidable poet (inspired by the real-life Marianne Moore) and her unusual new collaborator, a digital mind just one month old.

This is a relationship, a friendship, unlike anything Marian has known, and as it evolves, she is forced to confront the secrets of her past and the direction of her future. Who knew that a disembodied mind could help bend Marian’s life towards human connection, that friendship and family are not just time-eating obligations but soul-expanding joys. Or that belonging to one’s art means, above all else, belonging to the world.

SEAN MICHAELS is an internationally bestselling novelist and critic from Montreal, author of the Theremin novel Us Conductors, winner of the Scotiabank Giller prize, and The Wagers.