An online lecture with cartoonist Amy Kurzweil (FLYING COUCH), moderated by Tahneer Oksman, at The American Academy in Berlin.

Cartoonist Amy Kurzweil’s first book, Flying Couch (2016), tells the story of her maternal grandmother’s escape from the Warsaw ghetto and her family’s inheritance of this Holocaust story. Her work-in-progress, Artificial, documents the life of her paternal grandfather—a Viennese musician who escaped the Nazis in 1938—and examines her scientist father’s quest to resurrect his late father’s identity through artificial intelligence. In this talk, Kurzweil shares her approach to the genre of graphic memoir and the process of hand-crafting family narratives and personal memories. What, she wonders, does the hand-drawn-line communicate that the machine cannot? What does the machine preserve that the body forgets?

Here’s a link to the recorded talk plus Q&A afterwards: https://www.americanacademy.de/videoaudio/graphic-memoirs-and-the-art-of-resurrecting-the-past/