Episode Transcript:
Shalom and welcome to the Jewish futurism Lab where we look at Torah, tech, and tomorrow. This is episode one, which means you’re either here on purpose or you clicked the wrong link by accident. Either way, I’m glad that you’re here. My name is Mike Wirth. I’ma muralist, designer, and educator based in Charlotte, North Carolina. I makeneon soaked artwork about Jewish futures. I teach graphic design at Queens University. And I’m an artist andresidence at the Stan Greenspon Center for Holocaust and Social JusticeEducation.You can see everything I’m building, the art, the essays, the weird experiments at www.mikewirthart.com.
So, here’s the deal with this podcast.I’m building a lab. Not the kind withbeers and Bunson burners and lab coats.A creative lab. A speculative lab. Really. Uh, what if we took this ancient Jewish idea and threw it into the future kind of lab. Each episode, I’m going to grab one piece of Torah, one ritual, one myth, one symbol, or one bonkers moment from Jewish history and put it into conversation with the tools shaping our lives right now. design, AI, storytelling, speculative thinking, all of it.Sometimes this will sound a little bit like an art history lecture, sometimes like a design critique, sometimes like Torah study that accidentally wandered onto the bridge of the Enterprise. And honestly, that’s kind of the point. The goal is practical. I want us to imagineJewish futures that feel alive. Futures that aren’t just about survival, but about meaning, ethics, beauty, and belonging. Futures where technology and spirituality don’t just coexist. They actually talk to each other. And I want to do it in a way that invites you in.Even if you’re not an artist, even if you never coded a line in your life, even if you haven’t opened a siddur since your bat mitzvah.
So, welcome to the lab. Let’s get weird. Okay. So, what do I mean when I sayJewish futurism? Here’s the short version. Jewish futurism is a creative framework that uses Jewish memory, texts, and symbols to imagine and designJewish futures through art, ritual prototypes, and speculative learning.It’s not a single artwork. It’s not just one philosophy. It’s a practice, a way of thinking, and of making.And you’ll notice I usually write futurism with a lowercase F. That’s verymuch on purpose. I’m not signing us all up for Italian futurism with a capital F. That early 20th century art movement uh was super into speed, war, and yeah, had some seriously anti-semitic baggage.Lowercase futurism lets me talk about imagining futures without cosigning tha thistory. We’ll unpack that whole storyin a future episode because it’s wild and it’s important context.I describe Jewish futurism as blending design, spirituality, and technology to reimagine the future of Jewish identity, rituals, and ethics. That sounds fancy,but really it’s just asking what does aJewish future look like if we could get to design it ourselves? Because here’s the thing. Jews have always always been futurists. We’ve survived by adapting, by reimagining, by taking the ancient and making it speakto the present. Shabbat, that’s a weekly ritual uh for the world that we want to be in, the world that we want to build.The Passover seder, a time machine that collapses past, present, and future into one table. Amazing.So, Jewish time isn’t actually linear.It’s cyclical. maybe spiral or looping back upon itself. That’s why Jewish futurism isn’t about abandoning tradition. It’s about weaving memory and anticipation together. It’s about saying the future is a team sport and we’ve got thousands of years of practice.Visually, a lot of my work uses neon aesthetics, vivid colors, glowing interfaces, geometric designs. It’s cyberpunk meets mysticism. It’s theZohar meets BladeRunner. I want the work to feel like you’re standing in a future synagogue where theark is made of light and the Torah scroll is a hologram.But underneath the the glowy surface, the work is asking ethical questions.How do we preserve human dignity in a world shaped by artificial intelligence?What does it mean to be created in the image of God when we’re creating intelligence ourselves? How do we practice tikkun olam, the repair of the world, when the world includes Mars colonies or quantum computers?Jewish futurism refuses to let technology be neutral. It demands that innovation align with values like justice, dignity, saving lives, and collective care.So, now that we know what Jew Jewish futurism kind of is, let me take you back in time to show you that it’s actually not new. We’re going to go in time on a time travel journey here tobet in the former pale of settlement in Russia, Poland, right? What we know asthose modern states, but now in 1918, Vitebsk is a city in what is now Bellarus. At the time it was part of the Russian Empire right in the middle of the Russian civil war and in 1918 aJewish artist named Mark Chagal came home to Vitebsk. Chagal had been living inParis soaking up modernism but re hereturned to his uh hometown to dos omething radical. He founded thepeople’s art school and he invited other avant garde artists to teach there including Jewish artist El Lizitzky and notJewish artist Kazimir Maleovich, the Supremist master. Now he’s not asupremist like we think of today in culture. Suprematism was a form of artthat put geometric forms as supreme overall other visual forms. Now alsosomething to understand here is thatjust before uh the school opened uh Jews had received emancipation under the new Soviet Bolshevik revolution government where they didn’t have those rights under the Czar. This school became an early Jewish futurist lab as far as I can see. Young people, many of them Jewish, came to learn painting, design, typography, and radical new ways of seeing. They weren’t just making art. They were prototyping new worlds. See, this was just after theRussian Revolution. And as I mentioned ,uh, legal restrictions on Jews had now been lifted. But pilgrims, right, attacks on Jewish villages were still happening. Trauma and hope were colliding. And in that collision, artists asked, “What if we could design our own future?”Chagal’s paintings from this period are absolutely wild. floating rabbis, upside down villages, glowing synagogues that defy gravity. He wasn’t painting the asit was. He was painting the shtetl as a myth, as memory, as a maybe world. Andthis is what I like to call mystical futurism where doesn’t involvetechnology or science so much. It’s more of Kabbalah meets today.On the other hand, El Lizitzky took it a little bit further. In 1919, heillustrated a Passover song called Had Gad Ya. You know, the one about the goat, but instead of traditional images, he turned into bold Suprematist style shapes, right? We said Supremist shapes were sharp angles, pure abstraction, very radical design for the time. He was saying Jewish culture isn’t a museum piece. It’s a living material for experimentation.And then there’s Lzitzki’s architecture and typography. He designed dynamic futuristic structures. He imagined buildings that embodied motion and energy. His famous poster, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, is revolutionary propaganda and super well-known. But it’s also a speculative design using geometry to imagine a new social order in his home country.What bets taught me is this. Jewish futurism has always been about takingour stories, our symbols, our traumas,and our dreams and using them to stage new possibilities. It’s about myth making. It’s about saying the future doesn’t just happen to us, we shape it.I think a lot about Vitebsk when I’m w orking on my own projects. When I’m making a neon lit illustration of the tree of life or designing an augmented reality mazuza or writing speculative midrash with some AI tools. I’m not inventing this practice. I’m continuing it. I realize that I am a part of agreat legacy.All right. So, now that you know whatJewish futurism is and you’ve seen one historic example, let me tell you what’s coming next. Every episode of this podcast, I’m going to explore a different facet of Jewish futurism. Some episodes will dive into history, liketoday we did a little bit of the Vitebsk. Some will focus on specific projects I’m making like my Cosmogranate light installation or my Hiddur Olam Torah art book series. Some will feature guests like artists, rabbis, technologists, game designers, sci-fi writers, people who are imagining Jewish futures in their very own ways. We’ll talk aboutJewish science fiction from early Zionist utopian novels to contemporary authors. We’ll explore ethical questions like, can you wear a smartwatch onShabbat? Uh, what does the golem myth teach us about AI? and how do we design rituals for our future space colonies?And we’ll put uh we’ll pull from movements that inspire me and inspireJew Jewish futurism in general like afrofuturism, indigenous futurism,queer futurism, cyberpunk, solar punk, vapor wave, as well as retrofuturismfrom previous eras. Because Jewish futurism thrives when it learns uh from and uplifts other communities. The future is collaborative or really it’s nothing.Each episode will be about uh 25 to 30minutes, short enough for you to listenon your commute, but long enough to go actually deep enough.And if you want visuals, because honestly a lot of this work is super visual, you can find everything at my website, www.mmikeworthart.com.I post the essays, the artwork, the process notes, the experiments. It’slike a living futurist sketchbook.So here’s my invitation. Look at the world through Jewish futurist eyes.Where do you see opportunities to blend technology, art, and spirituality? What stories would you remix? What rituals would you redesign?On our next episode, we’re going even deeper into history. We’re talking biblical prophecy, kabbalistic cosmology, the golem legend, and even some earlyJewish sci-fi in the modern era. We’ll trace the long arc of Jewish speculative thought from Isaiah’s vision of peace to Herzel’s utopian novel to wandering stars in space. But for now, thanks for being here at the beginning. I’m building this in public in real time,and I’m glad that you’re a part of it.That’s it for episode 1. If you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share it with someone who loves weird Jewish things.and check out www.mikewirthart.comfor visuals [music] and more. Until nexttime, may your imagination be illuminated?