In this episode of The Jewish futurism Lab, Mike Wirth uses the 4C model of creativity to map out what we really mean by “creative” in an age of AI art and endless images. He traces his own journey from parametric code experiments to Jewish futurist murals, then layers in Jewish history, exile, and the long tension around graven images as a lived curriculum in world‑building.
Along the way, Mike explores flow, aura, and authorship, asking who holds intention and responsibility when AI enters the studio. The conversation lands in Jewish futurism as an ethical frame, inviting listeners to treat narrative and technology as tools for building livable futures.
Episode Transcript
0:18
18 seconds Welcome back to the Jewish Futurism Lab,
0:20
20 seconds where we unpack Torah, tech, and tomorrow. I’m Mike Worth, Jewish futurist, community artist, and design educator, coming to you from Crowntown,
0:28
28 secondsCharlotte, North Carolina. Today, we’re going to ask a quieter question beneath all of the hot takes on AI and art. What do we really mean when we say something
0:36
36 secondsis creative? We’ll bring the 4C model of creativity into conversation with Jewish history and exile, and look at how we can see the same pixels, galleries, and
0:45
45 secondsfeeds, yet read them completely different when something new appears.
0:48
48 secondsThen, we’ll ask what it means for Jews to take up these tools and say, “No, this is how we will build our future.” Let’s get into it, y’all.
1:12
1 minute, 12 secondsSo, let’s start by naming this quiet question. Creativity is one of those words that we use constantly but almost
1:19
1 minute, 19 secondsnever define. We point at a painting, a film, a unique business idea, a really clever joke, and we say, “That’s so
1:28
1 minute, 28 secondscreative.” But underneath that compliment, we may be talking about completely different things. Sometimes we may mean originality. We’ve never
1:36
1 minute, 36 secondsseen anything like this before, so so creative. Sometimes we mean emotional impact. This really moved me and it will stay with me now. Definitely creative.
1:46
1 minute, 46 secondsSometimes we mean moral courage. It has said something risky or true. And wow,
1:52
1 minute, 52 secondsthat’s creative. And sometimes we just mean authorship. I can feel a real person’s story inside of this object or
2:00
2 minutesimage or song. Now, we add AI into the mix and everything gets a heck of a lot noisier.
2:07
2 minutes, 7 secondsAn image model spits out an image or a melody that looks or sounds new. Is that creative? If we say no, what exactly are
2:16
2 minutes, 16 secondswe protecting? And if we say yes, what are we giving away? To make sense of this, I want to do three things in
2:23
2 minutes, 23 secondstoday’s episode. First, I’ll introduce the 4C model of creativity, a way psychologists talk about creativity as a path rather than an on andoff switch.
2:34
2 minutes, 34 secondsSecond, I’ll place the model inside the Jewish story. How Jews have used creativity as refuge and as world building, especially in exile. Third,
2:44
2 minutes, 44 secondsI’ll bring in AI, the aura of art, and Jewish futurism to ask, “What is creativity now? And what
2:52
2 minutes, 52 secondsresponsibilities come with the power to build worlds through images, stories, and code?
3:00
3 minutesBut first, let me take you back to grad school for me at Parsons in New York City around 2001.
3:06
3 minutes, 6 secondsNow, the philosophy of the program that I was in, MFADT, was to build classes of artists,
3:14
3 minutes, 14 secondsdesigner, coders, and I was deep in the ones and zeros of generative art, trying to recreate Lzitzki on a screen for a
3:22
3 minutes, 22 secondsproject. I wrote this little program that made shapes drift and rearrange themselves a new composition every time
3:30
3 minutes, 30 secondsthat the code ran on the screen. I had absolutely written the code, but the computer was producing the actual art.
3:37
3 minutes, 37 secondsThis was my first encounter with what I later would learn to call parametric design. Where you don’t place every box
3:44
3 minutes, 44 secondsor pick every color. You write a series of instructions and rules and you watch a system respond. I felt weirdly split on this. Totally in charge of my idea,
3:55
3 minutes, 55 secondsbut not in the nitty-gritty of the image making. I remember classmates in other programs would ask, “So, are you the
4:04
4 minutes, 4 secondsartist or is the computer the artist?” I didn’t have a clean answer for them. It made me feel uneasy, but it also made me
4:12
4 minutes, 12 secondsfeel powerful, like I had stumbled into an art form that almost nobody around me had language for yet. That tension
4:19
4 minutes, 19 secondsbetween authorship and system is the same knot we’re still pulling on now with AI.
4:26
4 minutes, 26 secondsSo with that question hanging in the air, let’s put some structure underneath it and talk about this 4C model of creativity.
4:35
4 minutes, 35 secondsSo back in 2016, psychologists James Kaufman, Ronald Beaguetto, and Max Haland proposed something called the 4C
4:43
4 minutes, 43 secondsmodel of creativity. Their idea is simple. Instead of treating creativity as a yes no trait, they describe it as a
4:51
4 minutes, 51 secondsspectrum within four levels. The first level is mini C. Mini C is the private spark that happens within you. It’s the
5:00
5 minutesinner aha moment that clicks. You might be reading a text, listening to music,
5:05
5 minutes, 5 secondsor sketching in a sketchbook. And suddenly your understanding shifts. No one else sees it or hears it. There’s no product yet, but your inner world just rearranged itself a little bit.
5:17
5 minutes, 17 secondsThe second is little C. Little C is the spark that happens in others. Little C is everyday creative action. The recipe
5:26
5 minutes, 26 secondsyou tweak, the layout you rearrange, the new melody you try for a line of liturgy, the tiny design decision you make that solves a problem at work.
5:36
5 minutes, 36 secondsLittle C is creativity of daily life seen by people around you but not necessarily professionalized.
5:44
5 minutes, 44 secondsThe third level is called proc. Proc is where creativity becomes vocation and craft. You’ve put in your years of
5:51
5 minutes, 51 secondspractice. You have your thousand hours on your tools and you understand your field. Your peers recognize your work as
5:58
5 minutes, 58 secondsoriginal and solid. You might still feel like an impostor on the inside, but from the outside, people can see that this isn’t just dabbling for you. It’s a
6:06
6 minutes, 6 secondsdiscipline. There’s a professional recognition. Clients and customers are happy. But this doesn’t quite reach the legendary level of the fourth C.
6:17
6 minutes, 17 secondsThe fourth C is called big C. And big C is extremely rare. It’s fieldchanging creativity. The discoveries, moments, or
6:26
6 minutes, 26 secondsartworks that permanently alter how people in a domain think, feel, or create. These are the names that end up in history surveys and retrospectives.
6:36
6 minutes, 36 secondsThe key insight of the 4C model is that creativity is not binary. Everyone has access to mini C and little C. With
6:44
6 minutes, 44 secondssupport and persistence, some people move into proc and the select few get into big C. Creativity becomes a life
6:52
6 minutes, 52 secondspath with stages, not a mysterious lightning bolt that strikes a chosen few.
6:58
6 minutes, 58 secondsWhen I think about many sea, I think about the quiet moments in my own practice where something in Jewish text suddenly shifts. That’s really where my
7:07
7 minutes, 7 secondshidor olum project work began. sitting with the weekly parasiot the Torah portion I’d get these little flashes of
7:15
7 minutes, 15 secondswhat if this verse looked like a circuit board or what if this story was a city map those weren’t finished pieces just
7:23
7 minutes, 23 secondsprivate clicks in my own head little C showed up when I started sketching those flashes instead of ignoring them I’d
7:31
7 minutes, 31 secondsfilled pages with thumbnail drawings strange hybrid symbols layouts and treated Torah like a design system of
7:38
7 minutes, 38 secondsthese sketches turned into small studio projects, some into workshop exercises where I asked students to diagram a text
7:46
7 minutes, 46 secondsinstead of just, you know, talking about it. Over time, that became proc. The same instincts that drove those tiny
7:54
7 minutes, 54 secondsexperiments grew into f full mural projects for me, lectures, and eventually into what is being known as the Jewish futurism guy here in
8:03
8 minutes, 3 secondsCharlotte and beyond. institutions started calling not just because I could paint a wall but because I had a clear
8:10
8 minutes, 10 secondsvision for Torah memory and future and that’s when I realized this wasn’t my private way of learning it was actually
8:17
8 minutes, 17 secondsmy vocation and that’s why I created the Hadoro lum book series.
8:24
8 minutes, 24 secondsSo that’s how the 4C path has shown up in my life. Let’s zoom that out and place the whole spectrum inside a Jewish frame. Now,
8:34
8 minutes, 34 secondsif you zoom out on the last century or so, a pattern starts to appear. Jews are a tiny fraction of the world’s population. Yet, a disproportionately
8:43
8 minutes, 43 secondslarge share of recognized, creative, and intellectual work has come from Jewish individuals in science, literature,
8:51
8 minutes, 51 secondsfilm, music, design, and other worldbuilding fields. The exact number varies by source, but they routinely
8:59
8 minutes, 59 secondsshow recognition far above what population alone would predict. I don’t bring this up to brag. I bring it up
9:06
9 minutes, 6 secondsbecause it calls for explanation. Here is a thesis I want to hold lightly, but seriously,
9:13
9 minutes, 13 secondsJewish life has functioned in practice as a create creativity incubator. Not because of some mystical creative gene,
9:21
9 minutes, 21 secondsbut because our texts, practices, and historical conditions have trained us to live by questions, to imagine
9:28
9 minutes, 28 secondsalternative worlds, and to survive between cultures.
9:33
9 minutes, 33 secondsConsider a few ingredients. From childhood, many Jews are taught to argue with texts, with teachers, sometimes
9:41
9 minutes, 41 secondseven with God. We’re encouraged to ask why and what if and how else could this be read? That is training in divergent
9:50
9 minutes, 50 secondsthinking. We inherit a tradition where midash, the creative expansion of stories, is central. We take a short
9:58
9 minutes, 58 secondsbiblical scene and spin entire worlds of commentary around it. That is worldbuilding, my friends. Historically,
10:06
10 minutes, 6 secondsmany Jews have lived as minorities at cultural crossroads, navigating life in more than one language and system at
10:13
10 minutes, 13 secondsonce. That is training in hybridity, in seeing multiple perspectives at once, in spotting the cracks where new forms can
10:22
10 minutes, 22 secondsgrow. When you add those together, it becomes less surprising that many Jews find themselves drawn to creative fields. The 4C path feels familiar
10:31
10 minutes, 31 secondsbecause our tradition has been walking in its own way for centuries.
10:36
10 minutes, 36 secondsSo, let’s return here to mini C for a second. In Jewish terms, you can think of many C as my own Torah. The unique
10:45
10 minutes, 45 secondsway a verse, a prayer, a ritual or historical moment reconfigures something inside of you. You read a para uh you’ve
10:53
10 minutes, 53 secondsread every year or maybe for the first time and suddenly a word uh you’ve never noticed feels central or brand new. You
11:01
11 minutes, 1 secondstand in Amida prayer and realize that one line is speaking directly into the week that you’ve just had. You sit with
11:08
11 minutes, 8 secondsa midash and it opens a door to your own story that you didn’t know was there. No one else hears that inner dialogue, but
11:15
11 minutes, 15 secondsit’s totally real. That’s mini Creativity happening in the medium of your own consciousness and imagination.
11:25
11 minutes, 25 secondsNow, little C appears when you give that inner shift some form. You write a small poem on the back of your sitter, your
11:33
11 minutes, 33 secondsprayer book sheet. You sketch a motif from the para into your notebook. You design a tiny ritual tweak around a life
11:42
11 minutes, 42 secondsevent. You visualize a piece of Torah as a data diagram or as a city or as a user interface with buttons that you can
11:50
11 minutes, 50 secondspush. Those little sea acts may never hit Instagram. They may only touch a handful of people. But in Jewish life,
11:58
11 minutes, 58 secondsthat is where much of our daily world building happens. We translate inherited texts and symbols into forms that fit
12:06
12 minutes, 6 secondsinto our actual lives, our bodies, and our neighborhoods. For many Jews across time, especially in precarious
12:14
12 minutes, 14 secondsconditions, these acts of making have been literal refuge.
12:19
12 minutes, 19 secondsSo, here’s a little story. After October 7th, everything in my feeds and text threads felt like it was vibrating. I
12:27
12 minutes, 27 secondswas getting this flood of messages, some from friends checking in, some compassionate, but a lot of them soaked
12:34
12 minutes, 34 secondsin anti-semitic and anti-ionist venom. I felt like I was sitting Shiva with my phone instead of with my own people. Out
12:42
12 minutes, 42 secondsof that, I made digital illustration called Sherked Shiva. It’s a image of a silhouetted man slumped in a chair surrounded by glowing phone screens.
12:53
12 minutes, 53 secondsEach screen holds fragments of real texts and posts that I received in those first few days after October 7th. It was
13:01
13 minutes, 1 secondmy way of saying this is what it feels like when grief, fear, and everyone else’s hot takes are all pinging you at once.
13:10
13 minutes, 10 secondsI submitted the piece to a group show of Charlotte based artists. The guest curator accepted it, but the chief
13:17
13 minutes, 17 secondscurator pulled it, saying they were acting in the protection of the Jewish community and that viewers wouldn’t understand what I’m saying and might get
13:26
13 minutes, 26 secondsangry. I remember thinking, “Isn’t this what art is for, to hold uncom the uncomfortable thing we don’t yet understand. Even if it could hang on
13:35
13 minutes, 35 secondstheir wall, it still functioned as refuge for me. It told the truth of what my community and I were feeling and
13:43
13 minutes, 43 secondsreminded me that my job is to insist that our grief and perspective belong in that room. That is why I mean when I
13:52
13 minutes, 52 secondsmean by saying that creativity is a refuge.
13:55
13 minutes, 55 secondsLet’s look at what happens when that refuge grows into full-blown proc and then the occasional big C. So as these
14:04
14 minutes, 4 secondspatterns repeat over years, you begin to recognize proc, you become someone who creates regularly, takes feedback
14:11
14 minutes, 11 secondsseriously, builds a body of work, and starts to influence how others think, pray, learn, or create. In Jewish terms,
14:19
14 minutes, 19 secondsproceed shows up in rabbis, educators who craft new curricula and liturgies.
14:24
14 minutes, 24 secondsIt shows up in artists and designers who whose work circulates widely within Jewish spaces. It shows up in people
14:32
14 minutes, 32 secondsbuilding speculative projects around Jewish futures, not as one-off experiments, but as sustained practice.
14:39
14 minutes, 39 secondsProc is where responsibility thickens.
14:41
14 minutes, 41 secondsYou are no longer just playing for yourself. Your work shapes other people’s inner and outer worlds. Big C
14:49
14 minutes, 49 secondsis rarer still. That’s when a particular Jewish creative life, a mystical system,
14:55
14 minutes, 55 secondsa movement, a body of art, a mode of storytelling permanently expands what Judaism can be. It might be a visual
15:03
15 minutes, 3 secondslanguage that becomes synonymous with a movement. It might be a speculative vision that influences how Jews and non-Jews picture Jewish futures. Now add
15:12
15 minutes, 12 secondsanother layer, the youngness of Jews in the cannon of Western art history.
15:18
15 minutes, 18 secondsBecause of anxiety around graven images and because of our minority status, much of Jewish uh visual art historically
15:26
15 minutes, 26 secondslived in spaces that art history did not always value. Things like manuscripts,
15:31
15 minutes, 31 secondsritual objects, murals inside of synagogues, textiles, calligraphy, and some typography. From the outside, that
15:39
15 minutes, 39 secondscan look like Jews didn’t make art for very long, did they? And only recently joined the story of modern art. From the
15:46
15 minutes, 46 secondsinside, that narrative is false. Our commandments about images are not a blanket ban on creativity. They are an early media ethics guide in my opinion.
15:57
15 minutes, 57 secondsThey acknowledge that images are powerful, that they can capture and distort, that they can become idols unto themselves.
16:06
16 minutes, 6 secondsIn that sense, Torah is not anti-art. It is pro-responsible art. It commands us to be extremely careful about what we
16:14
16 minutes, 14 secondsrepresent, how we represent it, and what we allow our eyes and communities to worship.
16:21
16 minutes, 21 secondsAs Jews have moved into the formal institutions of art history, and later into film, television, comics, games,
16:28
16 minutes, 28 secondsand digital media, we’ve carried that tension with us into those places. A combination of hunger to create and weariness about what representations can
16:38
16 minutes, 38 secondsactually do. Growing up, I always felt this low-grade tension between the commandment about graven images and the
16:45
16 minutes, 45 secondsfact that I wanted deeply to be an artist. Nobody sat me down and said,
16:49
16 minutes, 49 seconds”You can’t draw. Don’t do this. It’s against our religion. It’s against our people.” But the vibe around images was cautious enough that it made my
16:57
16 minutes, 57 secondssketchbook feel a little illicit. Then I read My Name is Asher Lev by Kaim Potak.
17:05
17 minutes, 5 secondsThis novel about a hidic kid whose painting life puts him in conflict with his community’s expectations. Suddenly,
17:12
17 minutes, 12 secondsI had language and a mirror. Here was a Jewish character whose art felt both like a calling and a problem. The book
17:20
17 minutes, 20 secondsdidn’t resolve the tension for me, but it did something more important. It convinced me that diving deeper into Jewish art was exactly where I needed to go, no matter how complicated it got.
17:31
17 minutes, 31 secondsThe only thing standing between me and doing was permission.
17:35
17 minutes, 35 secondsTo this day, that early friction shapes my design choices. I think hard about where I place faces, how I handle sacred
17:43
17 minutes, 43 secondstext, what I choose to make hypervisible, and what I leave abstract or symbolic. The tension between image
17:50
17 minutes, 50 secondsand commandment isn’t an obstacle anymore. It’s part of the engine of my work. So, that’s the backdrop we carry
17:58
17 minutes, 58 secondsinto the next piece of the puzzle. What happens to flow and the aura of art when AI walks into the studio? Now, I want to
18:06
18 minutes, 6 secondsbraid in those two concepts a little bit more deeply. Flow and the aura of art.
18:12
18 minutes, 12 secondsFlow in psychological language is a state where challenge and skill are completely balanced. Time falls away and you are fully absorbed in what you’re
18:20
18 minutes, 20 secondsdoing. You’re not bored. You’re not overwhelmed. You’re right at the edge of your abilities, immersed and feeling alive. In Jewish spiritual language,
18:28
18 minutes, 28 secondsthat state overlaps with kavana,
18:31
18 minutes, 31 secondsfocused, heartfelt intention in your prayer and with shepha, a sense of divine flow or abundance moving through
18:39
18 minutes, 39 secondsyou in creative or devotional work. Aura is a term some use to describe the presence of an original artwork in time
18:46
18 minutes, 46 secondsand space like Walter Benjamin. feeling that this object or moment carries an unre repeatable history and a charge
18:53
18 minutes, 53 secondsthat a reproduction might not ever possess. When we argue about AI art,
18:59
18 minutes, 59 secondswe’re often also arguing about these things. Can a generated image carry aura? Where is the flow in the human, in
19:07
19 minutes, 7 secondsthe system, or in the relationship between them? What counts as real quote unquote creativity in that mix? Or is
19:14
19 minutes, 14 secondsthere any at all? Here is where a working definition to hold these two together can work. Creativity is not
19:21
19 minutes, 21 secondsjust producing something new. It is the ongoing relationship between a maker, a community and a world in which ideas and forms are transformed with intention,
19:30
19 minutes, 30 secondsrisk and responsibility.
19:32
19 minutes, 32 secondsIt includes the inner state of flow, the outer artifact and the ethical consequences of what is made. So by that
19:40
19 minutes, 40 secondsdefinition AI can clearly participate in the outer artifact layer. It can help generate image texts and sounds but the
19:49
19 minutes, 49 secondsinner layer the flow the shepha the kavana that’s still human. And the relationship layer the responsibility to
19:56
19 minutes, 56 secondsa community to history to people who will be shaped by this work that’s also still human. The question is really not is AI creative in some abstract sense.
20:06
20 minutes, 6 secondsThe question is who is holding intention and responsibility when these tools are used? My first taste of AI imagery was
20:15
20 minutes, 15 secondswith Google’s deep dream in 2015. I uploaded a photo mostly out of curiosity. Hit the button and then
20:22
20 minutes, 22 secondssuddenly everything had eyeballs over it. Eyes in the trees and the clouds and the background noise. But the model was
20:29
20 minutes, 29 secondsoveramplifying patterns it knew it had to detect. It was trippy and kind of funny, but I didn’t really feel any
20:36
20 minutes, 36 secondsartistic threat from it, if you can understand that. And then almost a decade later in 2021, when open- source tools like disco diffusion arrived,
20:46
20 minutes, 46 secondssomething shifted. For the first time, I felt like I was getting somewhere visually. I could rough sketch out ideas of speculative Jewish spaces and symbols that would have taken me hours by hand.
20:57
20 minutes, 57 secondsThe resolution was low, the style inconsistent, and it definitely wasn’t my quote unquote line or color language at all. But as a kind of sketch engine,
21:07
21 minutes, 7 secondsit was useful. I started thinking of my outputs as raw material, elements I might collage into something more intentional later, not as finished
21:16
21 minutes, 16 secondspieces that I’d ever assigned my name on.
21:19
21 minutes, 19 secondsThat experience set an early boundary for me. AI could sit at the conceptual and experimentation layer of my process,
21:26
21 minutes, 26 secondsbut the final artwork, especially in Jewish contexts, needed to pass back through my own hand, my own eye, and my own responsibility for what it means.
21:38
21 minutes, 38 secondsThat brings us here to the bigger picture. We have people whose culture trains them in questioning, pattern making, and imaginative survival. We
21:46
21 minutes, 46 secondshave commandments that treat images and stories as spiritual and psychologically potent. We have a modern history in which Jews are heavily involved in
21:55
21 minutes, 55 secondsfields that build the stories and symbols of our modern life. That combination means Jews have had significant influence on the narratives
22:04
22 minutes, 4 secondsand metaphors that move through mass media, even while often being misrepresented or attacked by those same
22:10
22 minutes, 10 secondssystems. This is where Jewish futurism enters as an explicit ethical frame.
22:16
22 minutes, 16 secondsJewish futurism looks at this whole arc and says, “We are not just making content. We are designing possible worlds. We know what happens when images
22:25
22 minutes, 25 secondsare weaponized against us and other minorities.” We also know how healing it is to encounter stories and visuals that
22:33
22 minutes, 33 secondshold our complexity and our future in front of us. So if we’re going to be present in art, design, media, and AI,
22:41
22 minutes, 41 secondsJewish futurism insists on treating narrative and technology as a kind of covenant. It asks questions like, “What
22:49
22 minutes, 49 secondskind of Jewish futures are we normalizing through our work?” Great question. Who is centered and who is
22:56
22 minutes, 56 secondserased in our speculative worlds? Who comes with us? How do we avoid reinforcing anti-semitic tropes or
23:04
23 minutes, 4 secondsflattening others into caricatures? and how do we use our creative power to protect the vulnerable and expand the horizons of dignity and possibility?
23:14
23 minutes, 14 secondsEarlier in my career, I spent a lot of time making slick animated ads,
23:19
23 minutes, 19 secondsincluding what I felt like was my 50th cat litter spot. Technically, it was a good exercise, but at some point, I realized I was pouring my skills into
23:28
23 minutes, 28 secondsthings that didn’t line up with my values or my communities, even though we love cats. That dissonance became a
23:35
23 minutes, 35 secondscompass. Around the same period, I started creating a series of infographics that broke down Jewish holidays into clear visual language.
23:43
23 minutes, 43 secondsWhat they mean, where they come from,
23:45
23 minutes, 45 secondsand how their practice. It was about 2009, and encoding Jewish knowledge into digestible, sharable graphics felt like
23:52
23 minutes, 52 secondsa new move in information design. The audience was both non-Jews and Jews who had never really been taught the origins of the days that they were celebrating.
24:02
24 minutes, 2 secondsIt was for beginners. Organizations like Hillel International, which supports Jewish life on campus and helps students
24:09
24 minutes, 9 secondsnavigate the holiday cycle, were working to make those same traditions approachable. Back then, my infographics
24:16
24 minutes, 16 secondsplugged into that same impulse, and we started a social media campaign collaboration between Hillel and myself, but this time through a design lens.
24:25
24 minutes, 25 secondsThose projects became a northstar for my ethics. If a piece of work helps people understand Jews and Judaism with more nuance or gives Jews themselves a
24:34
24 minutes, 34 secondsclearer, prouder sense of their own story, that leans towards a hell yes. If it flattens us into stereotypes, turns
24:41
24 minutes, 41 secondsour symbols into cheap props, or asks me to ignore the humanity of Palestinians,
24:46
24 minutes, 46 secondsblack and brown communities, queer and trans folks, or anyone else I care about, that’s a hard no for me, dog, no
24:53
24 minutes, 53 secondsmatter how nice the paycheck is. Which brings us to a question that’s really at the heart of all this. What is all this Jew Jewish creativity actually for?
25:05
25 minutes, 5 secondsSo where does this leave us? We started with deceptively simple question. What is creativity really in a world of AI
25:13
25 minutes, 13 secondsart and endless images? We saw that creativity can be understood as a path mini, little C, proc and big C, not as a
25:22
25 minutes, 22 secondsbinary on or off trait. We saw that Jewish life has long served as a creativity incubator, training people to
25:31
25 minutes, 31 secondsquestion, to worldbuild, and to find refuge in making. We revised our complex relationship with images and
25:38
25 minutes, 38 secondscommandments, not as a ban on art, but as a deep awareness of arts power. We wrestled with AI, flow, the aura of art,
25:47
25 minutes, 47 secondsand authorship. We named Jewish futurism as a way to take responsibility for our narrative and technological powers. For me, all this points towards a simple,
25:57
25 minutes, 57 secondsdemanding idea. Jewish creativity is not just about making beautiful things. It’s about making livable worlds inside and
26:06
26 minutes, 6 secondsoutside where Jews and our neighbors can exist with dignity, complexity, and a sense of collective future.
26:15
26 minutes, 15 secondsIn 2024, I brought my work to Miami for Art Basil. Super huge moment. I was showing at the the Jada Art Fair and I
26:24
26 minutes, 24 secondshad two pieces on display that were really cool and they used augmented reality to layer speculative Jewish futures on top of physical images.
26:34
26 minutes, 34 secondsPeople would hold up their phones and suddenly there were new parts of the images, new new motion, new things emerging from from the image to the
26:42
26 minutes, 42 secondsspace around them. While folks were engaging this, an older woman in her late 70s or 80s uh spent some time with the work and then turned to me and said,
26:53
26 minutes, 53 seconds”You know, my father used to draw these futuristic cities and dream up new ways to be Jewish almost a hundred years ago.
27:00
27 minutesWhen he first got to the States after fleeing from Europe, you remind me of him. He would get so excited and you have that same look of optimism in your
27:09
27 minutes, 9 secondseyes.” Oh, that story hit me right in the kishkas. It landed really hard. In that moment, the work stopped just being about my own ideas and became part of a
27:18
27 minutes, 18 secondslarger chain of people sketching Jewish futures under pressure. I felt this wave of joy and responsibility at the same
27:26
27 minutes, 26 secondstime. Joy, I realized, is going to have to lead us forward. So, I want to leave you with this. Given the history of the
27:34
27 minutes, 34 secondsJewish people, the commandments, our presence in creative fields, and our longing for home, what kind of worlds do you want to help build with your hands,
27:44
27 minutes, 44 secondswith your words, with your code, your heart, and your rituals? And who will get to live in those worlds with us?
27:53
27 minutes, 53 secondsThat’s it for today’s episode of the Jewish Futurism Lab. If this stirred something in you, please share it with somebody who’s wrestling with AI,
28:01
28 minutes, 1 secondcreativity, or Jewish life right now. I’m Mike Worth. Thank you for listening, and I will see yall in the future.
28:08
28 minutes, 8 seconds Bezrat HaShem.