Tag: futurism

  • What Went Wrong with Italian Futurism and Why Every futurist Needs to Know More About It

    What Went Wrong with Italian Futurism and Why Every futurist Needs to Know More About It

    When I teach graphic design history at Queens University of Charlotte, we hit a point in the semester that always makes me a little uncomfortable, because I know it’s coming before the students do. We’re talking about Italian Futurism, those bold typographic posters, a visionary sounding manifesto bursting with energy, those declarations about speed and machines and destroying museums. At first, students lean forward and feel like the work looks alive and feels thrilling. And then we read more deeply into the Marinetti’s words and we see that this movement became a propaganda apparatus for Mussolini’s fascist regime.

    The first page of the manifesto of Il Futurismo by FT Marinetti 1909

    Those promising-sounding ideas about breaking with the past? They’re loaded with fascist and racist intentions. That gorgeous energy? It was weaponized.
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    FT Marinetti 1909

    This is the pedagogical tightrope I walk every semester, and it’s the same tightrope I’m walking in my work on Jewish futurism.

    I’m trying to rescue the core impulse of futurism, the bold, beautiful desire to imagine and design better futures, from what Italian Futurism did to it.

    Because here’s the thing: Italian Futurism started with legitimate, even utopian desires, and it still became a cautionary tale. If you’re going to study any kind of futurism seriously, you need to meet Italian Futurism early, not to emulate it, but to understand exactly what can go wrong when speed replaces wisdom and aesthetics trump ethics.
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    Futurism vs futurism: Why the Capital Letter Matters

    I’ve started being very careful about capital F versus lowercase f. Futurism with a capital F names a specific historical movement: Marinetti’s Italian avant-garde, with all its inherited baggage. It’s bound up with nationalism, misogyny, the glorification of war as “the world’s only hygiene,” and an eventual merger with Mussolini’s Fascist Party in 1920. When I write “Futurism,” I’m signaling: we’re talking about that movement, that history, those consequences.
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    Futurism with a lowercase “f” names something broader and more perennial: the human impulse to imagine, prototype, and design what comes next. It’s the practice of speculating about futures, whether through art, spirituality, technology, or politics. Lowercase futurism is a method and a desire, not an ideology. It’s the thing Jewish futurism, Afrofuturism, Queerfuturism, Sinofuturism, and Gulf futurism all share: the courage to ask what could be, and the willingness to build toward it.
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    This distinction isn’t just academic. It gives us critical vocabulary. Capital-F Futurism becomes an object of analysis and caution, the ancestor we study to avoid repeating. Lowercase futurism becomes a space for repair, reinvention, and new ethical commitments. Jewish futurism inherits the impulse without inheriting the violence.

    How Futurist Movements Emerge: What They All Want at First

    Futurist movements consistently arise during periods of dramatic technological transformation and cultural rupture. Italian Futurism emerged from a very specific crisis. Turn-of-the-century Italy was struggling in ways that made the country feel stuck in the past. The government was weak and unstable. There was no real national identity binding the regions together. Industrial development lagged decades behind other European powers. Poverty was widespread, modernization faced fierce resistance, crime and corruption were endemic, and millions of Italians were emigrating in search of better lives.​

    FIAT, 1927 Giuseppe Romano (1905–67) Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli Collection, Bologna

    Meanwhile, foreign tourists flooded Italy to gaze at ancient ruins and Renaissance masterpieces, treating the country like a beautiful museum, a relic of what it once was. For young Italian intellectuals like Marinetti, this was humiliating. People came to see what Italy was, not what it is or could become. The weight of the past felt suffocating.​

    This pattern repeats across other futurist movements. Afrofuturism developed in response to the ongoing trauma of the transatlantic slave trade and systemic oppression, seeking to reclaim narratives and imagine liberation. Gulf futurism arose from the rapid, oil-driven transformation of the Arab Gulf states. Sinofuturism responds to China’s technological rise and Western anxieties about shifting global power.​

    Despite their different contexts, these movements share foundational patterns. They reject traditions they perceive as inadequate or stifling. They embrace technology as a catalyst for radical cultural change. Most importantly, they assert the right to imagine and define their own futures rather than accepting externally imposed visions.​

    Codognato, Plinio Fiat 520 Optima!, 1928
    Lazzaro, Umberto di Italian Aerial Lines, 1933 ca.

    Futurist movements emerge from communities experiencing rupture, whether from rapid modernization, colonialism, diaspora, or globalization. They often adopt manifesto culture, broadcasting bold visions to gather followers. They’re youth-driven, appealing to younger generations eager to break free from what they see as the constraints of older orders.​

    At their inception, futurist movements typically seek cultural sovereignty, the synthesis of heritage and innovation, celebration of dynamism and transformation, radical breaks from oppressive pasts, and social change through technology. These are legitimate, even beautiful desires. The critical question is: what values guide those transformative visions? Italian Futurism demonstrates what happens when the desire to destroy the past overwhelms the responsibility to build just futures.​

    Collage of Futurismo Fascisto Art By SheldonOswaldLee

    The Promise and Peril of Italian Futurism

    Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched Italian Futurism with his 1909 manifesto, and it crackled with revolutionary energy. He declared the racing car more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace and announced war on museums, libraries, and academies. The movement promised total cultural transformation through speed, machines, violence, and youth.​

    But Marinetti wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He made actual political proposals to sell off Italy’s art heritage in bulk to other countries. Museums were “graveyards,” he argued, places that paralyzed Italy and prevented it from joining the modern world. Venice, beloved by foreign tourists, was dismissed as “Europe’s brothel”. Art critic John Ruskin, who had celebrated Italian cultural heritage, became an enemy figure.

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    John Ruskin, 29 June 1863, Photo by
    William Downey (1829-1915)

    The Futurist manifesto even contained a self-consuming logic. It declared that when Marinetti himself turned 40, younger futurists should throw him “into the trash can, like useless manuscripts”. The movement advocated not just destroying museums once, but periodic cleansing of cultural memory. Nothing could be allowed to accumulate tradition or meaning.

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    FT Marinetti’s Futurist Cook book- where he calls for the ban of pasta form the Italian diet, 1913 Posterhaus

    The seeds of destruction were there from the beginning. Marinetti glorified war as “the world’s only hygiene” and promoted aggressive Italian nationalism. When the Futurist Political Party merged with Mussolini’s Fascist movement in 1920, artistic vision was subordinated to political power. The philosophical contradictions, celebrating individual creative genius while demanding conformity to nationalist ideology, created tensions that made the movement culturally irrelevant even as it gained political influence.​

    Aeroritratto di Mussolini aviatore, Alfredo Ambrosi, 1930

    Five Things That Went Catastrophically Wrong

    1. Glorification of Violence and Destruction

    Italian Futurism didn’t just accept violence as a historical reality. It actively celebrated war, aggression, and destruction as aesthetic and moral goods. The movement embraced Italian expansionism and cultural supremacy, making technological progress inseparable from domination. Rather than synthesizing past and future, Italian Futurism sought to obliterate history entirely, creating a vacuum that fascist ideology eagerly filled.​

    This pattern wasn’t unique to Italy. The source material connects Futurism to similar state-sponsored iconoclasm in revolutionary France, Soviet Russia, and Maoist China. When modernization ideology justifies cultural destruction, it creates dangerous precedents. The logic always sounds progressive at first: we must destroy the old to make way for the new. But that destruction rarely stops where its advocates promise.​

    2. Absence of Ethical Guardrails

    The movement valued technology and speed for their own sake, with no moral framework to guide their application. Machines were beautiful because they were fast and powerful, not because they served human flourishing. This absence of empathy-centered design principles meant that when political power beckoned, the movement had no philosophical foundation to resist authoritarianism.​

    Marinetti viewed Italy’s cultural heritage not as something to be honored or reinterpreted, but as a burden to be liquidated. There was no question of what wisdom traditions might offer, no consideration of what future generations might need from the past. Speed was the only value.​

    3. Authoritarianism Over Democracy

    Italian Futurism began with anti-monarchist and anti-clerical positions, challenging established power. These principles were quickly abandoned when Marinetti saw opportunities for influence within Mussolini’s regime. The movement became a propaganda tool, with artistic vision subordinated to the authoritarian state. Individual creative genius, once celebrated, was channeled into serving nationalist ideology.​

    4. Exclusionary Cultural Supremacy

    Italian nationalism and cultural dominance were core tenets from the start. There was no space for pluralism, interfaith dialogue, or universal design principles. The aggressive rejection of tradition created a vacuum where fascist ideology could flourish, as the movement offered speed and violence but no sustaining vision of human connection.​ Not to mention that the regime implemented Italian Racial Laws in 1938, introducing discrimination and persecution against Jews of Italy. 

    The humiliation Marinetti felt when tourists treated Italy as a museum of the past was real. But his response, to erase that past entirely rather than build new futures in dialogue with it, became toxic. Cultural sovereignty doesn’t require cultural amnesia.​

    5. Aesthetic Without Substance

    When Mussolini refused to make Futurism the official state art of fascist Italy, the movement collapsed into cultural irrelevance. Decades of manifesto-writing had produced style over philosophical depth. Without a sustainable ethical foundation, Italian Futurism had nothing to offer once political winds shifted.​

    The movement’s self-consuming logic guaranteed this outcome. If nothing is allowed to accumulate meaning, if every generation must destroy what came before, then no stable cultural foundation can ever form. You can’t build futures on ground you keep setting on fire.​

    Jewish futurism: Building From Different Ground

    This is where my work begins. Jewish futurism emerges from fundamentally different premises, offering a model for how technological optimism can coexist with ancient wisdom and ethical responsibility. Where Italian Futurism glorified destruction, Jewish futurism centers empathy-led innovation, positioning technology as a tool for meaning-making rather than domination.​

    Jewish history demonstrates millennia of resilience and reinvention without destroying the past. Continuous reinterpretation, of texts, traditions, cultural practices, allows Jewish communities to honor ancestral heritage while embracing modernity. This mirrors Afrofuturism’s Sankofa principle, which emphasizes learning from the past to inform future trajectories. Rather than revolutionary destruction, Jewish futurism practices synthesis and transformation.​

    In my own practice, Jewish futurism is rooted in Jewish thought: tikkun olam (repair of the world), justice, responsibility. Technology is never valued for its own sake but always in service of deeper moral commitments. This philosophical grounding provides the ethical guardrails that Italian Futurism catastrophically lacked. The question at the heart of my work is: “What kind of ancestor will you be?” That question changes everything.​

    Where Marinetti wanted to be thrown in the trash at age 40, Jewish futurism asks what we’re building that will outlast us, what we’re passing down that future generations will need. It’s not about preserving everything unchanged. It’s about being in active, creative dialogue with tradition while we build what comes next.​
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    What We Can Learn: Five Lessons for Building Responsible Futurisms

    Ethics Must Precede Aesthetics: Beauty and innovation without moral grounding enable atrocity. Technology requires wisdom traditions to guide its use. Speed without wisdom is just velocity. It doesn’t know where it’s going or why. When Marinetti proposed selling Italy’s art heritage in bulk, he showed what happens when aesthetic ideology overrides ethical consideration.​

    Honor the Past While Building the Future: Synthesis surpasses destruction as a strategy for cultural renewal. Tradition provides foundation for innovation rather than serving as an obstacle to it. Jewish tradition treats time as cyclical rather than linear, where past, present, and future dynamically interact. The humiliation Italy felt at being treated as a museum was real, but erasure isn’t the only response. We can acknowledge what’s broken in our inherited traditions while keeping what sustains us.​

    Center Human Dignity Over Cultural Supremacy: Universal design principles create futures for all people, not just dominant groups. futurism must be liberatory rather than oppressive, replacing nationalism with empathy and collaboration. Jewish futurism creates shared spaces for collective growth and interfaith collaboration. The pattern of state-sponsored iconoclasm, from revolutionary France to Soviet Russia to Maoist China, shows us what happens when one vision of the future tries to erase all others.​

    Resist Political Opportunism: Artistic movements must maintain ethical independence even when political power beckons. When survival requires moral compromise, the movement has already failed. Marinetti’s compromises to ensure the movement’s survival hollowed it out from within. The proposals to liquidate cultural heritage weren’t just aesthetic statements. They were political calculations about access to power.​

    Root Innovation in Community: Collective meaning-making replaces the cult of individual genius. As I’ve learned in my own practice, the future, like design itself, is fundamentally a team sport. It thrives when we create collectively and collaboratively. Collaboration and care supersede competition and domination. The Futurist manifesto’s call to throw Marinetti himself in the trash at 40 reveals a movement with no concept of intergenerational continuity, no way to pass wisdom forward.​
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    The Responsibility of Imagining Futures

    Every speculative vision carries political and ethical consequences. Italian Futurism’s trajectory from revolutionary art movement to fascist propaganda machine demonstrates that enthusiasm for the future, absent ethical grounding, can enable profound harm.​

    When I stand in front of my design students at Queens, looking at those bold Futurist posters, I don’t want to just critique them. I want to show what it looks like to rescue the core impulse, the courage to imagine radically different futures, from what got corrupted. The frustration Marinetti felt was real. Italy was stuck. The weight of the past was crushing. Foreign tourists treating the country as a beautiful corpse was genuinely humiliating. But his solution, to burn it all down and start from nothing, created more problems than it solved.​

    Jewish futurism offers that alternative model: technological optimism rooted in ancestral wisdom, innovation guided by empathy, futures built through synthesis rather than destruction. We can honor what we’ve inherited while transforming it. We can be critical of traditions that harm while keeping what sustains. We can build futures that acknowledge the past without being imprisoned by it.​

    The question isn’t whether we’ll imagine futures. In periods of technological transformation, futurist movements will inevitably emerge. The question is what values will guide those visions. Will we learn from history’s warnings about the price of speed without wisdom, aesthetics without ethics, innovation without responsibility? Or will we repeat Italian Futurism’s mistakes with new technologies and new manifestos?​

    I’m betting we can do better. Jewish futurism, and the broader family of ethical futurisms it’s part of, shows us how. We can be bold and careful. We can embrace transformation and honor memory. We can design futures that are actually livable, not just fast. That’s the work. That’s what I’m trying to build.

  • Spiritual Creativity: My Journey into Community and Sacred Practice

    Spiritual Creativity: My Journey into Community and Sacred Practice

    What does it mean to make creativity a sacred practice, and how can art transform Jewish life? For me, becoming a Jewish artist wasn’t a career move. It was a spiritual awakening. This article traces how I came to see the creative process not only as a personal path to the divine but as a communal tool for connection, healing, and evolving Jewish tradition. Through murals, rituals, digital artwork, and collaborative design, I’ve learned that creativity can be one of the most powerful forms of Jewish practice we have today.

    “Why would you become a Jewish artist?” people used to ask me. “Isn’t that limiting your market to a very small sliver?” It’s true, I wasn’t always a Jewish artist. In fact, for a long time, I rarely made Jewish art. I was unsure. Afraid. Happy to be an assimilated American. Unaware of how essential it would become for me and for my community.

    I flirted with Jewish-themed projects years ago. Between 2008 and 2010, I worked with Hillel International and Manischewitz to create Jewish holiday infographic posters for social media. In 2014, I collaborated with the JDC (Joint Distribution Committee) to visualize their financial data and annual reports. I was illuminating the divine, even though I didn’t call it that yet.

    My Hanukkah infographic from the holiday set, 2010

    It wasn’t until 2015 that I truly made my first Jewish artwork: a portrait of Anne Frank for a mural exhibition called Renegades. Other artists were painting their own cultural heroes. Selecting figures who had gone against the grain. I realized it was time to seek my own. Anne Frank became my entry point into this work, a symbol to me of resilience and a powerful voice against erasure.

    Anne Frank by Mike Wirth- Painted in 2015 as part of the Renegades Exhibition- Statesville, NC

    That act of painting her opened a door. Slowly, I began to turn toward the sacred in my own tradition. The power of a large, colorful, public mural amplified the song I wanted to play during the process of making this artwork. My art-making became a form of prayer, my studio transformed into a sacred space, and my creativity evolved into an intentional spiritual practice.

    This shift happened when I read the Art of Jewish Prayer by Yitzhock Kirzner, Aryeh Kaplan’s Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation, and My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, that I consciously directed my art towards sacred purposes, rooted in the Jewish tradition of Hiddur Mitzvah, the beautification of commandments. These texts provided context, examples, and permission to dive deep into creation with the Creator. Creating art that explicitly engaged Jewish symbols, rituals, and values was transformative. It connected my creative spirit directly to my Jewish heritage, deepening my understanding of who I was as both an artist and a Jew.

    Seeking Spirituality Beyond Home

    For years, spirituality felt elusive. I searched widely through books, traditions, and practices that were not native to me. They were meaningful, somewhat familiar, but not quite mine. The connection I sought remained just out of reach, inauthentic because it lacked resonance with my core identity.

    But art always felt different. Unlike anything else, the creative process opened a space where I felt fully present, deeply focused, and yet somehow expanded beyond myself. When I was in the flow of making, I experienced peace, clarity, and a sense of connection to something ineffable. Creativity became a spiritual threshold where my ego dissolved, time softened, and I encountered what I can only describe as spirit.

    Much like prayer or meditation, creativity required me to slow down, listen, and surrender. There was kavannah or intention and there was surrender to something unfolding through me, not just from me. The act of making was mirroring sacred ritual: there were preparations, gestures, rhythms, and moments of revelation. I realized I was building altars out of paper, light, pigment, and symbol.

    In those moments, my studio wasn’t just a workspace, but it was a mikdash me’at, a small sanctuary. Making became prayer. Not metaphorically, but truly: a way of communing with the Divine, of processing the world, and of seeking wholeness through acts of beauty and imagination.

    Turning Toward the Divine

    Everything shifted when I began to turn that creative intention toward the divine. Through Jewish themes, symbols, and rituals, I discovered a channel between my artistic life and my spiritual heritage. I wasn’t just illustrating ideas anymore, I was beginning to create images of the supernatural sensations I experienced in prayer and meditation. My imagination was filled with light, energy, movement, and meaning that felt deeply sacred and alive. I longed to capture the invisible. To make visible the ineffable sparks, flows, and forces that surged through ritual, study, and spiritual presence. I began to see the hidden energy encoded in the stories of the Torah. Figures like Moses, Miriam, and Elijah took on a new presence in my mind and not just as biblical characters, but as spiritual superheroes, carriers of divine power and transformation. Suddenly, creativity was no longer a separate mode of expression; it became my way of connecting, of serving, of sanctifying.

    Cosmic Shema- digital illustration by Mike Wirth, 2022

    Deepening Jewish Knowledge and Art

    That epiphany led to study. I immersed myself in Jewish art, theology, and spiritual traditions: Betzalel, Kabbalah, Hiddur Mitzvah, Mussar. I found ancient frameworks that affirmed what I had already intuited that art could be holy. That beauty was not frivolous. That creativity could be a form of moral and spiritual refinement.

    At a certain point, I realized I didn’t just want to explore this for myself and I wanted to help build a new creative-spiritual system that other Jews could use in practice. A framework that would invite both artists and non-artists to access spirituality through creative intention. A system rooted in Jewish values but expansive enough to meet people where they are in their community centers, schools, studios, or synagogues. A new pathway for sacred practice that could evolve alongside Jewish life itself.

    Design and the Sacred Creative Process

    As a designer and artist, I began to notice profound overlaps between the spiritual frameworks I was studying in Judaism and the design methodologies I used professionally. Both begin with empathy and intention. Both evolve through cycles. Both aim to make meaning. When I merged these systems, they each became more accessible, emotional, and impactful, not only for myself, but for others engaging with my work.

    This led me to develop a process I now use in both personal practice and community workshops. It blends design thinking, Jewish intentionality, and artistic exploration. I begin by identifying a question or tension. Something personal or communal. I respond with sketches, writing, or prototypes, then reflect on what resonates. I refine or rework the ideas in cycles, grounding the process in kavannah (spiritual intention) and humility. Over time, it becomes more than a finished piece, it becomes a tool for spiritual insight and connection. Here’s how it typically unfolds:

    A matrix of my creative-spiritual framework

    One of the most powerful connectors between these two worlds is iteration. In design, iteration means we test, revise, and revisit ideas. We are always improving through cycles of feedback. In Judaism, iteration is baked into everything: we revisit the same Torah portions each year with new eyes, we refine rituals through lived experience, and we continually return to core questions through study and prayer. This cyclical, reflective approach makes the sacred creative process feel alive. It becomes responsive to both tradition and change of the practice of ritual, liturgy, Torah cycles and compared them to the creative frameworks I used as a designer, I began to notice deep resonances. Jewish time is iterative. Rituals are prototypes refined over generations. Sacred texts are living documents engaged by communities in cycles. These are not just religious structures they are deeply creative systems.

    Merging the frameworks of UX design from sources like IDEO, Interaction Design Foundation and Jewish spiritual practice not only clarified both for me, but it made them more accessible, emotional, and human. Suddenly, design became prayerful. And Judaism became a beautifully designed user experience for living with meaning. In that synthesis, I found a personal theology of creativity, one that invites others in regardless of artistic background.

    How UX Design and Spiritual Practice overlap

    Witnessing Community Transformation 

    In 2023, I was part of the inaugural Social Practice Institute hosted by the Greensboro Jewish Museum. Over a 10-day intensive, my cohort of Jewish creatives explored the intersections of Social Practice theory and Judaism. As our capstone project, we were invited to create a social practice artwork grounded in Jewish values. I chose to design a ritual rooted in my family’s Shabbat practice by formalizing a simple yet powerful question that my non-Jewish partner asks each week: “What was your high and low?” Working with Rabbi Judy Schindler, I wrote a prayer and developed a ritual element that involved dipping salt and honey, symbolizing the sweet and bitter aspects of the week. This gesture transformed an informal tradition into a shared, sacred moment that felt authentically Jewish to our whole family.

    Infographic explaining my High and Low Shabbat ritual- Design by Mike Wirth, 2023

    At Queens University of Charlotte, I created a Hanukkah mural project that brought together a diverse and pluralistic group of students and community members. This included Jews from many backgrounds across the Charlotte community, including Orthodox, Reform, interfaith families, and cultural Jews working side-by-side. Each night, a community leader would light our real menorah and then spray paint the flame for that night on our mural menorah. It was a rare, joyous, and profound moment of connection, anchored in creativity and shared ritual.

    President Dan Lugo and his family at the final night of the Menorah-mural at Queens University of Charlotte, 2020

    In 2024, at Temple Shir Tikvah in Wayland, MA, I worked with the congregation during a 3-day residency to collect hundreds of photos, drawings, and stories of each member of the community’s “sacred Jewish objects.” We meditate on what it means for objects to be “Jewish” and “sacred”. Some gave Judaica while others gave images of a stuffed animal, because it reminded them of a recently deceased loved one. This exercise transformed these individual intimate artifacts into a collective community digital collage of a “time tapestry” of meaning that forged personal connections and bridged generations and practice. The final artwork became a visual record of personal memory and shared identity. We printed the 9 ’ x 9’ on archival fabric, and it currently hangs in the synagogue.

    The community time tapestry created with Temple Shir Tikvah, Wayland MA 2024

    In 2025, I will be participating in the Jewish Street Art Festival in collaboration with UC Irvine Hillel. That community has experienced deep pain. From campus protests disrupting life for Jewish students to student council boycott votes targeting Israel. Our art will be a form of public healing and spiritual resistance, a sacred reclamation of space through color, symbol, and story.

    Even online, I see how creativity becomes a sacred connector. When I post new Jewish-themed artwork for my upcoming Parshat guidebook, the response is immediate and profound. The comment threads and DMs often skip small talk entirely and dive straight into deep conversation about grief, joy, interpretation, and belonging. With just one image, we’re able to arrive at a spiritual place together. And that, to me, is sacred.

    Personal Revelation and Commitment

    What I’ve learned is simple and profound: creativity is not just for individual enlightenment. It is a communal force. It brings us into dialogue, into presence, and into the work of building something sacred together. My commitment is to continue creating in this way and not just to beautify our tradition, but to actively evolve it with care, joy, and intention.

    If this story resonates with you and if you’re looking to bring creative spiritual practice to your synagogue, school, museum, or campus, then I’d love to connect. I’m available for lectures, workshops, and collaborative art projects that help communities deepen their relationship with creativity, tradition, and each other.

  • Dreaming in Neon:

    Dreaming in Neon:

    How Jewish Futurism Connects Our Past to the Worlds We Have Yet to Build through Creative Action

    By: Mike Wirth

    I often say that I found my Jewish spirituality on the bridge of the Enterprise. In 2019, my love for sci-fi and the many amazing stories, myths and legends in the Jewish canon inspired me to begin making Jewish Futurist artwork and stories. Initially, I approached my Jewish Futurism project as something entirely new to me and was an artistic frontier I felt empowered to explore and innovate. Yet, the deeper I ventured into its history, the clearer it became that I wasn’t inventing anything novel but reconnecting with a visionary legacy deeply embedded within Jewish thought and creativity. Recognizing this heritage has profoundly empowered me as an artist and designer. It has also shown me that the future, like design itself, is fundamentally a team sport, thriving when we create collectively and collaboratively. As I journey boldly into new creative worlds, I continually ask: how might emerging technologies and speculative storytelling expand our sense of what it means to be Jewish?

    Recognizing Futurism as inherently Jewish matters deeply today. In a world experiencing rapid technological advancement and cultural shifts, understanding that Futurism is deeply rooted in Judaism is essential. Realizing innovation and speculative thought aren’t new but are foundational to Jewish identity gives us powerful tools to navigate contemporary challenges. I’ve learned that Jewish identity has always been a continuous process of reinterpretation and reinvention. Traditions evolve, stories adapt, and rituals transform. In my artistic practice, I actively engage with this tradition of innovation by creating neon-infused aesthetics, speculative narratives, and AI-integrated rituals that explore contemporary Jewish life and spirituality.

    In Wirth’s digital illustration, “No weapon formed against me shall prosper”, his hamsa amulet turns into a functional shield to demonstrate the power of a speculative design of spiritual-technology.

    The contemporary wave of Jewish Futurism, evident in neon aesthetics and bold imaginative storytelling, represents the latest chapter in an ancient story of reinvention and visionary thinking. It’s deeply connected to broader cultural Futurisms, including Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism, which reclaim historical narratives while envisioning new futures. A powerful example of cross-cultural futurist collaboration is Wakanda, the Afrofuturist society in Marvel’s Black Panther, created in 1966 by Jewish comic writers Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Later expanded asynchronously by Black creators like Marvel artist Billy Graham in 1974, though asynchronously in method, the development of Wakanda highlights the transformative power of collaboration and cultural exchange—principles central to my approach to Jewish Futurism. I envision Jewish Futurism similarly flourishing through dialogue, learning from, and uplifting other futurist movements to build a collective, visionary future. Just as Afrofuturism reclaims history through sci-fi and technology, Jewish Futurism draws on Jewish history and spirituality to construct new speculative identities. That clearly makes me wonder what a synchronous or intentional futurist collaboration between the two movements looks like?

     Jewish tradition treats time as cyclical rather than linear, an approach distinctly aligned with futurist thinking, where past, present, and future dynamically interact. I’ve always found this cyclical concept of time particularly inspiring: it isn’t merely memory-based, but anticipatory. The Jewish calendar intertwines historical remembrance with a continuous vision of the Messianic Age, guiding ethical decisions across generations. Every Shabbat offers a glimpse of the ideal world we aim to build. This way of thinking about time aligns closely with my creative work and the speculative fiction, digital media, and futurist designs I admire.

    Architects of the Unseen: Jewish Artists and the Futurist Mindset

    Jewish creativity has embodied futurist thought throughout history, particularly during artistic and intellectual breakthroughs. Learning about El Lissitzky’s (1890–1941) Had Gadya series (1919), which transformed a traditional Passover song into abstract Suprematism, deeply influenced me. His work wasn’t just artistic experimentation—it was visionary, imagining a liberated Jewish future through visual language. Similarly, Marc Chagall’s (1887–1985) surrealistic paintings like I and the Village (1911) weren’t just nostalgic; they projected mystical futures. The innovative designs of Bauhaus architect Erich Mendelsohn (1887–1953), including the Einstein Tower (1921), similarly anticipate new Jewish identities through dynamic, visionary architecture.

    A page from El Lissitsky’s illustrated Had Gadyad (A traditional Passover song) from 1919 demonstrates futurist aesthetics applied to traditional content.

    The Golem legend associated with Rabbi Judah Loew of 16th-century Prague provides an early exploration of artificial intelligence and ethical creation, echoing contemporary discussions in my own work and research around AI ethics. Similarly, the Sar Torah tradition in Kabbalah, in which letters of the Torah are endlessly recombined to generate new insights, resonates strongly with my contemporary experiments with AI-driven Torah study. The legend speaks of summoning an angel to teach Torah on demand, an idea akin to algorithmic knowledge generation in modern AI tools. I’ve seen some attempts on OpenAI’s website, but imagining a self-aware “HashemGPT” is exciting and terrifying.

    Jewish intellectuals significantly shaped avant-garde movements through innovative methodologies deeply rooted in abstraction and adaptation. When El Lissitzky designed his “prouns,” he wasn’t simply creating abstract forms; he was actively shaping new visions of spatial possibilities. Erich Mendelsohn’s architecture similarly embodied dynamic motion, symbolizing Jewish resilience. Studying these artists has profoundly impacted how I approach my own speculative design practice, encouraging me to envision meaningful and adaptable futures. These forms and aesthetics successfully connected to the “universal,” acting as gateways into Jewish thought for the wider world.

    Much like the supernatural adventures of Moses and Ezekiel, the realm of science fiction and superheroes has been profoundly influenced by themes and symbols from Jewish stories. Hugo Gernsback (1884–1967), founder of Amazing Stories (1926), coined the term “science fiction,” profoundly shaping the genre. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (1951–1993) directly engaged with the preservation of knowledge, influencing modern thought on technology and ethics. William Tenn’s On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi (1974) playfully merged Jewish identity with extraterrestrial society, highlighting how speculative fiction uniquely addresses identity and existential questions.

    Jewish creators have left a profound legacy in speculative fiction. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) deeply explored human morality and existential questions through futurist storytelling. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman (1938) reshaped storytelling, directly connecting Jewish themes of exile and sanctuary with futurist imagination through Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, a symbol of refuge and transformation.

    Scene from Superman II (1980), where Superman interacts with an AI hologram of his deceased father. The Fortress of Solitude symbolizes a futuristic Jewish value of L’Dor V’Dor (generational knowledge transfer), image is property of Warner Bros.

    Partners in the work of creation: Going forward

    Today, Jewish Futurism continues these historical legacies within global speculative culture. In my own practice, I utilize AI-generated imagery and digital tools to conceptualize futuristic Jewish spaces and rituals. This process mirrors traditional midrashic reinterpretations—making Jewish narratives relevant and resonant for contemporary generations. Experimental art, VR storytelling by the TorahVR project, neon Hebrew typography by artists like Hillel Smith, and innovative biomaterials by designers like Neri Oxman demonstrate how traditional Jewish practices meaningfully evolve. Core Jewish values of Tikkun Olam (repairing the world), Kavanah (focused intention), and L’Dor V’Dor (generational knowledge transfer) guide my futurist creativity, emphasizing ethical engagement, meaningful innovation, and continual adaptation.

    Understanding Futurism as a deeply Jewish impulse doesn’t merely enrich our historical perspective—it empowers us as contemporary creators, thinkers, and innovators. The Talmud says we are to partner with Hashem in the work of creation and equipped with this knowledge, we can confidently shape our future, build meaningful new traditions, and actively collaborate with diverse communities. Our shared futures depend on our courage to dream out loud, innovate collectively, and proudly carry forward the visionary spirit at the heart of Jewish identity.

    Wirth’s digital illustration “Atzelut” (2022) dreams of using spiritual-technology to travel across time and space towards great connection to the universe.