Long before artificial intelligence, social media and smartphones transformed daily life, another generation of artists wrestled with a world reshaped by new technologies.
For broadcaster and storyteller Jad Abumrad, the parallels between that era and today are impossible to ignore.
The creator of Radiolab will explore those connections during his keynote presentation, When Time Breaks: From Virginia Woolf to Psycho, at the Deep Water Literary Festival on June 19. The talk explores connections between Virginia Woolf’s era and contemporary debates over AI, creativity and technological change.
The idea grew out of a recent reading of Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse.
“I just joined a book club and we read To the Lighthouse,” Abumrad said. “Reading it as an old person is a whole different experience. That’s such an interesting book.”
As he revisited Woolf’s work, he began thinking about the technological upheavals that surrounded her writing.
“Radio, cinema, the railroad was just coming through, you had telegraph, you had all these things that were happening in the world,” he said. “They were speeding up time.”
Abumrad sees Woolf as an artist trying to understand and respond to that acceleration.
“I just got really interested in thinking about her as a writer who was trying to reclaim time or trying to respond to time speeding up,” he said. “These moments in history where technology just upends the way we think and then we have to respond to sort of declare ourselves.”
That exploration deepened when he encountered a surviving recording of Woolf’s voice, a 1938 BBC broadcast of her essay Words Fail Me.
“It was like hearing this friend,” Abumrad said. “After you read the book, you feel such a friendship with the author.”
The essay struck him as remarkably contemporary.
“It’s really about how we need a new language,” he said. “The words that we have to describe the world that we’re in just don’t work anymore and we need new words.”
For Abumrad, that challenge feels familiar.
“I feel like we’re all trying to find a new — all the ways of talking about things seem dead in a way,” he said. “The language of politics, the language of protest, the language of progress. All of it feels like it needs a reboot.”
A century of disruption
Abumrad said the technological changes of Woolf’s era may have felt as disruptive as those experienced today.
“You can’t overstate what a mind-f*** that technology must have been,” he said of radio. “The idea that for thousands of years voices came out of heads and then suddenly they didn’t.”
At the same time, railroads and telegraphs were shrinking distances and transforming how people experienced news and information.
“You had this idea that news was no longer local. It was happening everywhere all at once simultaneously,” he said.
Those changes arrived alongside the trauma of World War I and the looming threat of another global conflict.
“It must have just felt like a cataclysmic moment in much the same way that we feel now,” Abumrad said.
To describe such moments, he uses the phrase “time quake” — periods when society’s understanding of time and space suddenly shifts.
“What feels like a coherent moment is different,” he said. “It feels to me like a quake in a way … a violence that’s being done to your inner sense of time.”
Stories as a way to understand change
Throughout his career, Abumrad has translated complicated scientific and philosophical questions into stories. He says storytelling becomes especially important during periods of uncertainty.
“When we’re all going through something, you need to sort of look around and see that that’s being reflected in other people,” he said.
He calls storytelling “the grammar of understanding.”
The promise and peril of AI
Abumrad plans to include AI-generated artwork in his Deep Water presentation. While he finds some of it compelling, he remains uneasy about the technology’s implications.
“The speed at which a large language model can take a lot of imagery that people have slaved over for centuries and then completely decontextualize it from the artists themselves and then spin out a million different versions — it’s sort of amazing and it’s also terrifying,” he said.
He worries that AI often places the technology itself at the center rather than the artist.
“Most of the time when I see AI art, the technology is center stage and the artist isn’t,” Abumrad said. “That troubles me a little bit.”
Still, he acknowledges the future remains uncertain.
“I’m hoping that it’ll just become another tool and then we’ll rebalance it so that people can be center stage again,” he said. “But I don’t know. I think the jury’s still out.”
Looking through multiple lenses
Abumrad’s work has long crossed boundaries between journalism, science, music, philosophy and art. He says that’s because no single perspective is enough to understand the world.
“You can’t just look at the world with one lens,” he said. “You have to always line up five or six lenses and look at them in sequence.”
Abumrad said understanding often requires moving among multiple perspectives.
“It feels more true to me,” he said.
Image: This year’s Deep Water Literary Festival launches June 19 with a keynote performance by Jad Abumrad, founder of Radiolab. (WNYC Studios)