The Jewish Museum of Florida Is Bringing a Bartender Machine and an AI Clone to Art Basel Week

During Art Basel Week, the Jewish Museum of Florida will host a working Rube Goldberg bartender machine and an AI-powered installation that lets visitors hold a conversation with a digital version of a Miami artist. Both are part of The Wondering Jew: Chagall, the École de Paris and the Worlds They Inspired, which opens November 18 at 301 Washington Avenue in Miami Beach.

Joseph Herscher — the artist behind the Joseph's Machines YouTube channel, whose videos have accumulated more than one billion views — will build the bartender machine on-site and feature it at a museum brunch on Sunday, December 6, from 10 AM to 1 PM. He will also lead student workshops during Art Basel Week. Herscher's work follows in the tradition of Rube Goldberg, the Jewish American cartoonist whose drawings imagined elaborate chain reactions to accomplish ordinary tasks. He has brought his machines to Sesame Street and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and leads workshops for children around the world.

Miami-based interdisciplinary artist Dahlia Dreszer — whose use of AI in art was the subject of a Time interview — will bring her Knight Foundation-funded project Clone Dahlia to the museum. The installation uses artificial intelligence to let visitors converse with a digital version of herself, displayed on holographic hardware purchased with a Knight Foundation grant. Dreszer was born in Colombia and raised in Panama, and her work draws on her Latin American and Jewish heritage to explore identity, memory and cultural inheritance.

"My family's migration stories have shaped how I think about identity and home — the objects we carry and the traditions we pass down tell those stories," Dreszer said. "Through my work, I hope visitors discover Jewish experiences and cultures they may not have known before."

The Wondering Jew reclaims an antisemitic trope by changing a single letter — turning an image of punishment into one of curiosity and creation. The exhibition begins with Marc Chagall and the Jewish artists of the École de Paris, who carried their languages, memories and traditions to a new city, and asks what survives when you move, and what new worlds get built from what you carry. The story runs through Miami Beach directly: in the 1920s, as the Paris artists were making their names, Jewish families were building a new community south of Fifth Street. The synagogue buildings that now house the museum opened in 1929 and 1936.

Opening the same day, the museum's Chagall exhibition brings together works by Chagall and other Jewish artists of the École de Paris, along with an interactive immigration map that asks visitors where their ancestors came from and where they live today, placing their stories alongside the artists' journeys.

The programming marks the public debut of the museum's new leadership: CEO Howard Lipman and chief curator and experience officer Ali Shrago-Spechler, a South Florida native who spent over a decade in New York working in the culture sector and earned a Fulbright Award in Germany researching stages built by Nazis for propaganda. Before joining the museum, she spent four years as arts director at the David Posnack JCC in Broward County, where she founded The Overlap, a program that used comedy, music and storytelling to address antisemitism and build community.

"The Wondering Jew is a beautiful expression of what we hope this museum can be in its next chapter — a place that brings people together through art, history and stories that still matter," Lipman said. "In Miami, a city built by generations of people who came from somewhere else and made a new home, that story has particular resonance."