The Future of Art in a Postdigtal Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Cconsciousness

Today, I received the book in the mail for the publisher (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press).
It explores BLOGART in its chapters on postdigtial and wiki perspectives.

Below is the back cover text:
In The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age artist and educator Mel Alexenberg offers a vision of a postdigital future that reveals a paradigm shift from the Hellenistic to the Hebraic roots of western culture. The author surveys new art forms emerging from a postdigital age that address the humanization of digital technologies. He ventures beyond the digital to explore postdigital perspectives rising from creative encounters among art, science, technology, and human consciousness. The interrelationships between these perspectives demonstrate the confluence between postdigital art and the dynamic, open-ended Jewish structure of consciousness. Alexenberg’s pioneering artwork – a fusion of spiritual and technological realms – exemplifies the theoretical thesis of this investigation into interactive and collaborative forms that imaginatively envisage the vast potential of art in a postdigital future.

“This Hebraic-postmodern quest is for a dialogue midway on Jacob’s ladder where man and God, artist and society, and artwork and viewer/participant engage in ongoing commentary.”
– Prof. Randall Rhodes, Chairman, Department of Visual Art, Frostburg State University, Maryland, USA

“Mel Alexenberg, a very sophisticated artist and scholar of much experience in the complex playing field of art-science-technology, addresses the rarely asked question: How does the ‘media magic’ communicate content?”
– Prof. Otto Piene, Director Emeritus, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA

“This is a wonderful and important book.”
– Dr. Ron Burnett, President, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada

“The author succeeds in opening a unique channel to the universe of present and future art in a highly original and inspiring way.”
– Prof. Michael Bielicky, Director, Institute for Postdigital Narratives, University of Art and Design / ZKM Center of Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany

“This book is simply a must read analysis for anyone interested in where we and the visual arts are going in our future.”
– Dr. Moshe Dror, President, World Network of Religious Futurists, and Israel Coordinator, World Future Society

Torah Tweets: A Postdigital Biblical Commentary as a Blogart Narrative

New Blogart Project

Artists Mel Alexenberg and Miriam Benjamin are celebrating their 52nd year of marriage by collaborating on this blogart project. They were married motzei Simhat Torah, the Jewish holiday when the torah scroll is rewound to begin the annual cycle of reading it. During each of the 52 weeks of their 52nd year, they post six photographs relecting their life together with torah tweet captions that relate the weekly torah reading to their lives, past and present.

 
Genesis Torah Tweet: Miriam recycled one mitzva for another. She pressed cloves into our Sukkot etrog (citron) for a sweet smell to mark the end of Shabbat.

New book exploring BLOGART

My new book The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness (Intellect Books / University of Chicago Press, 2011) explores blogart in its chapters on postdigital and wiki persepctives.

This is the copy for the University of Chicago Press catalog:
In The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age, artist and educator Mel Alexenberg offers a prophetic vision of a postdigital future that reveals a paradigm shift from the Hellenistic to the Hebraic roots of Western culture. The author surveys new art forms emerging from a postdigitial age that address the humanization of digital technologies. He ventures beyond the digital to explore postdigital perspectives rising from creative encounters between art, science, technology, and human consciousness. New chapters “Postdigital Perspectives: Rediscovering Ten Fingers” and “Wiki Perspectives: Multiform Unity and Global Tribes” have been added to chapters on semiotic, morphological, kabbalistic, and halakhic perspectives. The interrelationships between these alternative perspectives demonstrate the confluence between postdigital art and the dynamic, creative, open-ended Jewish structure of consciousness. Alexenberg’s pioneering artwork – a vibrant fusion of spiritual and technological realms – exemplifies and complements the theoretical thesis of his book. A revolutionary investigation into interactive and collaborative forms that imaginatively envisages the vast potential of art in a postdigital future.

Mel Alexenberg is head of the School of the Arts at Emuna College in Jerusalem and former professor of art and education at Columbia University and Bar Ilan University, head of the art department at Pratt Institute, and research fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. His artworks are in the collections of more than forty museums worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Jewish Museum of Prague, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. He is editor of Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture.

Alexenberg's Blogs

Artiststory
Autoethnography of artist Mel Alexenberg's quest along the vibrant interface between
multiple fields - art/science/technology/culture,
multiple roles - artist/researcher/teacher/writer,
mutliple identities - Jewish/Israeli/American/Global.

Torah Tweets: A Postdigital Biblical Commentary as a Blogart NarrativeArtists Mel Alexenberg and Miriam Benjamin are celebrating their 52nd year of marriage by collaborating on this blogart project. They were married motzei Simhat Torah, the Jewish holiday when the torah scroll is rewound to begin the annual cycle of reading it. During each of the 52 weeks of their 52nd year, they post six photographs reflecting their life together with torah tweet captions that relate the weekly torah reading to their lives, past and present.

Postdigital Art
Postdigital art addresses the humanization of digital technologies through interplay between digital, biological, cultural, and spiritual systems, between cyberspace and real space, between embodied media and mixed reality in social and physical communication, between high tech and high touch experiences, between visual, haptic, auditory, and kinesthetic media experiences, between virtual and augmented reality, between roots and globalization, and between web-enabled peer-produced wikiart and artworks created with alternative media through participation, interaction, and collaboration in which the role of the artist is redefined.

Wikiartists
People throughout the networked world can become wikiartists by collaborating in creating web-enabled peer-produced artworks. MERIWIP: MEditerranean RIm WIkiart Project is an exemplary wikiart project in which anyone from the 21 countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea can participate.

Photograph God
Focus your camera lens on God and you will see God looking back at you. Seeing God is seeing divine light reflected from every facet of your life. The ancient wisdom of kabbalah will help you recognize that you have been looking at God all the time but missed the action. "God is the Compassion, the Strength, the Beauty, the Success, the Splendor, and the Foundation of everything in heaven and earth" (Chronicles 1, 29:11). Post photos of these divine attribute in your everyday life.

JerUSAlem-USA
A participatory art project that links the twenty places in the United States called “Jerusalem” with the original Jerusalem in Israel for which they are named. There are Jerusalems in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, and Vermont. Residents of the American Jerusalems are invited to participate by sending photographs of their everyday life that are matched by photographs from Jerusalem, Israel.

Future Holocaust Memorials
In the tradition of Picasso’s Guernica extended into our networked times, artist Mel Alexenberg has created a work of webart as a call to action to prevent a second Holocaust before Ahmadinejad executes his plan to wipe Israel off the map with a nuclear bomb as Iran’s prelude to global conquest. (Rhizome ArtBase at the New Museum of Contemporary Art has honored this webart blog by adding it to its online archive of exemplary works of new media art.)

Aesthetic Peace
An aesthetic metaphor derived from Islamic art invites a perceptual shift through which Muslims see the Jewish State of Israel as a blessing expressing Allah’s will rather than as an alien presence in the midst of the Islamic world. Perhaps thinking out of the box from a fresh aesthetic viewpoint can succeed in bringing peace where politics has failed.

Future of Art
About Mel Alexenberg’s recent books: The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness, and Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture (both published by Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press), and in Hebrew: Dialogic Art in a Digital World: Judaism and Contemporary Art (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass House/Emuna College).

Zionist Artists
The great biblical miracle of liberating one nation of thousands from enslavement in the one country of Egypt after hundreds of years of exile pales in comparison with the Zionist miracle in our time of liberating millions of Jews from persecution, pogroms, and Holocaust in scores of countries after thousands of years of exile and bringing them home to Israel. Being an integral part of this Zionist miracle is an enthralling creative opportunity for artists unprecedented in world history.