Praise for New Book on Blogart, Photography and Spirituality

Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life

is one of art’s most complete and compelling integrations of the sacred and profane.  Mel Alexenberg shows the way to the divine via digital imagery and heightened perception of its presence in the moving face of every person, place, and thing.  It reads like a swift and soulful breeze.” - Dr. Shaun McNiff, author of Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go and Art Heals: How Creativity cures the Soul, University Professor, Lesley University, Cambridge

  
"Alexenberg offers a scintillating experiment in creativity. His work is an invitation to deepen your spiritual sensibilities as you extend your imagination.” - Jan Phillips, author of God Is at Eye Level: Photography as a Healing Art

 

"Alexenberg proposes that text and image - something as simple as photos taken with a smartphone, and multiplied in their resonance by the Internet - can be a consciousness raising tool" - Peter Samis, Associate Curator, Interpretation, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

“Thinks brilliantly outside the box. It crisscrosses disciplines, from science and technology to philosophy and mysticism to art as both historical and creative phenomena. This is one of those books that other thinkers will wish they had somehow thought about how to write, and to which readers of diverse sorts will simply respond by saying: wow!” - Dr. Ori Z. Soltes, author of Tradition and Transformation, Professorial Lecturer in Theology and Fine Arts, Georgetown University

“There are many parallels in Christian thought and deed that should allow this excellent book to resonate with many people of faith. He has succeeded in creating a program for photographers, on a daily basis, to explicitly weave their faith into their art and ultimately, back into their worldview with a fresh perspective.” - Bob Weil is co-author of The Art of iPhone Photography: Creating Great Photos and Art on Your iPhone

"Photograph God gives us an amazing perspective on our own existence, especially in the age of interconnected iPhone culture." - Prof. Michael Bielicky, Head of Department of Digital Media/Postdigital Narratives, University of Art and Design/ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany

"In an original way, Prof. Alexenberg invites us to connect the networked world of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, WhatsApp and Blogspot, with the concept of the unseen God." - Dr. Yael Eylat Van-Essen, author of Digital Culture: Virtuality, Society and Information, teaches at Tel Aviv University and Holon Institute of Technology, Israel

"I can feel your joy, warmth and good humor in your images."- Julie DuBose, author of Effortless Beauty: Photography as an Expression of Eye, Mind and Heart

"Alexenberg locates art in the realm of personal experience and creative expression at a time when art education is falling under the jurisdiction of more singular bureaucratic prescriptions.... A valuable addition to the literature of art education.” – Dr. Jerome J. Hausman, author of Arts and the Schools, former Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and World Council member, International Society for Education through Art

ART IS A COMPUTER ANGEL (A Blogart Post)

“Art is a Computer Angel” is one of 52 posts in a postdigital blogart project created by artists Mel and Miriam Alexenberg to celebrate their 52nd year of marriage. During each of the 52 weeks of their 52nd year, they posted six photographs reflecting their life together with a tweet text that relates the weekly Bible reading from a Torah scroll in synagogues worldwide.

See how Mel and Miriam linked this Torah portion to their life with photographs and tweets at http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/genesis-7-art-is-computer-angel.html .

The concepts in this portion are developed in Mel Alexenberg's new book Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life http://photographgod.com that he wrote as a sequel for the general reader to his book The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age http://future-of-art.com. It explores the vibrant interface between selfies, social media, and spirituality.

(Photo from AT&T Annual Report shows the artist Mel Alexenberg sending a computer angel on circumglobal flight from AT&T building in New York)    

ART IS A COMPUTER ANGEL (on the 7^th portion of Genesis)

He [Jacob] had a vision in a dream. A ladder was standing on the ground and its top reached up toward heaven; and behold! Divine angels were ascending and descending on it. (Genesis 28:12)

We enjoyed sitting together in the Metropolitan Museum of Art print room holding Rembrandt's drawings and etchings of angels in our hands.

Mel painted on subway posters and screen printed digitized Rembrandt angels and spiritual messages from underground:

Divine angels ascend and descend. (Genesis 28:12) "They start by going up and afterwards go down" (Rashi) "Have you seen angels ascending from the NYC subways? (Alexenberg)

Art is a computer angel.  The biblical term for art (MeLekHeT MakHSheVeT) is feminine.  The masculine form is computer angel (MaLakH MakHSheV).

The biblical words for angel and food are written with the same four letters to tell us that angels are spiritual messages arising from everyday life.

We chose an image of an ascending angel to digitize and send on a circumglobal flight on 4 October 1989, Rembrandt's 320th memorial day.  

We sent it via satellite from the AT&T building in NY to Amsterdam to Jerusalem to Tokyo to Los Angeles, returning to NY the same afternoon.

The cyberangel not only circled our planet, it flew into tomorrow and back into yesterday, arriving in Tokyo on 5 Oct. and LA on 4 Oct.

In Tokyo, the 28 faxed sheets were assembled in Ueno Park and then rearranged as a ribbon ascending the steps of a Shinto chapel.

As we assembled the cyberangel on its return to NY five hours after it had left, TV news sent it into ten million American homes.

The AP story of our angel flight appeared in 60 newspapers each with a different headline.  AT&T featured it in its Annual Report.

For the full story and more images, see “artworks” at http://www.melalexenberg.com.

New Book on Creating Blogart

Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life, a new book by artist Mel Alexenberg invites readers to create a personal blogart project for dissemination worldwide through the blogosphere and Twitterverse. 

It develops conceptual and practical tools for creatively photographing God as divine light reflected from every facet of life.   It teaches how to weave these photos of God into a blog that draws on the wisdom of kabbalah in a networked world to craft a vibrant dialogue between the blogger’s story and the biblical narrative. 

See the book blog http://photographgod.blogspot.com and the exemplary blog "Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life" http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.com.  

   

“Mel Alexenberg offers a scintillating experiment in creativity. His work is an invitation to deepen your spiritual sensibilities as you extend your imagination.” - Jan Phillips, author of God Is at Eye Level: Photography as a Healing Art 

 “One of art’s most complete and compelling integrations of the sacred and profane. It reads like a swift and soulful breeze.” - Dr. Shaun McNiff, author of Earth Angels: Engaging the Sacred in Everyday Things, University Professor, Lesley University, Cambridge

“Thinks brilliantly outside the box.  It crisscrosses disciplines, from science and technology to philosophy and mysticism to art as both historical and creative phenomena. This is one of those books that other thinkers will wish they had somehow thought about how to write, and to which readers of diverse sorts will simply respond by saying: wow!” - Dr. Ori Z. Soltes, author of Tradition and Transformation, Professorial Lecturer, Georgetown University 

“Photograph God strikes a balance between Kabbalah and contemporary culture. It is literate, wise, and easily accessible.” - Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, author of God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality and Ultimate Meaning and Kabbalah: A Love Story 

“There are many parallels in Christian thought and deed that should allow this excellent book to resonate with many people of faith.” - Bob Weil, co-author of The Art of iPhone Photography

"Photograph God gives us an amazing perspective on our own existence, especially in the age of interconnected iPhone culture." - Prof. Michael Bielicky, Head of Department of Digital Media/Postdigital Narratives, University of Art and Design/ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe 

“A mystical computer program for spiritual seeing.” - Rabbi Dr. Shimon Cowen, Director, Institute for Judaism and Civilization, Australia

"In an original way, Prof. Alexenberg invites us to connect the networked world of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, WhatsApp and Blogspot, with the concept of the unseen God." - Dr. Yael Eylat Van-Essen, author of Digital Culture: Virtuality, Society and Information, teaches at Tel Aviv University and Holon Institute of Technology, Israel

"Alexenberg proposes that text and image - something as simple as photos taken with a smartphone, and multiplied in their resonance by the Internet - can be a consciousness raising tool" - Peter Samis, Associate Curator, Interpretation, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The book is available at http://amazon.com  

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

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 perspectives.

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 Narrative
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 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.