Rembrandt and Chagall Angels of Peace Meet in Jerusalem

 Two Faces of Israel's Supreme Court Building Speak to Israel Today 

The dialogic architecture of the Supreme Court building in Jerusalem offers creative ways for solving the current dilemma that shapes what happens inside the courtrooms and in every Israeli citizen’s life. Virtual flights of Rembrandt and Chagall inspired Cyberangels of Peace from the Supreme Court to the Knesset set the stage for dialogue in a different spirit.

My computer-generated image accompanying this article shows me in the period garb of Menasseh ben Israel, Rabbi of Amsterdam, who was the author of the book Rembrandt illustrated. I am in Rembrandt's studio in the Rembrandt House Museum holding up my Rembrandt-inspired cyberangel print above a fax machine that I placed on the etching press where Rembrandt made his prints.

Supreme Court building architecture invites dialogue and exchange of ideas

I was invited by Israel’s Supreme Court Justice Menachem Elon and Israel Museum Chief Curator Izzika Gaon to join with them as a judge for the International Judaica Competition in Jerusalem in 1995. Other members of the jury were Teddy Kollek, former mayor of Jerusalem and Ada Karmi, architect of the Supreme Court building.

After we had spent several days judging the artworks, Ada Karmi took me on a private tour of her new Supreme Court building when it was closed. She pointed out how the architectural space mediates between the time and language of today and that of the past. Ada and I had both been professors at Columbia University during the same years.

I found myself in a unique building that was holding a dialogue between two worlds. One half was facing towards the desert with traditional decorative stone architecture common in the Middle East for centuries. The other half was constructed with modern building materials facing towards the Mediterranean Sea gateway to Europe and America. The courtrooms, each with a different interior design, seemed to float between these two worlds inviting dialogue, conversation, discussion, negotiation, and exchange of Ideas.

As an artist who has been working with digital art forms for more than half a century, I launched my Cyberangels of Peace from Rembrandt’s studio in Amsterdam into the Supreme Court building. In our age of artificial intelligence, the cyberangels were smart enough to continue their flight beyond the Supreme Court to the Knesset where Rembrandt angels joined Chagall angels.

Chagall angels in Knesset hover over celebrated scientists, artists and architects

I know Chagall’s angels in the Knesset well. They hovered over me for the fifteen years that I was a member of the Council of the Wolf Foundation that awards the coveted Wolf Prize to the most accomplished scientists, artists, and architects in the world. The President of Israel at the recommendation of the Minister of Education had appointed me to represent the arts on the Council.

I sat on the stage with the recipients of the prizes beneath three huge tapestries on the wall behind me in the Chagall State Hall in the Knesset. In one tapestry, “The Vision of Isaiah,” Moses is portrayed as an angel with the Tablets of the Law in his hands with Jacob dreaming of angels going up and down on a ladder. In the tapestry “The Exodus,” the two most distinct images are Moses and King David. The Israelites are gathered between them. A cloud hovers over the Israelites while an angel is blowing a shofar to mark the declaration of redemption.

When I looked at the north wall of the Hall, I saw a Chagall mosaic of images of numerous people looking up at an angel signaling to the Jews to return to their homeland. You can see the tapestries and mosaics at the website The Knesset.

Art is a computer angel when biblical Hebrew meets modern Hebrew

Rembrandt was the master at telling Bible stories with angels in his paintings, drawings, and etchings. He created an etching of Jacob’s dream for the only book he illustrated based upon the verse: “A ladder was standing on the ground, its top reaching up towards heaven as divine angels were going up and down on it.” (Genesis 28:12) The angels in Jacob’s dream go up from the Land of Israel and go down throughout the world heralding a message of peace: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war anymore.” (Isaiah 2:4)

My cyberangels were born when I was in synagogue listening to the chanting of the biblical portion from a Torah scroll while translating in my mind the Hebrew words into English. I realized that the Hebrew term in the Bible for “visual art” MeLekHeT MakHSheVeT means “thoughtful craft,” a feminine term. When I transformed it in my mind into its masculine form, it became MaLakH MakHSheV meaning “computer angel.”

I rushed to tell my wife Miriam that I discovered that my role as a Jewish male artist is to create computer angels! I was well equipped to create them since I was research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies and head of the art department at Pratt Institute where I created and taught the course “Fine Art with Computers.” Art is a computer angel when biblical Hebrew meets modern Hebrew in a postdigital world.

Rembrandt angels meet Rav Kook, chief rabbi of pre-state Israel, in London museum

Two weeks before I discovered that art is a computer angel, my son Rabbi Ron Alexenberg, who was archivist at Rav Kook’s House in Jerusalem, sent me a copy of an interview in the London Jewish Chronicle of Rav Kook who was Chief Rabbi of pre-state Israel in the first half of the 20^th century.

He said that when he lived in London, he would visit the National Gallery, and his favorite pictures were those of Rembrandt. When God created the intense light of the first day of creation, he reserved it for the righteous men when the Messiah would come. But now and then there were great men who are blessed and privileged to see it. I think Rembrandt was one of them, and the light in his pictures is the very light that was originally created by God Almighty.

I was making preparations for the cyberangel flight around the globe sponsored by AT&T in 1989 using fax machines, the leading-edge technology of the time. The cyberangel flew from New York to Amsterdam, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Los Angeles, returning to New York, to honor Rembrandt on the 320^th anniversary of his passing on October 4^th. Cyberangels could not only fly around the globe, but they flew into tomorrow and back into yesterday.

Thirty years later, my cyberangels came alive again on October 4, 2019 to pay tribute to Rembrandt on the 350^th anniversary of his passing. A new technological era of smartphones and social media had dawned. This time, the cyberangel took flight though the Internet into the thirty museums throughout the world that have my artworks in their collections.

Calev’s different spirit needed today to shape Israel’s future in an old-new land

Theodor Herzl’s dream of a future State of Israel described in his visionary novel Altneuland, Old-New Land. Rembrandt represents the best of the old while Chagall represents the best of a new art. Their cyberangels meet in future art forms of emerging digital technologies that create a vibrant dialogue between old and new.

It is this vibrant dialogue between the old and the new in art forms that can be a model for the people of Israel coming together. It is significant that protesters in the two camps chose the same visual image to represent them – the flag of Israel.

According to the timeline of the Torah, we were first a people when we left Egypt, Am Yisrael. 50 days later we received the Torah at Mount Sinai, Torat Yisrael. 40 years later most of those who had left Egypt died in the desert because they retained their slave mentality, afraid of a future of freedom in their own land. Only Calev had a “different spirt,” and could envision a good life in Eretz Yirrael.

“God said, ‘The only exception will be My servant Calev, since he showed a different spirit and followed Me wholeheartedly. I will bring him to the land that he explored, and his descendants will possess it.’" (Numbers 14:24) “Among the men who explored the land, Joshua son of Nun and Calev son of Yefuneh tore their clothes in grief. They said to the whole Israelite community, "The Land that we passed through to explore is a very, very good Land!" (Numbers 14:6-7)

Those Israelites who perished in the desert lacked the courage to see themselves building a good future in their own land. They feared that the giants who lived there would kill them and their families. However, Calev, with his different spirit, was able to see the same giants as an indication of how the Israelite children would grow big and strong eating the bounty of nutritious food produced in the Promised Land. Having a different spirit is to be able to see the same things that everyone else sees from radically alternate viewpoints that transform the perception of hopelessness into optimistic hopefulness.

It is Calev’s fresh vision of being free in our own land that needs to be renewed today by all the contemporary tribes of Israelis as they create a constitution designed for a vibrant interplay between being both a Jewish and democratic state. Miriam always reminds me that the last line of the blessing of each new month is that all Israelis are one family “Haveyrim kol Yisrael, v’nomar Amen”

Rav Kook wears a Bedouin cloak and kefiyyeh instead of a black coat and top hat

As an artist, I summarize this article with a beautiful visual image of two tall handsome men singing and dancing together with secular young pioneers on their communal farm Poriah overlooking the Sea of Galilee in 1913. One of the men was dressed wearing a Bedouin cloak and kefiyyeh headdress, with a rifle over his shoulder. The other man was dressed in a long black coat over a white shirt with a high hat.

One of the men was the community’s guard who just had dismounted from his horse to join the singing and dancing. He was wearing the black coat. The man wearing the Bedouin cloak and keffiah was Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, Rabbi of Jaffa who later in his life became the Chief Rabbi of pre-state Israel.

Rav Kook regularly visited secular communities throughout the Land of Israel where he danced and sang and spoke of the need to unite the entire nation with a connection of souls and spirits. When he saw a man as tall as he was come in from his guard duty, he asked him if they could talk in the manager’s office. He suggested exchanging clothes with the guard, explaining that he wanted to bind together all Jews, from an elderly rabbi to the youngest worker of Poriah.

They both returned to the dancing and sang “Bring home our dispersed from among the nations” – v’karev pizuraynu. At the end, the Rav announced, “I wore your clothes and you wore mine. So it should be on the inside – together in our heats!”

I summarized here the story told by Avraham Rosenblatt who was in Poriah that night in the month of Tisrei 5674. It was published in Rabbi Chanan Morrison’s highly acclaimed book Stories from the Land of Israel available at Amazon. In the book, we gain insight into the Rav Kook’s rare qualities of spirit, his overflowing love for the Jewish people and the land of Israel, and his rare ability to bridge the religious-secular divide.

Appeared in Times of Israel with different title

Cyberangels Fly from Rembrandt's Studio to Ocean to Sea to Gulf

 Atlantic Ocean to Mediterranean Sea to Arabian Gulf                        In Honor of the Abraham Accords Third Year, Rembrandt Inspired Cyberangels Fly from USA to Morocco to Israel to UAE to Bahrain 

Artist Mel Alexenberg Launches Cyberangels from Rembrandt's Studio in Holland to Abraham Accords Museums in USA, Morocco, Israel, UAE, and Bahrain

Dressed in period garb, I launched Rembrandt inspired cyberangels from the great master’s studio in Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. 

It was a wakeup call to my cyberangels that were asleep in the Smithsonian’s flat file for three decades to begin the first leg of their virtual flight to convey a message of peace to USA on the Atlantic Ocean to Morocco and Israel on the Mediterranean Sea to UAE and Bahrain on the Arabian Gulf.

My cyberangels were born when I was research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies and realized that the biblical Hebrew term for “art” is “thoughtful craft.” In its feminine form, “thoughtful craft” becomes “computer angel.”  

On the White House Lawn

My wife Miriam and I witnessed a historic event of biblical proportions heralding the emergence of a different spirit for shaping a new era. We watched from our home in Israel the signing of The Abraham Accords on the South Lawn of the White House on September 15, 2020.

If we were at the National Museum in Washington to see my Digitized Homage to Rembrandt lithograph of cyberangels in the museum collection, we would only have to walk a short distance to watch representatives of the three Abrahamic religions launching a new epoch of peace in the Middle East.

 The Abraham Accords were being signed by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Jewish prime minister of Israel, Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani, the Muslim foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and Donald Trump, Christian president of the United States of America.

The Bible tells of Abraham’s contentment that his sons Ishmael and Isaac came together to be with him at the end of his life. Now, four thousand years later, their heirs came together in brotherhood at the White House. The names of Abraham’s sons, Ishmael and Isaac, are English versions of their original Hebrew names. Ishmael is Yishmael meaning “God will hear” and Isaac is Yitzhak meaning “will laugh." Linking Yishmael and Yitzhak can be read as: “When God will hear that Abraham’s sons have reunited, He will laugh in joy!”

My Moroccan Family

At the same time that Miriam and I were watching the signing the Abraham Accords, we heard sirens announcing that rockets were being fired into Israel by the Arab terrorists who rule Gaza. Our daughter Iyrit phoned us to tell us that a rocket had struck the Israeli city of Ashdod sending her wounded neighbors to the hospital.

Iyrit’s husband Dr. Yehiel Lasrey is the mayor of Ashdod who was born in Morocco and moved to Israel with his family when he was six.  He grew up in Ashdod, a small town on the sea that has grown into one of Israel’s largest cities and its major port. Yahiel studied medicine at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and went from being surgeon-general of Israel’s navy to specialist in internal medicine at Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot, a member of Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and a founder of the Israeli Andalusian Orchestra – Ashdod.

The orchestra performed in Morocco in March 2022 in collaboration with the Moroccan Association of Andalusian Music. It was the orchestra’s first performance in Morocco since the resumption of diplomatic relations between the countries in December 2020. A moving moment occurred at the outset of the evening with the playing of the Israeli and Moroccan national anthems.

Ascending to Israel

Ascending from the Land of Israel applies to angels. “A ladder was standing on the ground, its top reaching up towards heaven as angels were ascending.” (Genesis 28:12)  I created a serigraph “Angels Ascending from the Land of Israel” at the Israel Museum’s affiliated graphics center in Jerusalem that shows Rembrandt inspired cyberangels flying up from a satellite image of Israel.

Ascending to Israel applies to the Jewish people returning home to Israel after 2,000 years of exile.  “I bore you on the wings of eagles and brought you to me.” (Exodus 19:4) “Bring My sons from afar, and My daughters from the ends of the earth." (Isaiah 43:6)

When my wife Miriam and I and our children Iyrit, Ari and Ron flew from New York to live in Israel in 1969, we were called olim (ascenders) coming on aliyah (ascending). The eagles that flew us and millions of Jews from the ends of the earth to live in our ancestral homeland had jet engines on their El Al Airlines wings. Our son Moshe was born in Israel as were our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

“From generation to generation, they will dwell in the Land of Israel where the wilderness will rejoice over them, the desert will be glad and blossom like a lily. Her wilderness will be made like Eden, and her desert like a Divine garden. Joy and gladness will be found there, Thanksgiving and the sound of music.” (Isaiah 35:1, 51:3)

Rembrandt in United Arab Emirates

My Rembrandt inspired cyberangels’ flight from Rembrandt’s studio to USA on the Ocean, Morocco and Israel on the Sea, to Louvre Abu Dhabi art museum in UAE on the Gulf. A cyberangel of peace ascending from the Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book, where the oldest Bible texts are housed, makes a virtual flight into the Abu Dhabi museum.

In the permanent collection of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, is a gemlike Rembrandt painting “Abraham and the Angels” that was purchased for the museum at Sotheby’s in Dubai. It shows winged angels sitting with Abraham while his wife Sarah watches.

The historic Abraham Accords that forges ties between Israel and UAE occurred during the year that Rembrandt was being honored on the 350th anniversary of his death by museums throughout the world. Louvre Abu Dhabi presented the exhibition Rembrandt, Vermeer & the Dutch Golden Age, masterpieces from the collection of the American Thomas S. Kaplan whose wife Dafna in the daughter of Israeli artist Mira Recanati.

Dr. Kaplan writes “More than any other painter’s legacy, we believe Rembrandt’s ability to touch the soul represents a uniquely fitting expression of this visionary Franco-Emirati project seeking to promote tolerance and the common civilization of mankind.”

Roots of Abraham Accords in Bahrain

Bahrain’s leadership set the stage for the Abraham Accords decades ago. Crown Prince Sheikh Salman Bin Hamad Al Khalifa at his meeting with Israel’s foreign minister Silvan Shalom in 2003 expressed his pride over Bahrain’s Jewish community and described it as an example for peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews.

Hounda Nonoo from a Jewish family that has lived in Bahrain for more than a century served as a member of parliament and as ambassador of Bahrain to the United States from 2008 to 2013.

In December 2022, President of Israel Isaac Herzog on his first visit to Bahrain to meet with King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa said: “Our budding relationship is in many ways a reunion. Jews and Muslims are not strangers but family, sharing a common ancestor, Abraham, after whom our historic accords are named.”

Bahrain is shaping the future by building a Museum of Contemporary Art that will fly up like an angel of peace to hover over the Gulf waters. The internationally renowned architect, the late Zaha Hadid, created designs for the museum which protrudes from a narrow alleyway in Muharraq and gently curves in an overhang above the water in the direction of Manama. The museum’s interior reflects the folds and outcrops of the building’s wavy exterior.

May the Hebrew Malakh Shalom and the Arabic Malak Salam be recognized as one and the same Angel of Peace.

Artist Mel Alexenberg in period garb launching cybrangels from Rembrandt's studio in the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam to museums in Bahrain, UAE, Israel, Morocco, USA.

Narrative NFT: Cyberangels, Rembrandt, King Charles III

 Narrative plays a prominent role in the postdigital art of Web3 and NFTs. In my book, The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press), the word “narrative” appears fifty times, from art narrative, autobiographic, biblical, community, creative, data-driven, historical, to personal narrative.

I have been exploring visual narrative art in many of my artworks that can be seen at my websites Mel Alexenberg and Grandfather of NFTs  and at Wikipedia. I also created an Artiststory blog in 2007 with the 2011 post Postdigital Narrative Art.

I partnered with Michael Bielicky, professor of digital media art at ZKM University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, in establishing the Institute for Postdigital Narrative at ZKM in 2010. The video of my talk at the inauguration of the Institute can be seen at Vimeo.

The statement of the Institute’s aims are even more relevant today than they were over a decade ago. “Mankind has always operated on narrative to explain and understand its own existence.  Our times, in particular, call for the exploration, expression and especially, creation of new story-telling formats.”  NFTs offer unprecedented opportunities for generating creative postdigital narratives.

NFT Honoring King Charles III

I created a three level visual narrative NFT to honor King Charles III on his acceding to the British throne.  It begins from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem where more than three millennia ago angels in Jacob’s dream went up a ladder and then flew down three centuries ago into Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam where I transformed them into cyberangels and launched them from Rembrandt’s studio on a flight around the globe until they descended into the Victoria & Albert Museum in London to bring good wishes to King Charles from his mother Queen Elizabeth’s great-great grandparents Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

My cyberangel artworks have been in the collections of these three museum. The cyyberangels that have been asleep in the flat files of the museums for three decades are coming alive, taking flight through virtual NFT skies from Israel to Holland to England.

 Art is a Computer Angel

This narrative begins with the birth of cyberangels when I was listening to the ancient Hebrew words being chanted from a handwritten Torah scroll while translating them into English in my mind.  It described the artist Bezalel as being talented in all types of craftsmanship to make MeLekHet MakHSheVeT” (Exodus 35:33). These Hebrew words for “visual art” literally mean “thoughtful craft,” a feminine term. When I transformed it into its masculine form MaLakH MakHSheV, it became “computer angel.”

I rushed to tell my wife Miriam that I discovered that my role as a male artist is to create computer angels! I was equipped to create them as the head of the art department at Pratt Institute where I taught the first course on creating art with computers and was simultaneously research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

Since Rembrandt was the master at telling Bible stories with angels in his paintings, drawings, and etchings, Miriam and I went to The Metropolitan Museum of Art to see them up close. He created an etching of Jacob’s dream for the only book he illustrated based upon the verse: “A ladder was standing on the ground, its top reaching up towards heaven as angels were going up and down on it.” (Genesis 28:12) The angels in Jacob’s dream go up from the Land of Israel and go down throughout the world heralding a message of peace: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war anymore.” (Isaiah 2:4)

In Jerusalem, I created a serigraph “Angels Ascending from the Land of Israel” showing Rembrandt inspired cyberangels ascending from a satellite image of Israel. It is in the collection of the Israel Museum.

Rembrandt Cybererangels Fly around the Globe

My AT&T sponsored telecommunications art event on October 4, 1989 honored Rembrandt on the 320^th anniversary of his death. I launched a digitized image of his angel on a circumglobal flight from New York to the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, University of the Arts in Tokyo, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and back New York. After a five-hour flight around the planet, the deconstructed angel was reconstructed at its starting point.

When it passed through Tokyo, it was already the morning of October 5^th. When it arrived in Los Angeles, it was still October 4^th.  Cyberangels can not only fly around the globe, they can fly into tomorrow and back into yesterday. Millions throughout North America watched the cyberangel return from its circumglobal flight over major TV networks’ broadcasts from New York. It was featured in sixty newspapers and the AT&T annual report.

The image in the middle level of the NFT shows me in period garb in Rembrandt's studio in Amsterdam welcoming a cyberangel from the Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book where some of the oldest Bible manuscripts are housed that contain the narrative of angels going up and down the ladder in Jacob’s dream and sending the Rembrandt inspired cyberangel on to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

King Charles and Victoria and Albert are Family

The official opening by Queen Victoria of a museum for progress in art and design in 1857 was followed by her laying the foundation stone of its new building in 1899 and naming it Victoria & Albert Museum. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are the great-grandparents of King Charles’ mother Queen Elizabeth. 

Queen Elizabeth participated in the opening of the “World of the Bible” exhibition at V&A in 1965 in co-operation with the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and “The Bible in British Art” in 1997 with a poster for the exhibition showing angels ascending and descending on a ladder. This poster joined my 1986 “Digital Homage to Rembrandt: Night Angels” computer generated serigraph in the V&A prints and drawings collection. Both the biblical Hebrew words for “angels” and “kings” sound the same.

King Charles is a keen and accomplished artist who has exhibited and sold his works to raise money for his charities and also published books on the subject. King Charles commissioned seven major paintings of Holocaust survivors to add to the official Royal Collection of Art in 2022.  The project was part of the king’s long-standing aim of educating future generations and ensuring that the horrors of the Holocaust are never forgotten.

One emotional visit to Israel occurred in 2016, when Charles travelled to Jerusalem for the funeral of former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. While there, he visited the grave of his grandmother, Princess Alice of Greece, who saved Jews during the Holocaust and was honored as Righteous Among the Nations. She is buried in Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

It seems that the cyberangels ascended the virtual ladder from Jerusalem to Amsterdam to London and have come back down to Jerusalem.

Rembrandt Inspired Cyberangels bring Message of Peace to Ukraine

 

About the artist

Mel Alexenberg in known as “Grandfather of NFT’s” since he created experimental digital artworks for more than half a century. They have be seen by millions and are in the collections of thirty museums throughout the world from The Met and MoMA in New York to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

He has educated generations of young artists as art professor at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His books The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age and Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture are published by Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press.

NFT of Cyberangel Flight from Amsterdam to Kyiv

I am sending Rembrandt inspired “Cyberangels of Peace” on a virtual flight from Rembrandt’s studio in Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam to the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv.

After having been sent on a flight around the world, my computer generated angels are back in the great master’s studio ready for me to launch their flight into the museum in Kyiv to bring a message of peace. Their flight will be documented as an NFT gifted by me as the artist to the National Art Museum of Ukraine.

An NFT (non-fungible token) is a non-interchangeable digital asset like my artwork that documents cyberangel flight through image and narrative. The ownership of an NFT is authenticated and stored on a database called a blockchain.

The “Cyberangels of Peace” image that I created for the NFT shows me in period garb next to Rembrandt’s etching press holding a cyberangel that I transformed from black and white to the Ukrainian flag’s colors of yellow and blue. I chose to have these cyberangels ascend into the Kyiv museum through a drawing of it on a Ukrainian postage stamp that represents the past hand delivered messages being transformed into future forms of Web3 technology that can instantaneously deliver messages of peace.

My Family in Ukraine Singing Angels of Peace

“May your coming be for peace, angels of peace. Bless me with peace, angels of peace.”

You could have heard more than a century ago, my grandparents Max and Lena Alexenberg and great-grandparents singing this song with their families gathered around the table set for the Sabbath meal every Friday night in Rivne, Ukraine.

“Peace Be Upon You” is a traditional song that I also sing at Sabbath meals with my wife Miriam and our family in Israel where angel flights began. We encounter angel flight in the biblical verse:  “A ladder was standing on the ground, its top reaching up towards heaven as angels were going up and down on it.” (Genesis 28:12) The angels in Jacob’s dream go up from the Land of Israel and go down throughout the world heralding a message of peace: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war anymore.” (Isaiah 2:4)

When Cyberangels Were Born

Cyberangels where born when I was listening to the ancient Hebrew words being chanted from a handwritten Torah scroll.  It described the artist Bezalel as being talented in all types of craftsmanship to make artworks (Exodus 35:33). The Hebrew words for “visual art” literally mean “thoughtful craft,” a feminine term. When I transformed it into its masculine form, it became “computer angel.”

I rushed to Miriam to tell her that I discovered that my role as a male artist is to create computer angels! I was equipped to create them as the head of the art department at Pratt Institute where I taught the first course on creating art with computers and was simultaneously research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

Since Rembrandt was the master at telling Bible stories with angels in his paintings, drawings, and etchings, Miriam and I went to The Metropolitan Museum of Art to see them.  We enjoyed siting in the print room where we were given Rembrandt’s work with angels to see up close. The Met made photographs of them for me to digitize and create variations of them in different media that are in the collections of thirty museums worldwide. Today, my 1987 multimedia artwork “Jacob’s Dream” combining experimental etching, photoetching, and computer-generated etching is in the collection of The Met inhabiting the same print room as the Rembrandt originals.

When Peace Comes to Ukraine

After peace returns to the land where my ancestors sang of angels of peace, I plan to send as a gift to the National Art Museum of Ukraine my original 1986 lithograph of cyberangels Digital Tribute to Rembrandt that you see in my hands in Rembrandt’s studio. When the Ukrainian postal service will return to normal, I will send it air mail in a mailing tube with postage stamps from Israel from where angels ascend. 

By having both the original physical artwork and NFT is becoming a current trend described in The New York Times article “NFT Collectors Getting Real.” It explained that NFT collectors are beginning to crave the context for their digital collections that art history can offer through physical artworks. My NFT coupled with the lithograph is a “phygital” artwork, a recently coined term to describe art experiences that create a dialogue between physical and digital art forms.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington added my lithograph to its collection as a historic exemplar of pioneering digital printmaking. The chairman of the Department of Social & Cultural History wrote: "It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge, on behalf of the National Museum of American History, the receipt of ‘Digitized Homage to Rembrandt’ presented to our Division of Graphic Arts. This lithograph from a computer-generated image is a most valuable addition to our collection."

The chairman of the Committee on Prints of the Museum of Modern Art in New York wrote: “The members of the committee were pleased to accept this computer-assisted etching of Rembrandt’s imagery. As an example of the innovative technological experimentation taking place at Pratt Graphic Center, it will be of great interest to students of the development of graphic techniques.

From Rembrandt Inspired Cyberart in MoMA to Cryptoart NFT

Just as cyber artworks have found their homes in museums worldwide since the 1980’s, crypto artworks will be entering museum collections worldwide in the future.

As an artist whose digital artwork is in the MoMA collection, it will be meaningful for the museum to also have my Rembrandt inspired NFT in its collection. The image below shows me in period garb launching a Rembrandt inspired cyberangel from Rembrandt’s studio in Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam flying to MoMA. 

The Museum of Modern Art added my experimental digital multimedia artwork Jacob’s Dream: Digitized Homage to Rembrandt to its collection in 1987 after its being exhibited in “The Artist and the Computer” exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. I had created it when I was simultaneously Chairman of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute and Research Fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

Mrs. Alfred R. Stern, Chairman of the Committee on Prints and Illustrated Books, wrote on adding my 1986 experimental digital multimedia artwork Jacob’s Dream: “The members of the committee were pleased to accept this computer-assisted etching of Rembrandt’s imagery. As an example of the innovative technological experimentation taking place at Pratt Graphic Center, it will be of great interest to students of the development of graphic techniques.”

In addition to my teaching at Pratt and MIT, I am former art professor at Columbia University and professor at universities in Israel.

 My email is melalexenberg@yahoo.com 

MoMA IN THE LIFE OF THE ARTIST MEL ALEXENBERG

MoMA has a special place in my life having been born and educated in New York. Instead of taking the Green Bus to school, I’d often run across Queens Boulevard and take the bus in the opposite direction across the bridge to Fifth Avenue and 53^rd Street to spend the day with Matisses and Picassos. 

When I was head of the art department at Pratt Institute, I invited Francoise Gilot to lecture about her new book Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art. She gave me a copy and wrote in it: "To Mel Alexenberg, who sees angels in computers and computers in Angels. Francoise Gilot."

My first teaching job was as a high school biology teacher at Rhodes School on 54^th Street overlooking the MoMA terrace. (It’s the red brick building in the photo below.) 

My second date with Miriam, who became my wife ten months later, was in the MoMA where I explained to her ideas emerging from modern art. The last museum she had visited was the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam viewing Rembrandts when she was nine years old on her way from Suriname, the Dutch colony in South America where she was born, to live on a farm in Israel.

Victor D’Amico, director of the MoMA’s Children's Museum was my teacher when I was studying for an interdisciplinary doctorate in art and science at NYU. His classes were held at MoMA. Dr. Prabha Sahasrabudha who worked with Victor at MoMA was invited by Indira Gandhi to create a children's museum in India modeled after the MoMA Children's Museum. Prabha was later professor of art education at NYU and head of the committee that granted me my doctorate for my research on the aesthetic experience in creative process in art and science. 

My cyberangel flights in both digital and crypto forms are based on the biblical passage: “He had a vision in a dream. A ladder was standing on the ground, its top reaching up towards heaven as Divine angels were going up and down on it.” (Genesis 28:12) Angels in Jacob’s dream go up from the Land of Israel and go down throughout the world.

Top image: Rembrandt inspired cyberangels arrive from Israel at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in time for lunch at the Terrace Cafe.  The biblical words for angel and food are spelled with the same four Hebrew letters to teach that angels are spiritual messages arising from everyday life. Perhaps there is spiritual significance that museums that offer art also offer food.

Second image: The cyberangels begin their virtual flight from the Israel Museum's Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, home of ancient Bible scrolls. They gain momentum by going up from the tallest building in Israel, the 91 story Azrieli Spiral Tower in construction in Tel Aviv with the shape of a Bible scroll.

Third image: Cyberangels spiral up from a NASA satellite image of the Land of Israel on a smartphone screen on the cover of Mel Alexenberg’s latest book Through a Bible Lens.  They launch the book throughout the world from the artist/author’s studio in Israel. See praise for the book at Israel365.

Bottom image: This experimental mixed media artwork by Mel Alexenberg was exhibited in the “The Second Emerging Expression Biennial: The Artist and the Computer” exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York in 1987-88. 

It creates a visual dialog between a hand-drawn etching, photoetching, and computer-generated etchings based on a Rembrandt drawing in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that placed Alexenberg’s print in its collection. It was also acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1987.

Biblical Origins of Crypto Cyberangels

 Rembrandt’s inspiration for my postdigital age artwork began three decades ago when I was sitting in a small synagogue in New York listening to the chanting of the biblical portion about artists Bezalel and Oholiav building the Tabernacle. I was translating the Hebrew words into English in my mind when it struck me that the Bible’s term for “art” is malekhet makhshevet, literally “thoughtful craft.” It is a feminine term. Since I’m a male artist, I transformed it into its masculine form malakh makhshev, literally “computer angel.”

Mel Alexenberg, Brooklyn Angel,  Acrylic painting on panel, 90 x 161 cm.

When the services ended, I immediately told my wife Miriam that I discovered that my role as a male Jewish artist is to create computer angels. “To do what?” was her response. I reminded her of an article that our son Rabbi Ron Alexenberg had sent us a week earlier when he was archivist at Rabbi Kook’s House in Jerusalem. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook was a down-to-earth mystic who served as the chief rabbi of pre-state Israel during the first half of the 20^th century. When he lived in London, he enjoyed seeing the Rembrandt paintings in the National Gallery and described the light in them as the light of the first day of Creation.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Belshazzar's Feast, 1638, National Gallery, London

“Thoughtful Craft” is a More Fitting Postdigital Age Term than “Art” 

The biblical term for art as “thoughtful craft” is more appropriate for our digital era that the English term “art” related to “artifact” and “artificial,” the Hellenistic view that art’s role in mimesis, imitating nature. The contemporary Hebrew word for “computer” is makhshev, “thinker.” “Thinking machine” is a more relevant term today than “computing machine.” 

I explore this divergence in my books: Through a Bible Lens: Biblical Insights for Smartphone Photography and Social Media (HarperCollins) and The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press).

I felt well equipped to create computer angels that I like to call cyberangels. I was head of the art department at Pratt Institute, America’s leading art college, where I taught “Fine Art with Computers,” and research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies where I taught a course I called “Mindleaping: Developing Creativity for the Electronic Age.” I was a frequent flier on the New York-Boston route.

From Faxart to the Digital Culture of Smartphones, Social Media, and Crypto Art

Flash forward thirty years from the faxart generation in 1989 to the ubiquitous digital culture of smartphones and social media in 2022. Unlike the era of fax technology when I sent my Rembrandt inspired cyberangel from one city to the next on its circumglobal flight, today I can send cyberangels into the digital cloud. They then simultaneously can come down into thirty museums on five continents that have my artworks in their collections. The cloud describes a vast number of computers interconnected through a real-time communication network such as the Internet. The cloud is a living network of networks blanketing our planet that closely expresses the biblical commentary that the angels in Jacob’s dream ascend into the cloud and can come down anywhere in the world. 

Timeless Immortal Art China

From Emma Qin Wang, President of G&Y (Florence) Cultural Exchange Association, Firenze, Italy, General Manager of XiangKeYi (Shanghai) Culture Communication Co., Ltd., Shanghai, China

To Mel Alexenberg, Proposal for the “Timeless Immortal Art China" (TIA China) project and authorization for the installation of artistic works in China.

We are pleased to inform you that our Administration, sensitive to all initiatives concerning Art and Culture, is pleased to invite you to collaborate and share our project called: " Timeless Immortal Art - China " (TIA China), including installations of artistic works for the urban decoration of our country.

Professional artists, from different countries of the world, are joining our project, giving only their authorizations, in a non-exclusive way, for our use of the printing of the images of his artworks, on materials that may vary according to the context (such as ceramic tiles, glass, or other materials) to be installed in private or public places in China.

This is an extension of our previous well-received project Timeless Immortal Art - Meri (TIA Meri). We are very pleased to share with you, as one of the artists of the TIA Meri, that we would like to carry on this concept, and spread this project to more nations in the world.

The six artworks below were sent digitally to Emma Qin Wang for use in Shanghai and other cities in China.

Cyberangels Link Sister Cities Ashdod (Israel) and Wuhan (China)

Description of artwork: Computer-generated artwork sending blessings from the people of Israel to the people on China (full description at blogpost Cyberangels Link Sister Cities Wuhan (China) and Ashdod (Israel) from artist’s article in The Times of Israel).

Cyberangels of Peace Ascend from the Land of Israel

Description of artwork: Computer-generated serigraph in the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It is based upon the Bible in which angels ascending from Israel come down throughout the world with messages of peace.

Angle Angels

Description of artwork: Acrylic painting in the Library at Ariel University based upon the play on the similar words angle and angel.

Cyberangels of Peace Ascend from Jerusalem through Tel Aviv to the Rest of the World

Description of artwork: Cyberangels ascend from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem through the tallest building in Tel Aviv to museums throughout the world.

Rembrandt-inspired Cyberangels on Circumglobal Flight Stop in Amsterdam

Description of artwork: Rembrandt-inspired cyberangels stop in Rembrandthuis Museum in Amsterdam on flight via satellites around the world from New York, Amsterdam, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and back to NY. The artist Mel Alexenberg in period dress is in Rembrandt’s studio receiving the cyberangel.

Cyberangel Announcing Birth of Samson to Manoah

Description of artwork:  Computer-generated lithograph in the collection of Kunstmuseum Den Haag in The Hague, Netherlands, illustrating the biblical story of an angel announcing birth of Samson to his father.