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.