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Intellect Books - Mel Alexenberg

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140 pages

English

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This book develops the thesis that the transition from premodernism to postmodernism in art of the digital age represents a paradigm shift from the Hellenistic to the Hebraic roots of Western culture. Semiotic and morphological analysis of art and visual culture demonstrate the contemporary confluence between the deep structure of Hebraic consciousness and new directions in art that arise along the interface between scientific inquiry, digital technologies, and multicultural expressions. Complementing these two analytic methodologies, alternative methodologies of kabbalah and halakhah provide postmodern methods for extending into digital age art forms. Exemplary artworks are described in the text and will be illustrated with photographs.

Sujets

Arts visuels

ART

Cultural Studies

General

General officer

History of art

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Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 février 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781841509518
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0950€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Praise for
The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness
In his book, Mel Alexenberg navigates his artistic insight amid the labyrinthian complexities, explosions, and revolutions of the past forty years of art, tracing his way amid questions of science and religion, technology and environment, education, culture, and cosmos. Everyone will find his book full of new vantage points and vistas, fresh insights that give a uniquely personal history of artistic time that indeed points to new and open futures.
- Lowry Burgess, Dean, Professor of Art, Distinguished Fellow of the Studio for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.
This is a wonderful and important book. The author links the history of art to the important role played by various forms of thinking in the Jewish tradition and connects that to the emerging culture of digital expression. Brilliant insights and new ways of seeing make this a must-read for anyone interested in the intellectual history of images in the 21st Century.
- Ron Burnett, author of How Images Think (MIT Press, 2005), President of Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada, and Artist/Designer at the New Media Innovation Center.
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
- addressing even the most intangible (to media zealots): Judeo/Christian belief, the Bible, the Torah!
- Otto Piene, Professor Emeritus and Director, MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
The author succeeds in opening a unique channel to the universe of present and future art in a highly original and inspiring way. His connection between ancient concepts (Judaism) and the present digital age will force us to thoroughly rethink our ideas about art, society and technology. This book is evidence that Golem is alive!
- Michael Bielicky, Professor of Media Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Czech Republic, and at Hochschule fur Gestaltung, ZKM Center for Art and Media, in 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. Alexenberg has provided us with powerful new lenses to allow us to see how postmodern art movements and classical Judaic traditions compliment and fructify one another as the visual arts are now enlarging and adding a spiritual dimension to our lives in the digital era.
- Moshe Dror, co-author of Futurizing the Jews: Alternative Futures for the 21st Century (Praeger, 2003), President of World Network of Religious Futurists, and Israel Coordinator of World Future Society.
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.
- Randall Rhodes, Professor and Chairman, Department of Visual Art, Frostburg State University, Maryland.
The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness opens new vistas in the attempts to reconcile the newest developments in digital art and postmodern critical perspectives with the ancient concerns of the arts with the spiritual. It offers fresh perspectives in how we can learn from Greek and Jewish thought to understand the present era.
- Stephen Wilson, author of Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (MIT Press, 2002) and Professor of Conceptual and Information Arts at San Francisco State University.
To my wonderful wife, Miriam, our children: Iyrit and Shlomo, Ari and Julie, Ron and Miri, and Moshe Yehuda, our grandchildren: Elan, Inbal and Moshe, Maytav, Or, Rachelle, Razel, Renana, Shirel, Tagel, Tali, Yahel, Yishai, and our great-grandson: Yechiel Eliad Menachem.
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, 50:3)
The Future of Art in a Digital Age
From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness
By Mel Alexenberg
First Published in the UK in 2006 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
Copyright 2006 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Copy Editor: Holly Spradling
Typesetting: Mac Style, Nafferton, E. Yorkshire
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-9515 / ISBN 1-84150-136-0
Printed and bound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire
C ONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction - Postmodern Paradigm Shift: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness
Frank Lloyd Wright s Guggenheim Museum
Frank Gehry s Guggenheim Museum
Hebraic Consciousness and Postmodernism
Roots and Globalization
Down-to-Earth Spirituality
Multiple Perspectives
Talmud and the Internet
Engaging the Bible in a Playful Spirit
Intergenerational Collaboration in Polycultural Art
1 Semiotic Perspectives - Redefining Art in a Digital Age
From Representational to Presentational Art
Iconic Art: Resemblance
Symbolic Art: Consensus
Indexic Art: Documentation
Identic Art: Being
Prioric Art: Proposing
Dialogic Art: Interacting
2 Morphological Perspectives - Space-Time Structures of Visual Culture
Latent Structure and Transformative Processes
Alternative Perspectives
Mythological Perspective
Logical Perspective
Ecological Perspective
Origins of Ecological Perspective in Science
Origins of Ecological Perspective in Modern Art
From Deconstruction to Reconstruction
Morphological Analysis of Visual Culture: Biblical Fringes
Art as Visual Midrash: Four Wings of America
Sky Art: From Munich to the Tzin Wilderness
3 Kabbalistic Perspectives - Creative Process in Art and Science
Spiritual Bits and Bytes
Biblical Roots of Kabbalah
Ten Sephirot of Creative Process
Digitized Homage to Rembrandt
Cyberangels and AT&T
Creativity in Art and Science
Pathways to Beauty
4 Halakhic Perspectives - Creating a Beautiful Life
Beyond Religion and Science
Lessons from 9/11: Choose Life not Death
Tower of Babel: Disastrous Creativity
Eruv at Sodom: Honoring Human Diversity
Beautifying Actions: Adding Light to the World
LightsOROT at MIT: Learning Torah Through Art
Responsive Art in a Digital Age
Index
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has its origins in the summers of my childhood when my parents,Abraham and Jeanne, set me free among the sowbugs, salamanders, and swallows of the Catskill Mountains. My days were filled studying the behavior of the creatures of the forests and ponds and making drawings and paintings of them interacting in their natural habitats as well as in imaginary worlds of my creation. Boundaries between science and art were diaphanous in my youthful mind. Indoors, my parents created a warm loving Jewish home for my sister, Fran, and me, and provided me with a yeshiva education.
I learned systems thinking and ecological perspective in science from my teacher and mentor at Queens College, biology professor Max Hecht. At New York University, art department chairman Howard Conant had the daring to facilitate a biologist earning an interdisciplinary doctorate through the art department, rare in the 1960 s. I had enthusiastic support for my research on psychology of aesthetic experience in art and science from my dissertation committee: art educator Prabha Sahasrabudhe, physicist Morris Shamos, and psychologist Janice Gorn.
I was blessed to have had the opportunity to explore the intersections of art, science, technology, and Jewish consciousness with my teachers and colleagues. Foremost are my decades of dialogue with the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, Rabbi Moshe Dror,Yitzhaq Hayutman, and the artists Yaacov Agam, Uri Levi, and Avraham Pinkas, my co-authoring papers with Rabbi Norman Lamm and Rabbi Alter Ben-Zion Metzger of Yeshiva University, my collaborations with museum curators Sylvia Herskowitz, Ori Soltes, Michaela Hajkova, and my colleagues Margaret Mead at Columbia University and Otto Piene at MIT, and my studies with Rabbi Yisrael Avihai, head of the Bet-El Yeshiva for Kabbalists in the Old City of Jerusalem .
I learned through dialogue with my students in my courses: Art in Jewish Thought at the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel, Israel, and Emunah College in Jerusalem, Environmental Art at New World School of the Arts in Miami, Fine Arts with Computers at Pratt Institute in New York, Art, Technology and Culture at MIT, Aesthetic Education at Bar-Ilan University, Morphodynamics: Design of Natural Systems at Columbia University, and Art, Science and Education at Tel Aviv University.
In addition to having the love and support of my wife, Miriam, and our children, I have had the amazing opportunity to have them as learning partners in exploring the ideas that flow through this book. Miriam is my artistic collaborator, the high touch counterpart for my high tech leanings. Ari shared a studio/lab with me at MIT where we collaborated on developing responsive biofeedback artworks. I am especially grateful for Ari s help in creating the website www.melalexenberg.com at which readers can find full-color images of artworks by the author and links to artworks by other artists described in this book. Ron is a rabbi and biologist who helped me clarify concepts I developed in the kabbalistic and halakhic chapters. Moshe, a student of internatio