artiststory: From Selfies to Spirituality: A Blog as a Torah Art Form

30 July 2015

From Selfies to Spirituality: A Blog as a Torah Art Form

See my Times of Israel article:
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/from-selfies-to-spirituality-a-blog-as-a-torah-art-form/

The Torah portion read in synagogues worldwide on 1 July 2015/16 Av 5775 is Va'ethanan/ Implored (Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11).

Read creative explorations of this week’s Torah portion in my book
Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life http://photographgod.com.

I created the Torah Tweets blogart project with my wife Miriam to celebrate our 52nd year of marriage. During each of the 52 weeks of our 52nd year, we posted six photographs reflecting our life together with a text of tweets that relates the weekly Torah reading to our lives.

You can access it with all six photographs at the blog post: http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/deuteronomy-2-blog-as-torah-art-form.html

The Jewish thing to do is make art to eat. My wife Miriam and I made a banana cake for Shabbat. Miriam measured out the ingredients while I mashed the bananas. Our art is a tasty version of Internet images of the surface of Mars.

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Rethinking Creativity and Spirituality in a Postdigital Age

About the Artist

Mel Alexenberg is an artist, educator, writer, and blogger working at the interface between art, science, technology, culture, and Jewish thought and experience. His artworks explore interrelationships between the networked world and spirituality, postdigital art and Jewish consciousness, space-time systems and electronic technologies, and participatory art and community values. His artworks are in the collections of more than forty museums worldwide.

Alexenberg was professor of art and education at Columbia University, head of the art department at Pratt Institute, dean at New World School of the Arts in Miami, and research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. In Israel, he is professor emeritus of art and Jewish thought at Ariel University, head of Emunah College School of the Arts, and former professor at Bar-Ilan University and Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.

Born and educated in New York, Alexenberg earned degrees at Queens College, Yeshiva University, and New York University. He lives with his wife, artist Miriam Benjamin, in
Ra'anana, Israel.

The Soul of a Creator

Whoever is endowed with the soul of a creator must create works of imagination and thought, for the flame of the soul rises by itself and one cannot impede it on its course.... The creative individual brings vital, new light from a higher source where originality emanates to the place where it has not previously been manifest, from the place that "no bird of prey knows, nor has the falcon's eye seen" (Job 28:7), "that no man has passed, nor has any person dwelt" (Jeremiah 2:6). From Lights of Holiness by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook

Mel Alexenberg's Recent Books

Through a Bible Lens: Biblical Insights for Smartphone Photography and Social Media (HarperCollins, 2019)

Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life (CreateSpace, 2015)

The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture (Intellect Books/ University of Chicago Press, 2008)

Dialogic Art in a Digital World: Judaism and Contemporary Art (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass House, 2008) in Hebrew

The Future of Art in a Digital Age (Intellect Books, 2006)