Background and Instructions for Residents or Visitors
to Jerusalem Israel
“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)
From Jerusalem in Israel to JerUSAlems in USA
is an international digital art project that is a contemporary enactment of the
biblical commentary that angels go up on Jacob’s ladder from the Land of Israel
and come down throughout the world.
Residents or visitors to Jerusalem are invited participate
by documenting life in Israel’s capital by creating smartphone videos that
explore the idea that the biblical words for food (malach) and angel
(ma’achal) are written with the same four Hebrew letters to teach us that
angels are spiritual messages arising from everyday life.
The cover of my new book Through a Bible Lens:
Biblical Insights for Smartphone Photography and Social Media shows a
smartphone screen with digitized Rembrandt angels ascending from a satellite
image of the Land of Israel. These
cyberangels will emerge from videos you create. See http://throughabiblelens.blogspot.com
Your videos will be linked to others in a stream designed to
fly via digital technologies from Jerusalem in Israel into the twelve states in
USA having places named JerUSAlem: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland,
Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, Utah, and Vermont. See http://jerusalem-USA.blogspot.com
Instructions
Use your smartphone to create one-minute videos that present
mini-stories about food – growing it, selling it, cooking it, eating it, etc. Each of the videos should show different ways
of experiencing food. Choose two of your
videos that best show an imaginative viewpoint and creative perspective.
Email your name and where you’re from with your two videos
as attachments to me at melalexenberg@gmail.com. I
will interweave your videos with those created by students at Emunah College
School of the Arts in Jerusalem and volunteers in the Bridges for Peace Food
Project that feeds Jerusalem’s needy.
The sound track will be the renowned violinist Itzchak
Perlman’s ethereal rendition of Shalom Aleichem, a song sung by Jewish
families before the Sabbath eve meal.
You can hear the traditional melody for this song at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BDaDfmBQXA. It is appropriately spiritual music for
escorting cyberangels of peace on their flight from Jerusalem in Israel to the
12 states in USA that have JerUSAlems and then on to the rest of the world.
The cyberangels will fly from Israel into museums, colleges,
synagogues, churches, and bookstores in the 12 states. At each place where they come down to earth,
participatory events are being planned that that explore relationships between
angels and diverse kinds of work. The
Hebrew word for angel (malach) is the masculine form for the feminine
word for craftsmanship (malachah).
The photographs above are four of the 50 photographs in
Through a Bible Lens: Biblical Insights for Smartphone Photography
and Social Media that is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, other
Internet booksellers, and bookstores. My book speaks to millennials
in the language of today's digital culture of smartphones and social media. It
demonstrates to both young and old the most up-to-date thoughts on the
interactions between The Bible and the impact of new technologies on
contemporary life. Jews and Christians should buy this book for themselves as
well as for their children and grandchildren.
I am an artist, writer, and educator working at the
interface between biblical consciousness, digital technologies, and global systems.
I was art professor at Columbia University, research fellow at MIT Center for
Advanced Visual Studies, and in Israel, professor of art in Jewish thought at
Ariel University, Bar-Ilan University, and Emunah College. My artworks are in the collection of forty
museums worldwide, from Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Jewish Museum
of Prague, to Israel Museum in Jerusalem. In addition to being author of Through
a Bible Lens (Elm Hill/HarperCollins), my dozen books include 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).
This article appeared in The Times of Israel, IsraelSeen, and LinkedIn
