Mindleaping Through the Metaverse

"Workshops in Mind-Leaping: Developing Creativity for the Electronic Age" were developed at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies by Mel and Ari Alexenberg, a father and son creative collaboration, in 1985. 

MARTE Museum of Art of El Salvador is 7,611 miles from Jerusalem, Israel; 36 miles from Jerusalén, El Salvador; or 0 miles via The Cloud

Jerusalén is a municipality in the La Paz department of El Salvador with a population of 3,000. It was founded by the Cordova family that had moved to El Salvador in the mid 1700's. They were Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain. 

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele attended the 32nd International Mayors Conference in Jerusalem, Israel, in February 2018 when he was mayor of San Salvador. He prayed at the Western Wall and revealed that his wife's grandfather was a Sephardic Jew.

First Nation to Make Bitcoin Legal Tender 

President Bukele introduced a bill to the Legislative Assembly in June 2021 to make El Salvador the first nation making bitcoin legal tender. Athena Bitcoin stated that it intended to invest one million dollars into installing 1,500 cryptocurrency ATM’s that would be able to exchange the US Dollar for bitcoin, or vice versa. On 6 September 2021, Bukele announced that the Salvadoran government had bought its first 400 bitcoins. The following day, the Bitcoin Law came into effect, making bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador.

In November 2021, Bukele announced that he planned to build the world's first bitcoin city in the southeastern region of La Union at the base of the Conchagua Volcano, which would use geothermal energy generated by the volcano to power bitcoin mining. 

Rembrandt Cyberangel Flight from Israel to El Salvador

The image above shows the virtual flight of Rembrandt inspired cyberangels from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem to the MARTE Museum of Art of El Salvador. It is a digital expression of the biblical passage of angels in Jacob’s dream ascending from the Land of Israel and going down throughout the world bringing messages of peace.

“A ladder was standing on the ground, and its top reached up toward heaven, and angels were going up and down on it.”(Genesis 28:12)

The cyberangels emerge from the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum where the oldest manuscripts of the Bible are housed and fly to El Salvador. It is based upon a digital serigraph created in 1987 by the artist Mel Alexenberg at the Israel Museum affiliated printmaking center in Jerusalem that shows Rembrandt cyberangels going up from a NASA satellite image of the Land of Israel.

From Cyberart to Cryptoart

It would be an appropriate expression of El Salavador being the world leader in making cryptocurrency legal tender to transform Alexenberg’s pioneering cyberart into cryptoart as the first NFT in an art museum collection, 

Mel Alexenberg, From Digitalart to Cryptoart

Crypto art (also stylized as CryptoArt or cryptoart) is a category of art related to blockchain technology. 

Emerging as a niche genre of artistic work following the developing of blockchain technology. Crypto art quickly grew in popularity in large part because of the unprecedented ability afforded by the underlying technology for purely digital artworks to be bought, sold, or collected by anyone in a decentralized manner. (Wikipedia)

Mel Alexenberg launched Rembrandt-inspired cyberangels from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem through Tel Aviv on a virtual flight to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The cyberangels entered the museum through its café. It seems that museums that present art also sell food.

Mel Alexenberg, Pioneer in Digital Art

My pioneering digital artworks from the 1980’s are in the collections of thirty museums some of which are listed below. I created blog posts documenting my Rembrandt-inspired cyberangel artworks that can be seen at https://globaltributetorembrandt.blogspot.com. The original documents from these museums on adding my digital artworks to their collections are archived at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama; Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio; University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, Kentucky; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Midwest Museum of American Art, Elkhart, Indiana; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel;  Jewish Museum in Prague, Czech Republic; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary; Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, Austria; Malmo Art Museum, Malmo, Sweden; Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Art Museum of The Hague, The Netherlands; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Tasmania, Australia.

On adding my digital artworks to their collections, the Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum of American History attest to their pioneering and innovative character. At the time, I was head of the art department at Pratt Institute and research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. 

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK CITY

Mrs. Alfred R. Stern, Chairman of the Committee on Prints and Illustrated Books, wrote on adding Mel Alexenberg’s 1986 experimental digital multimedia artwork, Jacob’s Dream from the series Digitized Homage to Rembrandt to MoMA’s collection: “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.”

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, WASHINGTON, DC.

Gary Kulik, Chairman, Department of Social & Cultural History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. wrote about Mel Alexenberg’s 1986 computer-generated lithograph as a historic exemplar of the first digital artwork in its collection: “It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge, on behalf of the National Museum of American History, the receipt of "Digitized Homage to Rembrandt: Day Angels" kindly presented to our Division of Graphic Arts. This lithograph from a computer-generated image is a most valuable addition to our collection. It has been entered on our records as a gift from the Pratt Graphics Center. Please accept my thanks for your generous interest in the national collections.”