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CHAPTER 1
Biblical Consciousness in a Postdigital Culture
There is a confluence emerging in the twenty-first century between biblical consciousness and postdigital culture. Both share a structure of consciousness and its cultural expression that honors creative process and a different spirit. This chapter will define and explain the term "postdigital culture" in relation to biblical consciousness in contemporary life. It will demonstrate ways in which the creative process and a different spirit are expressed in the Bible, and in science and technology.
POSTDIGITAL CULTURE
Ubiquitous smartphone culture can be best understood in terms of how digital culture is rapidly evolving into a postdigital culture. Understanding the significance of integrating smartphone photography and social media in new forms of expression requires appreciation of scientific and technological creativity and postmodern art in a networked world.
My exploring the development of postdigital culture is based on my research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on creativity and new art forms emerging from digital technologies and global systems, my curating the collaborative LightsOROT: Spiritual Dimensions of the Electronic Age exhibition at Yeshiva University Museum, and my writing The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness, published by Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press. My definition of "postdigital" forms the core of the Wikipedia definition:
In The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age, Mel Alexenberg defines "postdigital art" as artworks that address the humanization of digital technologies through interplay between digital, biological, cultural, and spiritual systems, between cyberspace and real space, between embodied media and mixed reality in social and physical communication, between high tech and high touch experiences, between visual, haptic, auditory, and kinesthetic media experiences, between virtual and augmented reality, between roots and globalization, between autoethnography and community narrative, and between web-enabled, peer-produced wikiart and artworks created with alternative media through participation, interaction, and collaboration, in which the role of the artist is redefined.
Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Center, wrote in his article "Beyond Digital" in the magazine Wired: "Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only in its absence, not by its presence. Face it — the Digital Revolution is over." Digital technologies buried in smartphones and social media have become invisible. We just scan, tap, and swipe the surface of colorful screens without knowing or caring how the streaming plethora of images and texts are created.
To look beyond the digital, I invited some of the world's most innovative thinkers on postdigital futures — artists, art educators, and writers on new media — to contribute chapters to my book Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture. Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, author of (IN)VISIBLE: Learning to Act in the Metaverse, sees the postdigital artist as an intermediary, a catalyst between diverse fields of knowledge, ways of thinking, social models, and solution strategies based upon cooperation, communication, and interaction. Network culture not only changes modes of media production and distribution but also transforms art from object-making to art as processes of creating immaterial, rhizome-like structures of remotely connected individuals in online communities. "Print and radio tell; stage and film show; cyberspace embodies."
Stephen Wilson, author of Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology, proposed that although the impact of digital technology is significant, it forms part of something much more momentous that is intertwined with the aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and socioeconomic. Art is being redefined by a digital revolution linked to revolutions brewing in the realms of biology, neurophysiology, materials science, and cosmology that call for new directions.
Roy Ascott, author of Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, coined the word moistmedia as the symbiosis between dry pixels and wet biomolecules. Postdigital art will be devoted to creating moistmedia artworks from which new metaphors, new language, and new methodologies will arise. The dynamic interplay between digital, biological, and cultural systems calls for a syncretic approach that is realized through connectivity, immersion, interaction, transformation, and emergence. In Chapter Five, "Focusing on Creative Process," I describe how I created in my lab/studio at MIT a moistmedia artwork, Inside/Outside: Pnim/Panim, through which internal mind/ body processes of wet biomolecules and changing dry pixel images of one's face on a computer monitor engage in dialogue.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Friedman identified the forces that are determining the nature of a postdigital world in his book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. The flattening of the world is creating a level playing field in which Israel, with a population of only eight million, can successfully compete with giants such as the United States, Europe, India, and China. He calls these flattening forces "the new age of creativity: when the walls came down and Windows went up; the new age of connectivity: when the Web went around and Netscape went public; and the new age of collaboration: harnessing the power of communities." Those forces of creativity, connectivity, and collaboration are shaping postdigital culture.
Israel has become a major world player for its creativity in developing innovative start-ups that are shaping the postdigital world. One such start-up is Waze, a community-driven GPS (Global Positioning System) navigation app that works on smartphones. Google acquired Waze for a billion dollars to make Google Maps come alive.
Waze was developed ten minutes from my home in Ra'anana, by three young men, for use in Israel. It has since expanded for use in thirteen countries. Waze collects map data, travel times, and traffic information from users and transmits it to the Waze server. Based on the information collected, Waze is then in a position to provide routing and real-time traffic updates. It offers turn-by-turn voice navigation, real-time traffic, and other location-specific alerts.
The integration of smartphones, apps, and GPS reveals a postdigital age reading of a biblical passage:
"Ponder your straight and roundabout paths, and all your ways will be established (by Waze)."
(Original Translation, Proverbs 4:26)
The many translations of Proverbs 4:26, both Jewish and Christian, I found in Internet Bible sites deviate from a literal translation that was unintelligible in past eras. My word-for-word translation above only makes sense in today's high-tech world. Typical translations are:
"Weigh the course of your feet, and all your ways will be established"
(Tanach: The Torah/Prophets/Writings, Proverbs 4:26)
and
"Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established"
(King James Bible, Proverbs 4:26).
The transliteration of the original Hebrew for the first words of the sentence are spelled PLS and MAgl. (Hebrew words in the Bible are spelled without vowels.) If I walk into a hardware store in Israel and ask for a PeLeS, the storekeeper will give me a level that I can use to make sure that the paintings on my wall are hanging straight. In the Oxford Hebrew-English Dictionary, Magal means "circle." When I use Waze, the navigating voice tells me, "At the roundabout, proceed straight ahead."
The transition from a digital to a postdigital age is the subject of Daniel Pink's book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. Pink provided extensive evidence for the emergence of a postdigital Conceptual Age, beyond the digital Information Age. The Conceptual Age is an age of creators and empathizers who activate the right hemisphere of their brains to compliment the left-hemispheric dominance of the Information Age of knowledge workers and the earlier Industrial Age of factory workers. It is a postdigital age in which well-developed high-tech abilities are no longer enough for succeeding. In the Conceptual Age, high-tech knowledge is integrated with high-concept and high-touch creativity in all areas of human endeavor.
In a postdigital culture, High Concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention. High Touch involves the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning. In short, postdigital culture aims to humanize impersonal digital technologies.
HUMANIZING DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES
I was excited about the artistic possibilities of humanizing digital technologies when the first computer plotter arrived at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1965. I pleaded with the computer center's administrators to let me experiment with making art with their mammoth computer. "Giant, multimillion-dollar computers are for serious purposes, not for playing at making art," was their response. As a scientist in the process of metamorphosis into an artist, I was not unfamiliar with the world of computers. Indeed, I had written a paper, "The Binary System and Computers," describing how to build a simple digital computer; it was published in 1964, in a National Science Teachers Association journal. In addition to being a doctoral student at NYU and studying painting at the Art Students League, I was working as science supervisor for a Long Island school system and test center coordinator for the American Association for the Advancement for Science (AAAS) curriculum project: "Science: A Process Approach."
When I spoke about my rejection by the computer center administrators to my doctoral advisor, Professor Morris Shamos, head of the physics department and subsequent president of the National Academy of Sciences, he jumped with enthusiasm at my proposal to create art with computers. He phoned his colleague, the director of the Courant Institute, and explained to him the importance of humanizing digital technologies at a time when science-fiction writers and TV show producers were frightening people into believing that computers would take over the world and enslave them. I was granted free reign at the computer center in response to Professor Shamos's question, "Is there a better way to put a human face on computers than to have them make art?"
I programmed instructions for the computer to plot geometric patterns on rolls of paper. My cold, calculated computer-generated drawings seemed to invite a warm, sensuous, high-touch response. Using the millennia-old technology of encaustic painting, developed in ancient Egypt and Rome, appeared to me to be a most appropriate high-touch partner for high-tech digital drawings. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I had seen perfectly preserved Egyptian encaustic portraits painted during biblical times, and at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, palettes with muffin-tin hollows filled with encaustic paints unearthed from the ashes of the volcanic destruction of Pompeii. I could have used these paints in the palettes prepared nearly 2,000 years ago, as if they were made today to paint on digital printouts. I made encaustic paints by melting beeswax with microcrystalline wax and dammar resin crystals that I mixed with powdered pigments. The vibrant colors of my molten paints sensuously flowed over the plotter's hard-edged drawings, hardening into a gemlike, translucent surface. One of my early computer-generated encaustic paintings based on algorithms describing noise control was reproduced as the cover for the April 1966 issue of International Science and Technology.
In 1988, when I was art editor of The Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics, I wrote a paper: "Art with Computers: The Human Spirit and the Electronic Revolution." I proposed how digital technology was reshaping the worldview of humanity. Computers are extensions of the mind. Telecommunications systems are extensions of our nervous system, branching out to give global reach to our actions. The Electronic Revolution is changing our perceptions of ourselves and our place in the universe. Our concepts of space and time are being transformed. The two earlier revolutions of comparable magnitude were the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Unlike the Electronic Revolution, which was a qualitative leap, these two prior revolutions only involved quantitative changes. They were extension of our muscular system rather than of our central nervous system. The ox made our arms stronger and the horse made our legs faster. The tractor and automobile just added more strength and greater speed. There was no shift in kind.
At the same time I was writing my paper for The Visual Computer, I was a frequent flyer on the New York-Boston shuttle. I was simultaneously head of the art department of Pratt Institute, where I taught computer graphics, and research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, where I was collaborating with Professor Otto Piene, the center's director, on creating the LightsOROT: Spiritual Dimensions of the Electronic Age exhibition for the Yeshiva University Museum. My dialogue with the university president, Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, "Light, Vision and Art in Judaism," was a centerpiece of the exhibition catalog. Harvard University psychologist Rudolf Arnheim wrote the catalog introduction. In reviewing the exhibition, the ARTnews critic wrote: "Rarely is an exhibition as visually engaging and intellectually challenging."
POSTDIGITAL FREEDOM FROM IDOLATRY
Postdigital art frees us from the Bible's multiple admonitions not to freeze the likeness of God's dynamic, changing, vital, and vibrant creations in any form of static carved or molten images. Just look at my extensive list of postdigital art forms at the beginning of this chapter and you will find that none of them freeze any thing. All flow with the rhythms of life. They express Thorleif Boman's description of the active mode of Hebraic consciousness as "dynamic, vigorous, passionate, and sometimes quite explosive in kind."
"You shall not make any carved statue, or picture of any thing that is in heaven above, or on the earth below, or in the water below the earth."
(Original Translation, Exodus 20:4)
"You shall make no molted gods"
(Original Translation, Exodus 34:17)
"Turn not to idols, nor made yourself molten gods."
(Original Translation, Leviticus 19:4)
"You shall make no idols nor carved statues."
(Original Translation, Leviticus 26:1)
"You shall not make yourself any carved statues, nor pictures of any thing."
(Original Translation, Deuteronomy 5:8)
"Cursed be the man who makes any sculptured or molten image, which is an abomination to God even if it is fine handiwork."
(Original Translation, Deuteronomy 27:15)
Postdigital art forms explore lively interactive systems rather than static sculptures standing on pedestals or paintings trapped in golden frames. I mentioned above the postdigital artwork, Inside/Outside: Pnim/Panim, that I created at MIT. It relates to the terms coined by Professor Ascott. My interactive system is a moistmedia artwork through which internal mind/body processes of wet biomolecules and changing dry pixel images of one's face on a computer monitor engage in dialogue. It is a biofeedback system in which people paint a series of digital self-portraits with the flow of their energizing inner river of light. I programmed special software that transformed the color, form, and size of one's face on the monitor in response to changes in mind/body states. A portrait derived from Hebraic consciousness is a dynamic changing system presenting the flow of life forces between spiritual and material realms rather than a static painting in which a frozen face is set off from the world of life by a golden frame. Judaism honors art forms that express life being actively lived, not still life, not nature morte, not death. The Bible tells us to choose life:
"Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Choose life, so that you and your descendants might live."
(Original Translation, Deuteronomy 30:19)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Through a Bible Lens"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Mel Alexenberg.
Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
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