Rembrandt Cyberangel Flights

Rembrandt Inspired Cyberangel Flights 

The photograph of Mel Alexenberg in period garb in Rembrandt's studio in the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam shows him holding up his cyberangel print above a fax machine on the etching press where Rembrandt made his prints.

Mel was making preparations for the cyberangel flight around the globe sponsored by AT&T in 1989 using fax machines, the leading-edge technology of the time. The cyberangel flew from New York to Amsterdam, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Los Angeles, returning to New York, to honor Rembrandt on the 320th anniversary of his passing. 

Thirty years later, the cyberangel came alive again on October 4, 2019 to pay tribute to Rembrandt on the 350th anniversary of his passing. A new technological era of smartphones and social media had dawned. This time, the cyberangel took flight though the Internet into the 30 museums that have Alexenberg’s artworks in their collections. 

Alexenberg is known as Grandfather of Digital Art because his career as an artist embraced the technological developments of digital art from his first computer generated painting in 1965, to his groundbreaking digital printmaking experiments in the 1980s, to his honoring Rembrandt by launching a cyberangel flight around the world in 1989, to Internet flights in 2019 to museums on five continents, and into the future.   

The artworks below are six examples of the 90 images that Alexenberg created as a Global Tribute to Rembrandt. They document three variations of cyberangel flights launched through the Internet from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, from Rembrandt’s studio in Amsterdam, and by way of the museum’s café.

The first image shows cyberangels flying from the Israel Museum to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The second shows them flying from Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam to the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio, The third and fourth show flights from Rembrandt’s studio to the Israel Museum and to Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The fifth and sixth flights show cyberangels flying into the cafés of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.