In 1989, Rapoport received a grant from the California Arts Council via Carl Loeffler and Fred Truck’s Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) for the production of an online version of Digital Mudra Diskette (1988), an art book with software that recreated her original gallery-based, computer-mediated interactive installation Digital Mudra (1987-89). This work was first published online in 1989, predating the World Wide Web protocol. The Web Art project now available on Rapoport’s site is an updated version re-published in 1998 to accommodate evolving technologies.
Digital Mudra originated with a collection of photographs of participants’ hand gestures gathered during Rapoport’s early computer-assisted interactive performance Biorhythm (1980-84). In the gallery-based version of Digital Mudra (1987, Kala Art Institute, Berkeley) the repurposed photographs were correlated with similar gestures appropriated from the South Indian Mudra gesture language, as advised by lauded, Berkeley-based Kathakali dancer K.P. Kunhiraman (1931-2014) . Verbal expressions accompanying the Western gestures were juxtaposed with the meanings of their corresponding Mudra.
In this interactive Web Art project, viewers are asked to make their own selection of Mudra gestures, which are then correlated with phrases from the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).
In 2010, Rapoport returned to Digital Mudra, publishing Digital Mudra – Extended, a blog post that analyzed contemporary newspaper photographs using the Mudra gesture language.
Sonya Rapoport in studio with Digital Mudra
