In 2004, working with coder Hoang Le, Rapoport produced Kabbalah/Kabul: Sending Emanations to the Aliens, one of her most visually-rich and complex Web Art works. Like her earlier Smell Your Destiny, this work is concerned with the transmission of traits.
Using the blowfly as a symbolic medium of transmission, the work opens with an image of a US helicopter carrying the Kabbalah’s Adam Kadmon and the Tree of Life, whose branches are marked with altruistic “emanations” associated with bodily organs. Rapoport proposed that encoded altruistic traits could be transmitted across interstellar space by radio or laser signals. When the participant selects an emanation by clicking on its icon, an associated image of a stem cell within a cell cluster differentiates (lights up and changes into) a body part. The selected cell is eventually enhanced with a DNA altruistic trait in preparation for delivery to the extraterrestrials.
Rapoport gave a presentation about Kabbalah Kabul at a workshop for the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Paris in 2003.
Kabbalah Kabul was transformed into a large scale lightbox print featuring Adam Kadman for Rapoport’s retrospective exhibition Pairing of Polarities at Kala Art Institute (2011).
Unfortunately this work is currently challenging to view, as it uses Adobe Flash.