Objects On My Dresser, Phase 3: Shared Dynamics saw Rapoport make a major advance in her artmaking tactics, transforming her viewers into participants by involving them in the creation of the work through interactive events - what she termed “participation performances.” She would subsequently use the computer to process data gathered during these events to generate new work This way of making art would go on to define her practice for the next decade and beyond.

Shared Dynamics grew from the hexagonal Netweb plot that appeared in the earlier Psycho-Aesthetic Dynamics exhibition at 80 Langton Street, San Francisco, in 1980. Installed on the floor, images of the objects on her dresser on cardboard stands were arranged along six labeled axes according to her own “image-word associations.”

In 1980, Rapoport started hosting events where friends from her women’s groups, artist peers, and neighbors were invited to her home studio and encouraged to arrange these cards on the Netweb according to self-defined criteria. These events were physically animated and provoked open-ended conversation and debate amongst her participants.

If the earlier public presentations of Objects on My Dresser Rapoport laid bare her inner world—mined, mapped, and diagrammed—in this new iteration of the project she proposed to generate a similar visual representation of the idiosyncrasies of others. The participants… were invited to move cards along the Netweb axes and to stake out and articulate their own associations to the objects, words, and images.

- From Sonya Rapoport: Objects on My Dresser (2022), by Alla Efimova and Terri Cohn

This era also saw Rapoport’s first use of video to document her process, as in this 1981 tape where Rapoport explains the Objects on My Dresser project in her own words, explores her thought process, and interviews her friend and collaborator Tom Bates while he arranges card on the Netweb:

In 1981, Rapoport would go on to host public Shared Dynamics events at Artists Space, New York; the New School for Social Research, New York; and Sarah Lawrence College, New York, among others. She meticulously documented the choices that were made, and later input the data into the computer and plotter printed the results.

Noticing trends in the data she gathered, she invited chemistry graduate students, pharmacologists, lawyers, and other artists, drawing conclusions about shared values and group dynamics.