View original Kabbalah Kabul: Sending Emanations to the Aliens via Sonya Rapoport’s website

In 2004, 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.