News and More from the Art Alumni Group University of California, Berkeley



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Saturday, January 4, 2014

Kabbalah/Kabul: Sending Emanations to the Aliens


Sonya Rapoport will be exhibiting her web-based project "Kabbalah/Kabul: Sending Emanations to the Aliens" at Techfest 2014 in Bombay, India from 10 AM, January 3rd - 5 PM, January 5th, 2014. 

Techfest, Asia's largest science and technology festival, promotes technology, scientific thinking and innovation. It takes place on the campus of IIT Bombay at Powai, Mumbai.

"Kabbalah/ Kabul: Sending Emanations to the Aliens", encodes altruisms into a form that could be transmitted across interstellar space by radio or laser signals. Emanations are derived from the Tree of Life, the main icon of Kabbalah, in which ten creative forces intervene between the infinite and our created world.

The web narrative, set in the Afghanistan war, opens with an animation of a US helicopter carrying the altruistic emanations into outer space. The image morphs into embryonic stem cells superimposed on a spinning ring of Al Qaeda terrorist cells. When selected by the viewer, each stem cell differentiates into a body part and displays hybrid images of the war in Afghanistan and an altruistic element derived from DNA fusion. A winged Golem catapults the element into outer space to communicate with the aliens, while the Earth-bound viewers absorb the altruistic mantras into their own psyches.