Rav Kook is Avatar. Master of the 4 basic elements, he brings balance to a chaotic cosmos. Kudos to Sam Brody for this neat little mashup, and for allowing me to post it here at the blog. He merged this cartoon of the famous image of Kook, which you can see here, with this image created by a webcomic named ChaseCraft, which you can see here. Avatar is a lead character from the Legend of Korra series, about which there’s more here.

Sam then tagged the image with a passage from Yehuda Mirsky’s recently published biography of Kook:

“[P]recisely because the time to build had come, all the contradictions in his life and personality emerged in full force. he tried to stay above the political fray while taking an inescapably public and inevitably political role. he wanted to make everybody happy, and just could not.” – (Mirsky, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution, p.160)

Two ideas from Lev Mannovich in The Language of New Media come to mind. One has to do with argument that new media art should not try to look like traditional, old media art. Medium specific, it needs to like itself, like a new media product. The second point has to do with the seamless integration of contents. In contrast to modernist collage, this kind of cut is not supposed to show the edge or suture lines.

Someone should commission ChaseCraft to illustrate the Zohar.