Objects on My Dresser, an interactive installation with audio, was first installed at Franklin Furnace Archives in 1979. This initial phase of seven phases was called Pictorial Linguistics because of its image to word structure. A substitute set of images had been assigned to the original set of objects and then verbal correlates were assigned to each set of images; the objects themselves and the assigned substitute images. A documentation of this process comprised the work.

Later phases addressed further investigation of the verbal-image relationships. Recorded discussions about these relationships with psychiatric social worker Winifred De Vos were formatted into an audio presentation that accompanied the visual material at the installation at 80 Langton Street, San Francisco, in 1980. The visuals included Rapoport's dresser with the actual objects that she had collected for twenty years; drawings of these objects with their assigned associated objects; and a three dimensional computer spiderweb-netweb plot generated from the data connectives. In a formal setting, the plot, 16 feet in diameter, was projected from the ceiling from a slide onto the floor. Cards with the xeroxed images of the objects and cards of their image correlates were placed, according to viewer associations, along the netweb axes. For later travelling interactive performances, a simulated plot, constructed of white tape, substituted for the projection. In these performances, participants matched their own visual image associations by positioning the cards of the object images and their image correlates on the word theme axes - "eye", "hand", "chest", "masking", "moving" and "threading". Reasons for the selections and their placement were recorded.

Netweb plots were generated from the data of participating law, science and art groups. The graphics revealed significant information about their professional attributes. The University of California, Berkeley; School for Social Research and Artists Space in New York City; and Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York were among venues through 1992 for exhibiting Objects on My Dresser and its variations.