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Clip description
Vlad the chimp astronaut walks across the sterile interior of his spacecraft. In his darkened room, he writes another letter home, which he files in a drawer with other, unsent letters. Vlad sits at a console, dwarfed by the letters CCCP and Lenin’s profile in the background. He tries to speak into the microphone, but only mouths inaudibly. His spacecraft recedes into the vast and bleak interplanetary void.
Curator’s notes
The sound and music of this sequence emphasise Vlad’s predicament. The steely, inhuman environment of the spacecraft is underscored with beeps signalling no contact. The childlike helplessness and loneliness of Vlad is made all the more poignant by the tinkle of Brahms’ ‘Lullaby’ (1868). Aaron Rogers’s animation is spare yet powerful – it makes for a poignant portrayal of the alienation and loneliness of the cosmonaut chimp consigned to oblivion for the glory of the USSR.
Vlad’s story may also be an ironic metaphor for the digital animator, alone for endless hours at his console and disconnected from the real world. Aaron Rogers is now known as Aaron Seymour, a practising designer-artist and design academic.
