In a 1998 news conference, Soviet scientist Oleg Gazenko said about Laika, the first dog in space, “the more time passes, the more I’m sorry…we did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog…”

Still from Deborah Stratman, Laika, 2021, 4:33 min, HD video. Composer: Olivia Block, additional imagery: NASA, Jeremy Inglis, Suan Hsi Yong. Courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey.

At Corbett vs. Dempsey, Deborah Stratman’s short film Laika is tucked inside THE VAULT, the unobtrusive corner room fashioned from a massive safe. Amusingly enough, Laika emerges from Chicago electro-acoustic composer Olivia Block’s mushrooms trips during COVID lockdowns: “unable to do anything, I turned inward…the mushrooms helped me to listen somatically.” The soundtrack begins quietly, with two minutes of waves crashing on the beach. As low synths fade in and steadily distort into screeches, dark perceptions envelop the listener. You feel fear and incomprehensibility, alienation. The visuals, constructed after the soundtrack, intensify this feeling. A starry sky, an approaching star, and an ethereal dog with glowing eyes linger to the viewer past their vanishing. For a long moment, a strangely triangular mirror on dark rocks reflects the emerging sun into the camera. You sit with the way you respond to impenetrable beauty. The final sequence, which Stratman describes as her mind’s eye as she first listened to the soundtrack, is played in reverse. A boat chops backward through waves towards a fallen space capsule rising back into the sky, led by fluttering parachutes.

Laika is a withering critique of a human-centric worldview that pretends our story conventions are universal. First, the always-stationary camera and slow editing force us to stop and feel nature’s inexpressibly resonant, too-ignored beauty. The recurring dog with the glowing eyes appears as luminous splotches of red and blue, having been filmed by a thermal camera. Human-centric vision is deemphasized. Heat, warmth, and glowing life is affirmed. The nature documentary genre’s strangely human characters, story-stamping narration, fast editing, and whimsical soundtrack is part of what is evoked and castigated. Here, these scenes of natural life have a lingering and non-causal editing style, a soundtrack distorted by disquieting screeches, and no human presence as narrator or character model. Finally, the reversed last sequence, purposeful and poignant with its swelling music, suggests that we too can reverse our direction. We can use this quiet reflection on the value of the ignored to motivate work against our history of control, of only seeing viewer-centric objects. We can save Laika.

The viewer peers through Laika at the revelation that our default relationship with nature is selfishly constructed and actively cruel. Even when we’ve paid attention to real beauty, we’ve reduced and commanded it. After all, we never even planned to bring Laika back home. We just wanted to achieve things. In our world, we need to compartmentalize our vision to keep moving up, but in Laika, our visions slowly broaden. For a moment, we can just be.

On a related sidenote: against higher ups and engineers working around the clock to design and build a spacecraft in one month, Oleg Gazenko fought successfully for Laika’s capsule to have a six-inch window.

Justice Yoo