Aurora
Blue Soup

The group Blue Soup has used images of astronomical phenomena on more than one occasion. In the video Three Wishes (2002), a gradient sky is crossed by three pictogram shooting stars.

The protagonist of Aurora is an object flying through the atmosphere, named after the goddess of dawn who, according to Roman mythology, crosses the sky each day in her chariot. The 3D graphics convey its weight and immense speed, the aerodynamic stress it endures, and the temperature of its blazing trail. 

The video’s ambient soundscape, created by composer Andrei Antonets (OID) with sound engineer Egor Sukharev, shifts from sustained synthesizer tones to dissonant distortion. At the time of its premiere, which took place at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Aurora could be read as bearing the imprint of anxieties, fears, and hope amid a situation of global uncertainty—one that persists to this day.

Aurora continues a long tradition of depicting and interpreting celestial bodies. Their appearance was perceived as an omen of impending political or dynastic crisis (manuscripts from the Mawangdui tombs, China, 2nd century BCE), of disaster (the Bayeux Tapestry, Normandy, 11th century) or, conversely, as a positive sign, such as the Star of Bethlehem (Giotto’s fresco The Adoration of the Magi, Padua, 1303–1305). Today, the threat of the Earth colliding with other cosmic objects is a subject of cinematic fascination. It can take the form of a blockbuster action movie (Armageddon, directed by Michael Bay, 1998), an existential drama (Melancholia, directed by Lars von Trier, 2011) or a satire (Don’t Look Up, directed by Adam McKay, 2021). 

Like the goddess whose chariot flight takes place at the threshold between night and day, Aurora exists in a state of perpetual transition. As with other works by the group, the video’s interpretation remains open, yet it carries a tension characteristic of Blue Soup: how does one distinguish a lucky star from a bad omen, or the shadow of a deadly threat from a natural phenomenon enveloped in a romantic aura?