Jim Finn
Chicago, Illinois
Title
Interkosmos patch
Bio
Jim Finn (b. 1968, St. Louis) is an artist whose film and video work has
screened internationally at festivals such as Rotterdam, Ann Arbor, Cinematexas
and on PBS show EGG the Arts. His needlepoint pillow series,
Communist Heroes of South America was recently featured in knitknit
magazine. His first feature film Interkosmos is the Opening Night
film for this year's New York Underground Film Festival.
Statement
This is a needlepoint recreation of a spacesuit patch for the international
communist space program based in the former USSR. The Interkosmos program
began in the 1970s as a way to integrate socialist and non-aligned nations
into the Soviet space program; it brought cosmonauts from Cuba, Mongolia,
Hungary, Vietnam, East Germany and Syria among others into space. I used
this patch in my film Interkosmos about an East German space
colonization mission to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The needlepoint
patch is featured in the Amber space capsule headed for Ganymede, one
of the four Galilean satellites of Jupiter. The writing on the patch is
the Russian name for Interkosmos.
