“Quiescence” by Rosario Bitanga-Peralta (pictured) is one of more than 30,000 works of art included in the Lunar Codex, which physicist, artist and businessman Samuel Peralta intends to send to the moon. Rosario Bitanga/Samuel Peralta
The second manned moon landing mission – Apollo 12 in 1969 – had a secret payload attached to one of the legs of its lunar lander.
It was a ceramic tile the size of a thumbnail, engraved with six works of art, one of them by Andy Warhol. Nicknamed “Museum of the Moon“, was attached to a leg of the spacecraft and then left on the Moon.
It was the first time that human art had landed on the Moon, and two years later NASA sent a small figurine – Fallen Astronaut – aboard Apollo 15, which astronauts left at the landing site to honor those who lost their lives in lunar exploration.
Now, Samuel Peralta – a Canadian physicist, artist and entrepreneur – aims to significantly increase the Moon’s art collection by uploading tens of thousands of works by a diverse group of artists, representing nearly every country in the world. named Lunar Codex, [o que pode ser traduzido para “Códice da Lua”]the collection will be split into three releases planned over the next 18 months.
“If NASA and other European and Asian countries are serious about building a colony on the Moon, then this will be the beginning of arts and culture for that colony,” Peralta said.
Travel ticket
Initially, Peralta just wanted to send his own works to the moon. “I’ve been a poet since I was a little boy,” he said. “After a stint in the high-tech and energy industries, I also turned to speculative fiction.”
Since 2015, he has published an anthology series, “The Future Chronicles”, which now runs to 22 volumes that include a mix of award-winning authors and newcomers.
“The joy I felt when realizing that I could put my work on the moon was later transmitted to the people in my books”, he said.
The pandemic inspired him to further expand the selection as a way to offer hope and help during these times.
“Artists couldn’t show their works in galleries, musicians couldn’t go to concert halls. In the artistic community, there was a general feeling of unease”, he said. “I started to consider works that didn’t include me at all, that were provided to me or that were pointed out to me. I spoke to people I knew, gallery owners, collectors, other anthropologists, and from there the thing grew organically.”
In the meantime, it had booked a spot on three future moon missions, operated by private launch service providers SpaceX and United Launch Alliance.
“These companies don’t just ship NASA stuff and have extra cargo space,” he explained. “They opened it up to other companies, corporations, scientific institutions, universities and also to individuals. When I heard about this, I thought, maybe I can send something to the moon.”
The main objective of the missions is to send lunar landing vehicles, built by private American companies, which will carry out a series of scientific experiments to collect data about the Moon and its properties. The first is currently scheduled for later this year; two of them will land near the lunar south pole and one on a lunar plain known as Sinus Viscositatis.
Contemporary time capsule
Of the three collections that will make up the Lunar Codex, two have already been completed, but one is still open to proposals, since the spacecraft it will be transported in will not be launched before November 2024. For now, Peralta has work on 157 countries, but its aim is to expand that number as much as possible.
“I really want this to be a global project,” he said.
He believes there are over 30,000 employees in total. “I stopped counting at 30,000,” he said. “Each of them has at least one piece, but an artist or writer can have up to a dozen pieces. That means there are over 100,000 pieces. There’s a lot of realistic art. We have photography, wood prints, lithographs, oil, acrylic , mosaic, sculpture – there’s basically everything in all kinds of art. We’ve got whole books, short stories and poems. It’s huge.”
Peralta is self-financing the venture – at a cost “less than what a space tourist would pay”, which on a Virgin Galactic flight is around US$450,000 (just over €400,000 at current exchange rates) – and the collections will be miniaturized in Nickel NanoFiche, an analog format that can be read with a microscope. Content that cannot be stored this way, such as movies, will travel via digital cards.
The works of art that make up the Lunar Codex will be miniaturized in nickel NanoFiche. The quarter-size nickel NanoFiche (left) from Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series, launched into space on a Tesla roadster via SpaceX, is shown next to the gold NanoFiche (right), which is a support of file for Earth. Samuel Peralta
The content is mostly contemporary, with the oldest works dating back to the 1960s. The youngest contributor, Canadian Mazzy Sleep, is just 11 years old: “She has published poetry in some of the most prestigious literary magazines in North America,” said Peralta . “I asked her mother and I commissioned a poem about the moon from young Mazzy, who sent me four or five. The one I chose I thought was just fantastic.”
Ukrainian graphic artist Olesya Dzhurayeva, who fled Kiev after Russia invaded the country in 2022, is also part of Peralta’s project.
“She ran away with her two daughters to a village west of Kiev. Her desire to create art was strong, but without her studio, she had to improvise with what she had at hand,” Peralta said. “So he got wooden blocks, made ink with Ukrainian earth and used it to express his despair at the situation, in pieces like ‘The house whose light went out forever’; there are hundreds of stories like this in the Lunar Codex” .
The collection also includes what Peralta said was the first work by a disabled artist to be launched into space. The piece is by the American artist Connie Karleta Sales, who paints digitally using gaze technology, as she has very limited use of her limbs due to an autoimmune disease.
A new space race
One of the spacecraft that will house the Lunar Codex collection will also carry a similar project called the Ark of the Moon – a 20 cm high mini-museum about humanity, designed by Carnegie Mellon University to capture our vision of the Earth, the Moon and the space between the two. Another initiative, a work of art called Galeria da Lua, intended to lay the foundations for a permanent museum on the Moon, is made up of 100 artefacts, including sculptures, paintings and even organic matter such as seeds, contained in a plan of about 12, 7 centimeters in diameter. Developed by an international team of artists and managed from the Netherlands, Moon Gallery could be launched as early as 2025.
Initially, Peralta intended the Lunar Codex to only include his own works, such as “Sonnets of Labrador”, but has re-engineered the project as a global effort during the pandemic. Samuel Peralta
“Western male artists were the first to colonize the moon with their work,” said Daniela De Paulis, an artist who recently created a space transmission intended to simulate an extraterrestrial message. “Lunar Codex wants to expand this landscape to include female artists, artists from non-Western countries, as well as artists with disabilities, symbolically opening up the possibility of remotely incorporating the Moon through your work and becoming part of the narrative of space exploration and space exploration. new space race”.
Paulis, who is not involved with Lunar Codex, adds that while the project is the vision and work of a single individual, reflecting his personal interests in arts and culture, it is clear that its founder paid great attention to overall quality. of the works included.
“New generations of moon dwellers or space civilizations will be able to understand the symbolism of examples of art from our time and the complexity of the earthly human soul, as expressed through the specific art forms selected by the collector and project curators” Paulis said.
Jack Burns, professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, thinks the Lunar Codex is a pretty cool concept.
“As one of the scientific investigators on NASA’s first radio astronomy telescope, due to land at the Moon’s South Pole later this year, I am excited that arts and literature will become part of future lunar payloads,” he said.
“I remember the ‘Golden Record’ that flew on Voyagers 1 and 2 to the outer solar system and now to interstellar space. Motivated by Carl Sagan, the discs contained sounds and images of life on Earth. Likewise, the Lunar Codex is representative of the arts and culture of our world.”
Timothy Ferris, the writer and author who produced the Golden Record, said the Lunar Codex strikes him as odd, but its eccentricities may well mirror the changing status of space exploration, at a time when entering orbit and beyond is to become more accessible.
“In 1977, when I produced the Golden Record, we made an effort to make the 90 minutes of music representative of Planet Earth and not just our nation”, he said. “We had very little leeway to get into the ideas and sensibilities of individuals, except as they were reflected in the genius of the compositions of artists like Bach, Beethoven…and Chuck Berry.”
By working independently, Mr. Peralta can afford to be more subjective, Ferris said.
“Having bought the payload and having the advantage of modern miniaturization technologies, he is free to send anything he wants to the Moon. I hope we see more of this as humanity expands its dominion to Mars, to Earth. asteroid belt and the infinite frontiers offered by the clouds of comets that surround the Sun and other stars,” Ferris added via email. “One day, monuments to major state projects like Apollo on the Moon and Viking robots on Mars could be overtaken by millions of ‘Kilroy Was Here’ markers scattered from here to our interstellar borders.
“Time will tell,” said Ferris, “whether future historians will find the work of official committees or inspired individuals more valuable.”
2023-08-27 20:00:00
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