How the “Lunar Codex” aims to change the moon forever

“The Calm” by Rosario Pitanga Peralta (pictured) is one of more than 30,000 artworks included in the Lunar Codex, which physicist, artist and entrepreneur Samuel Peralta plans to send to the Moon.

The second manned lunar landing mission – Apollo 12 in 1969 – had a secret payload attached to one of the legs of the lunar lander.

It was a ceramic tile the size of a thumbnail, engraved with six artworks, one of which was by Andy Warhol. nickname “Moon MuseumHe was attached to one of the legs of the spacecraft and then left on the lunar surface.

It was the first time human art had landed on the moon, and two years later NASA sent a small statue – Fallen astronaut – On board the Apollo 15 spacecraft, which was left at the landing site by astronauts to honor those who lost their lives in lunar exploration.

Now, Samuel Peralta – a Canadian physicist, artist and entrepreneur – aims to exponentially 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. name of the thing Lunar manuscript, [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, this will be the beginning of the arts and culture of that colony,” Peralta said.

travel ticket

At first, Peralta just wanted to send his own work to the moon. “I’ve been a poet since I was a little kid,” he said. After a stint in the high-tech and energy industries, she also turned to speculative fiction.

Since 2015, he has published the anthology series Future Chronicles, which now spans 22 volumes featuring a mix of award-winning authors and newcomers.

He said, “The joy I felt when I realized I could put my work on the moon later transferred to people in my books.”

The pandemic inspired him to expand choice as a way to offer hope and help during these times.

“Artists couldn’t show their work in galleries, and musicians couldn’t go to concert halls. In the artistic community, there was a general sense of unease,” he said. “I started thinking about works that don’t involve me at all, that were given to me or that were referred to me. I talked to people I knew, galleries, collectors, other anthropologists, and from there it grew organically.”

In the meantime, it has booked a spot on three future missions to the moon, run by private launch providers SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance.

“These companies don’t just ship NASA stuff and have extra cargo space,” he explained. “They opened the door to other companies, foundations, scientific institutions, universities, and also to individuals. And 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 landers, made by private US companies, that will carry out a series of scientific experiments to collect data about the moon and its properties. The first session 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 groups that will make up the Lunar Codex, two have already been completed, but one is still open for proposals, given that the spacecraft in which it will be transported won’t be launched before November 2024. Currently, Peralta is working on 157 countries, but Its goal is to increase this number as much as possible.

“I really want this to be a global project,” he said.

It is believed that there are more than 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 as many as a dozen. That means there are more than 100,000 pieces. There is a lot of realistic art. We have photography, woodblock prints, lithographs, And oil, and acrylic. “Mosaics, sculpture – there is everything in all kinds of art. We have complete books, short stories, and poems. It’s huge.”

Peralta is self-financing the project – at a cost “less than a space tourist would pay”, which is about US$450,000 aboard a Virgin Galactic flight (just over €400,000 at current exchange rates) – and the collections will be minified in Nickel NanoFiche, an analogue format It can be read with a microscope. Content that cannot be stored in this way, such as movies, will travel through digital cards.

The content is mostly contemporary, with the earliest works dating back to the 1960s. The youngest contributor, Canadian Mazie Slip, is only 11 years old: “I have published poetry in some of the most prestigious literary magazines in North America,” Peralta said. . “I asked her mother and asked young Mazi to write a poem about the moon, and he sent me four or five. The one I chose was wonderful.”

Ukrainian graphic artist Olesya Dzorayeva, who fled Kiev after the Russian invasion of the country in 2022, is also part of the Peralta project.

“She fled with her two daughters to a village west of Kiev,” Peralta said. “Her desire to create art was strong, but without her own studio, she had to improvise with what she had on hand.” “So he got blocks of wood, made ink out of Ukrainian soil and used it to express his despair at the situation, in pieces like ‘The House whose Light Is Gone Forever’; there are hundreds of stories like this in Codex Lunar.”

The collection also includes what Peralta said was the first work by a disabled artist to be launched into space. The piece is by American artist Connie Carlita Seals, who paints digitally using the gaze technique, 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 Lunar Ark – a tiny 20cm museum about humanity, designed by Carnegie Mellon University to capture our view of the Earth, Moon and planets. The distance between the two. Another initiative, an artwork called Galleria da Lua, aims to lay the foundations for a permanent museum on the Moon, and it consists of 100 artifacts, including sculptures, paintings and even organic matter such as seeds, contained in a plan of about 12, 7 cm in diameter. Developed by an international team of artists and managed from the Netherlands, Moon Gallery could launch as early as 2025.

“Western artists were the first to colonize the moon with their work,” said Daniela De Paulis, an artist who recently created a space transmitter intended to simulate an extraterrestrial message. “Lunar Codex wants to expand this landscape to include women artists and artists from non-Western countries, as well as artists with disabilities, symbolically opening up the possibility of remotely integrating the Moon through your work and becoming part of the narrative of space exploration and the new space race.”

Paulis, who is not involved with Lunar Codex, adds that while the project is the vision and work of one individual, and reflects his personal interests in the arts and culture, it is clear that his founder paid great attention to the overall quality of the works. included.

“New generations of moon dwellers or space civilizations will be able to understand the symbolism of art examples from our time and the complexity of the terrestrial human spirit, as expressed through the specific art forms chosen by the collector and the project’s curators,” Paulis said.

Jack Burns, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, thinks the Lunar Codex is a pretty cool idea.

“As a research scientist on NASA’s first radio astronomy telescope, which is scheduled to land at the lunar 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 Voyagers 1 and 2 into the outer solar system and now into interstellar space. Prompted by Carl Sagan, the discs contained sounds and images of life on Earth. Likewise, the Lunar Codex represents the arts and culture of our world.”

Timothy Ferris, the writer and author who produced the Golden Record, said the Lunar Codex seemed strange to him, but that its strangeness may reflect the changing state of space exploration, as entry into orbit and beyond became more accessible.

“In 1977, when I produced the gold record, we made an effort to make 90 minutes of music represent planet Earth and not just our nation,” he said. “We did not have much room to enter into the thoughts and feelings of individuals, except for what was reflected in the genius of the compositions of artists such as Bach, Beethoven … and Chuck Berry.”

By working independently, Ferris said, Peralta is able to be more independent.

“After purchasing the payload and taking advantage of modern miniaturization technologies, he is free to send anything he wants to the Moon. I hope we will see more of this as humanity extends its dominance to Mars and Earth. The Asteroid Belt and the Infinite Frontier, provided by the comet clouds that Surrounding the sun and other stars.” “One day, the monuments of major country projects like Apollo on the Moon and Viking robots on Mars could be overtaken by the millions of ‘Kilroy was here’ signs strewn from here to our interstellar frontier.

“Time will tell whether future historians will find the work of formal commissions or inspired individuals more valuable,” said Ferris.