A portrait assembled from Lego bricks, woodcuts printed in Ukrainian soil and a collection of poetry from every continent are among thousands of works to be archived on the moon as a lasting record of human creativity.
The collection, known as the Lunar Codex, is being digitised and stored on memory cards or laser-etched on NanoFiche – a 21st-century update on film-based microfiche – in preparation for the missions that will ferry the material to the lunar surface.
Samuel Peralta, a semi-retired physicist and art collector from Canada who is leading the effort, describes the off-world archive as a message in a bottle to future generations to remind them that war, pandemics and economic crises did not stop people creating works of beauty.
Gathered from 30,000 artists, writers, film-makers and musicians from 157 countries, the images, objects, magazines, books, podcasts, movies and music are being divided into four capsules.
The first, known as the Orion collection, has already flown around the moon when it launched on the Orion spacecraft as part of Nasa’s Artemis 1 mission last year. In the coming months, a series of lunar landers will take the Lunar Codex capsules to various destinations in craters at the moon’s south pole and a lunar plain called Sinus Viscositatis.
The artworks will not be the first to be stranded on the moon. The lunar module for the Apollo 12 mission in 1969 carried a small ceramic tile bearing line drawings from Andy Warhol, the painter Robert Rauschenberg and the sculptors Forrest Myers and John Chamberlain. Two years later, the Apollo 15 crew left Fallen Astronaut, a 9cm-tall aluminium sculpture by the Belgian artist Paul van Hoeydonck, on the surface.
The Lunar Codex collection is markedly more diverse. Included in the archive are Ayana Ross’s New American Gothic, winner of the 2021 Bennett Prize for female artists; woodcuts and linocuts by Oleysa Dzhurayeva, a printmaker who left Kyiv soon after Russia invaded Ukraine; and paintings by Connie Karleta Sales, an artist and poet who lives with neuromyelitis optica, an autoimmune disease that attacks the spinal cord and optic nerves.
Chris Riley, the producer of the Sundance-winning documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, notes that the Apollo 11 crew left a silicon disc of etched messages from world leaders on the moon. “Here we are almost 60 years later, and many nations and companies are now heading for the moon, carrying with them much of what makes us human,” he said. “The Lunar Codex project epitomises this, by taking the work of 30,000 of us to lodge on the lunar surface.”
Ian Crawford, a professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck, University of London, is positive about the codex too, adding that “anything that gets people thinking in a cosmic context is great”. But he said such projects should not disturb the scientifically most valuable places on the moon, such as permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles.
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Chris Lintott, a professor of astrophysics at Oxford University and co-presenter of the BBC’s The Sky at Night, wonders what alien civilisations might make of our art, and what we might make of theirs. “In thinking about Seti [the search for extraterrestrial intelligence], we have talked about detecting alien art; would a sufficiently advanced civilisation, for example, find it pleasing to have stars on other sides of the galaxy blink in unison? If so, could we spot it? Would we recognise it as art? Maybe it’s as difficult to imagine some alien traveller finding these archives and recognising them for what they are.”
Peralta writes on the project’s website: “Our hope is that future travellers who find these time capsules will discover some of the richness of our world today … It speaks to the idea that, despite wars and pandemics and climate upheaval, humankind found time to dream, time to create art.”
