The Lunar Codex Will Archive the Work of 30,000 Artists—on the Moon

August 26, 2023 11:44 PM

The Lunar Codex Will Archive the Work of 30,000 Artists—on the Moon. A series of time capsules will honor and preserve contemporary art from around the globe. Among the works selected for the Lunar Codex are Ayana Ross’ painting New American Gothic, Pauline Aubey’s Lego portrait Emerald Girl and The Polaris Trilogy: Poems for the Moon, a commissioned poetry anthology with works from every continent, including Antarctica, per the Times. It also features pieces by the Ukrainian printmaker Olesya Dzhurayeva, who had to flee Kyiv last year in the wake of the Russian invasion, and Connie Karleta Sales, an artist with the autoimmune disease neuromyelitis optica who creates paintings using eye-gaze technology.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (17 comments total)

Let's archive our art on the Moon!
A poem, a painting, a tune—
Keep it all way up there.
The new space race: prepare
30,000 new artworks by June.
posted by rory at 3:54 AM on August 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

I wouldn’t have thought that there even were that many artists on the moon!
posted by notoriety public at 6:08 AM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

“This is the largest, most global project to launch cultural works into space,” Peralta says to the Times. “There isn’t anything like this anywhere.”

Haha I’ve also been told that my artworks should be launched into space.
posted by notyou at 8:04 AM on August 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

Fallen Astronaut by Paul Von Hoeydonck is a small sculpture that was placed on the moon in 1971...

(a time capsule stored in a digital format seems like the the essence of obsolescence)
posted by ovvl at 8:24 AM on August 27, 2023 [8 favorites]

Yeah, the true archive would actually send physical paintings and books and stuff to the moon. We're already losing our digital past due to obsolescence and bit rot and that's all material just created within my lifetime. Things from before then, they still exist because they aren't digital.
posted by hippybear at 8:35 AM on August 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's not easy to piece it together from what's on the project's sprawling website, in which the timecapsule page splits things out by mission/launch, with some payloads using analog microfiche-like technology ("nanofiche," which seems to be inscribed nickel plates) and others using digital memory cards, but the FAQ page does make it sound like it might just be audio/video going on the memory cards, with images and writing kept on the nanofiche. (Search on the FAQ page for "I understand how you can archive[...]" -- which also mentions some audio being etched into nanofiche as either waveforms, sheet music, or midi hexcodes.)

(That said, the FAQ also makes clear that this is an extremely idiosyncratic project, more or less run by just one person who started out with the idea of sending his own artwork to the moon, and that it's grown in a sort of ad hoc fashion from there, so I wouldn't be surprised if at some point -- seduced by the sheer information density -- writing/images started being placed on the memory cards, too.)
posted by nobody at 9:04 AM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

If Art Paul Schlosser ain't on there we have failed as a society.
posted by symbioid at 9:23 AM on August 27, 2023

I like the idea of any first human habitation on the moon growing around a vast virtual art museum.
posted by supermedusa at 9:49 AM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Does anyone else see this as a complete waste of time and money?
posted by doctor_negative at 10:26 AM on August 27, 2023 [8 favorites]

oh, i’m sure someone out there does.

for my part it seems like a waste of time only insofar as all human activity is a waste of time. i guess money serves as a proxy for time + materials, and by that standard it is likewise a waste of money to exactly the same extent as all human activity is a waste and money.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:02 AM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

"This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans."

- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiler's Guide To The Galaxy
posted by hippybear at 11:07 AM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Does anyone else see this as a complete waste of time and money?

Yes, but then, I also think the entirety of the Artemis project itself is a complete waste of time and money. I remain unconvinced there's a single thing a human can do up there that chucking a few drones up wouldn't do at least as well. Spend the extra billions you need to keep humans alive in space to keep a few of them alive down here.
posted by Room 101 at 1:22 PM on August 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

I grew up with the NASA space program. It was exciting and inspiring. But now that I’m grown up any sort of personed missions seem pointless. Including the so-called privately funded things like the muskrat’s whole Mars thing, which just appears to be an egotistical exercise. Sending digitized art works to the moon seems utterly ludicrous. Yes, my name is inscribed on a silicon chip in one of the Mars rovers, but I doubt that anyone or anything will ever see it since it’s microscopic. And those golden records on the Voyager? We will never know if they will be heard. It’s all concept art…
posted by njohnson23 at 3:53 PM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I grew up with the NASA space program. It was exciting and inspiring.

I still have in some box someplace Seventies pop-up books about the space program, including one with a space shuttle that pops wings out when the page is full folded out and another with a Space Lab mounted on a wire that pops out when that page is opened.

The place I grew up in was full of Space Age Optimism about everything, well into the Seventies and Eighties, because many of the fathers of my classmates were working at White Sands Missile Range, which was a giant developmental lab for all of the US hopes and dreams of military might [and maybe other superiority] during those years. It was the Other Lab at the south end of New Mexico, while Los Alamos was at the north end of the state. White Sands had a lot of desert to work with, so Trinity Site is part of White Sands Missile Range.

There's also a White Sands National Park, which if you're ever in the area is worth at least a half-day if not a full day to explore. Square mile after square mile of pure white gypsum sand. There was a Boys II Men video filmed there at one point. Also The Polyphonic Spree.

Anyway, it's an amazing plot of New Mexico to visit, even if Trinity Site is only open on Solar holidays for visitors. You can camp overnight at the National Park, very primitive camps, but amazing under a full moon with all that light bouncing off the sands. Put a glow stick on a tall pole on top of a dune near your camp and walk as far as you want away in the middle of the night and always find your way back.

I shall shut up now.
posted by hippybear at 8:00 PM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I understand that everything sent aboard the Saturn V was worth its weight in gold, because of the low payload-to-vehicle ratio. I imagine everything sent aboard the SLS is worth its weight in ... what's worth $20K-$50K per kilogram? Rhodium?

I do encourage more golden records sent beyond our heliosphere. The aliens need to hear our new 5.1 mixes, although sending Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots might be a little risky should the aliens turn out to be pink robots.
posted by credulous at 8:20 PM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

We are drowning in stuff on Earth, so now we send stuff ^{ok, it's small, but still} to the Moon?
posted by gakiko at 4:58 AM on August 28, 2023

(a time capsule stored in a digital format seems like the the essence of obsolescence)

...

Yeah, the true archive would actually send physical paintings and books and stuff to the moon. We're already losing our digital past due to obsolescence and bit rot and that's all material just created within my lifetime. Things from before then, they still exist because they aren't digital.

The linked project thankfully does not store the works with a digital encoding, though (like a digital photocopier) there is some digital quantization and dithering involved. Instead, it visually reproduces the works by engraving miniaturized copies of them onto nickel plates. Like a newspaper archived as microfiche, the end result can be read with something like a microscope, but unlike microfiche, the medium will last essentially forever. It seems at least as good as sending the physical works into space.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 6:21 AM on August 28, 2023 [1 favorite]