With the Lunar Codex program, sponsored by Samuel Peralta, a semi-retired scientist and art collector from Canada, a collection of varied human-created art may become immortal. The diverse collection of digitized art will be delivered to the moon as a permanent record of human inventiveness.
Lunar Codex is saved on memory cards or laser engraved on NanoFiche, a modern take on film-based microfiche. These will ensure that the art forms arrive safely on the lunar surface. Peralta portrayed this endeavor as a message to future generations, reminding them that war, pandemics, and economic downturns did not prevent people from creating art.
30,000 artists from 157 nations contributed to the collection
30,000 artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians from 157 nations contributed to the collection. Images, periodicals, books, podcasts, movies, and music are among the art mediums split into four capsules.
The first of these capsules, known as the Orion collection, has already orbited the moon after being launched on the Orion spacecraft as part of NASA’s Artemis 1 mission last year. A series of lunar landers will transport the Lunar Codex capsules to various places in craters near the moon’s South Pole and a lunar plain called Sinus Viscositatis in the following months.
The artworks aren’t the first to become stranded on the moon. When the Apollo 12 mission was launched for the moon in 1969, the lunar module carried a small ceramic tile with line drawings by Andy Warhol, painter Robert Rauschenberg, and sculptors Forrest Myers and John Chamberlain.
Lunar Codex: An eclectic collection of artworks
The Lunar Codex contains a more broad assortment of artworks. It includes Ayana Ross’s New American Gothic, which won the Bennett Prize for female artists in 2021; woodcuts and linocuts by Oleysa Dzhurayeva, a printmaker who fled Kyiv shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine; and paintings by Connie Karleta Sales, an artist, and poet who suffers from neuromyelitis optica, an autoimmune disease that attacks the spinal cord and optic nerves.
Peralta writes on the project’s website: “Our hope is that future travelers 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.”