What is Lunar Codex? Unique project sending digitised work of 30,000 artists to moon

A collection of various art made by humans might become immortal with the Lunar Codex programme, spearheaded by Samuel Peralta, a semi-retired physicist and art collector from Canada. The collection of varied digitised art will be sent to the moon as a lasting record of human creativity.

Lunar Codex is stored on memory cards or laser etched on NanoFiche, a 21st-century update on film-based microfiche. These will ensure that the art forms reach the lunar surface safely.

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Peralta described this initiative as a message to future generations to remind them that war, pandemics and economic crises did not stop people from creating works of art.

Art gallery on Moon’s South Pole

The collection of art is gathered from 30,000 artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians from 157 countries. The art forms include images, magazines, books, podcasts, movies and music, which are divided into four capsules.

The first such capsule is known as the Orion collection, which 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.

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The artworks will not be the first to be stranded on the moon. In 1969, when Apollo 12 mission was launched for the moon, the lunar module of the spacecraft carried a small ceramic tile bearing line drawing from Andy Warhol, the painter Robert Rauschenberg and the sculptors Forrest Myers and John Chamberlain.

Lunar Codex: Diverse collection of artworks

The Lunar Codex is a more diverse collection of varied artworks. It includes Ayana Ross’s New American Gothic, winner of the 2021 Bennett Prize for female artists; woodcuts and linocut 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.

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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.”

(With inputs from agencies)

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