Since time immemorial, the moon has been an object of fascination, a territory of fantasy.
Samuel Peralta, a scholar of Renaissance inspiration – a doctor in physics, poet, successful science fiction writer, editor, composer and lyricist, art collector, exhibition curator or award-winning film and television producer – confesses that traveling to the natural satellite of The Earth was one of his dreams.
“I realistically recognize that since I am old, I will never be able to be a space navigator. I do weight training, but my body will never be like that of astronauts,” he accepts during a Zoom conversation from his home in Toronto (Canada). “So this is the closest I will get to that goal,” he remarks.
That “this” has a name. Responsible for Lunar Codex, an extraterrestrial project in the literal sense. It consists of a huge digitized or miniaturized collection of contemporary art, poetry, music, films, magazines, podcasts and books that will be sent to the moon for permanent installation on the landers.
The magnitude of the plan is supported by the figures. It already has nearly 50,000 artists from at least 156 countries, according to the latest count. Add and continue.
Peralta compares it to those boxes with newspaper clippings that are placed when a building is built, for example at the beginning of the 20th century, which then, decades later, when demolished to build new ones, then appear as time capsules that explain what was happening. . “It’s kind of like, a message in the bottle for the future, to document the kind of things we did,” he says.
“The world is now going through catastrophes, be they gigantic fires, pandemics and viruses or wars and economic turmoil. Or artificial intelligence arrives and takes away our jobs,” he points out.
“But the human spirit still has the ability to create beautiful things, pieces of music, paintings, poems or novels and that is the message for future generations. Despite the problems we face, our spirit remains indestructible,” he emphasizes.
It is not the first time that the satellite has been used as a museum. On the Apollo 12 mission in 1969, tiny ceramic tiles were incorporated with line drawings by creators such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg, all discreetly attached to the leg of a lunar module. An aluminum sculpture, Fallen Astronaut, by Belgian Paul van Hoeydonck, was deposited by the crew of Apollo 15 in 1971.
Other contemporary artists, including Jeff Koons and Sacha Jafri, try to place solo works on the surface of the moon. The Arch Mission Foundation has launched Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy into orbit, among thousands of pages from the Lunar Library.
Unlike these cases, Codex is a project with a more ambitious narrative inspiration. “This is truly the largest global representation of our creation,” emphasizes Peralta. It also marks the first time that women artists, indigenous or with disabilities, are included.
It consists of four time capsules with material copied onto memory cards or nano files, with a nickel base and the size of a coin.
A Codex capsule already sailed last year on the Orion mission. The others are scheduled to be launched and land on the moon starting this November and until the end of 2024, through the commercial payload services offered by NASA.
When assigned firms manufacture the modules, the US space agency can sell extra space to carry things on board. Peralta covers practically all shipping costs. “My wife cries that I spend my retirement money,” he jokes. “Others give scholarships. Mine is a kind of legacy of all those artists on board. My work is also there, because it was the one I started with. It is a kind of immortality for my poetry,” she indicates.
His creation incorporates a wide diversity of recognized artists who do not necessarily have to be Picasso, Tolstoy or Beethoven. The starting point is contemporary creation, as long as it is not amateur.
“An artist aspires to be in the best galleries, but reaching the moon surpasses any expectation,” Irene Antich, a Costa Rican artist living in Barcelona, ??responds by phone. Her painting The Coat is part of this experience.
“In a romantic way, of course you dream of the moon and getting there!” she adds amused. And she explains that her works are very loaded with an existential part, with the mind and dreams.
“When I found out that one of my paintings would be sent to the moon I thought how cool!, but I admit that I didn’t understand it well, it sounded like science fiction,” comments by email Alessandro Tomassetti, a Canadian of Italian origin who, after going through the design and film industry in Los Angeles, also settled in the Catalan capital. In the collection is his canvas Pale Shelter. “When I learned about Peralta I understood how poetic and hopeful the project was, which is both for us and for any future civilization or explorer who discovers it,” he stated.
It all started with the pandemic, from Peralta’s magazines and books. He understood that this should be extended.
He began reaching out to others through Incandence, the media and technology company of which he is president and CEO. “I told them that I was going to put them over the moon, that they didn’t have to pay anything and many didn’t believe me, they thought it was a scam,” he laughs in the conversation.
“The project is about giving a little joy to myself and the artists. The moon is a good place to preserve our culture,” he insists. A Noah’s Ark, a manual for beings from other galaxies, for future civilizations. “Thanks to telescopes – he reflects from the present – ??it will be possible to look and see the exact point where an artistic work is. “It forever changes the way we look at the moon.”
