The Artist's Road Painting the World's Beautiful Places

A Marvelous Night for a Moondance

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Launch from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, January 15, 2025 (courtesy NASA)

    At last, the Lunar Codex collection of stills and art from the Colour in Your Life videos has launched! The full films will launch November 4th. The massive Lunar Codex project was founded by Samuel Peralta and has expanded to include 250,000 cultural artifacts from over 40,000 artists from around the world. The Codex is being carried over the course of seven space missions to the moon. It includes representation of works by artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers from 259 countries and 148 indigenous nations, preserved in several media including etched metal, ceramic-glass memory, quartz nano chips, semiconductor memory and/or chromatin-based microfiche.  

   The New York Times describes it as “A time capsule of human creativity, stored in the sky.”

   Artists were curated for inclusion by professional curators and gallerists. Peralta writes:  “This is a key difference from other current lunar projects, scientific or cultural. It is liberating: since the Lunar Codex does not receive payment, we're free to select works that fit our vision of the project. Creators know that their works are selected for their significance to the cultural vision, and not because of any payment.”

   "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 create art, found time to dream."
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   There have been previous artworks sent to the moon. The first was a very small ceramic disk etched by Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain, Forrest Myers and Andy Warhol. It was smuggled to the Moon on a lander leg on the Apollo 12 mission in 1969.

   In 1971, a 3.5” aluminum statue by Paul Van Hoeydonck went to the moon on the Apollo 15 mission. Titled “Fallen Astronaut”, it was created to commemorate astronauts who had died in space exploration.

   “The Lunar Codex is the first project to put the works of women artists on the Moon. It represents the first figurative realist art on the lunar surface, and is the first project to place music and film on the Moon. It is the first to represent the work of Indigenous peoples. Finally, it is the most expansive and diverse collections of contemporary arts and culture launched to the Moon or to space.” From the Lunar Codex website.

  See the Colour in Your Life segment featuring John Hulsey’s work that is included in the Lunar Codex here.