Before the age of space exploration, all artists could do was look up and gaze, sketch and write about a moon they could never reach. But Samuel Peralta, a semi-retired physicist living in Canada, has changed all that with the launch of the Lunar Codex, a project that sends art to the moon, converted into Nanofiche files (think microfiche but smaller) and left on the surface in time capsules.
“The whole thing started with the realisation that Nasa was going to privatise lunar landers,” he tells me on a video call. This enabled him to buy payload space – room on a rocket – for an artwork he created called Moonstone, which was etched on a metal disc.
Having whetted his appetite, Peralta found room on Nova-C, the Griffin Lander, and Nasa’s Orion orbital spacecraft. As the payload space increased, so, too, did the technology. The Nanofiche carries terabytes rather than megabytes of data, allowing 30,000 artists to be included in the project, with 158 countries represented (he has just secured an artwork from Somalia), encompassing magazines, books, podcasts, movies and music as well as visual art.
So why do it? Peralta says he started the project as a way of inspiring artists to keep going during Covid – that even though galleries on Earth were closed, the moon was always open. He says that the real point of the project is the effect it has on the artists involved. “That little spark will grow within them and the people they meet. That is the legacy.”
Canadian artist Heather Horton agrees, saying that she is “really touched” to be included in the project. She has contributed paintings of her late cat, Sasha, and says that, “Every time I look at the moon, for the rest of my life, it will be different.” Horton describes the project as “the longest-running art exhibition ever” and notes that it is the first time that women have made it to the moon.
For Ukrainian artist Olesya Dzhurayeva, the project offered “exactly what I needed” when her country was being invaded. Her donated paintings are “letters to the future where I tell them about my today. I am still alive, I can think, feel and dream. It is very, very exciting to realise that a part of me will live in a space outside our planet.”
“I think what we have done here is the most global, the most diverse, the most expansive project,” Peralta says of Lunar Codex. What started out as a way of sending his own artwork up to the moon has turned into something he hopes the whole world can celebrate, much like the 1969 lunar landing.
Peralta grew up in the Philippines. His mother is an abstract artist, while his father was “an anthropology professor by day, and a playwright by night”. While at university in Wales studying for a PhD in physics, Peralta won an award in a BBC poetry competition. Through that, he got to meet Wendy Cope, who “had very kind things to say about my poem, a love poem called Hush. Wendy said that the most beautiful three words that anyone could say to you were in that poem, and it wasn’t I love you – it was ‘I’ll cook tonight’!”
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Nonetheless, Peralta didn’t make writing his career. “My father said, don’t be a writer. Do something practical! I realised down the road that he was right – poetry can’t feed you. But I continued to write in my spare time.” Indeed, as well as being a scientist, Peralta has written 37 science-fiction novels. Has he any ambitions left to achieve? “I would love to write a hit K-pop song.”
Currently, there exists no agreed legal framework concerning the ownership of the moon. A United Nations “Moon Treaty”, drawn up in 1979, declared that it should be used to the benefit of all states. But the treaty itself has never been ratified, and this leaves the moon worryingly open to aspects of space “colonialism”. Peralta says that he hasn’t had any backlash towards the project apart from a few emails from people telling him to stop littering the moon, but “they don’t understand the project: the Nanofiche is very small!”
Indeed it’s not the physicality of the project that makes it so extraordinary. Rather, it is the beautiful metaphor. “I sometimes think of the Lunar Codex as performance art,” Peralta agrees with a smile. “This is the greatest performance art of my life!”
