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.
