We dreamed of going to the Moon and one day it was possible. The Lunar Codex is the collection of art, writing, music, and film in our time capsules. ​​

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Q. What's your relationship with NASA, SpaceX or... ?

A. NASA utilizes commercial lunar landers to carry payloads to the Moon, manufactured by partners - Astrobotic Technology, Intuitive Machines, Firefly Aerospace - under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) and Artemis programs.
         SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance (ULA) provide launch services to NASA directly or through the CLPS and Artemis programs. The Lunar Codex does not have any formal relationships with these launch service providers.
         Through Incandence, the Lunar Codex purchases payload space not utilized by NASA, either directly from NASA partners such as Astrobotic or MoonBox, or indirectly, through third parties who already have payload allocations. The latter category includes NanoFiche (Stamper Technology), LifeShip, Future Grind, Writers on the Moon, Galactic Legacy Labs (GLL), LunARC, and the Interstellar Foundation (ISF).

         We are on the advisory boards of ISF and the LunARC nonprofits. We participate in the Open Lunar Foundation, and are also supporting partners of the International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA).

        The Lunar Codex is not a formal partner of GLL or a part of GLL's Lunaprise artists program; Incandence independently purchased and supplied content for 674 Lunagram payload units from GLL, which are onboard the Odysseus lander.

         The Lunar Codex has key partnership agreements with NanoFiche, LifeShip, and with other organizations in our C&C section, through whom payload space was sourced on specific spacecraft, including Odysseus. 

          We've collaborated with NASA on specific artifacts for various time capsules, but we are primarily rideshare partners. They are the main passengers onboard the landers, and we have a seat next to them.

Q. What were the collaborations with NASA? 

     "Mars: An Artistic Mission", was an exhibit hosted by the California Art Club (CAC) to commemorate the landing of NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars on February 18, 2021, with the exhibition concept  provided by John Callas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), patron member of the CAC. The Lunar Codex archived the entirety of this exhibition in its Nova and Polaris time capsules.

       NASA creative director Erica Bernhard's 'letters to space' inspired Jon Hopkins and Ólafur Arnalds to craft a musical piece, "Forever Held," part of the Coldplay album 'Moon Music' and exhibits at NASA JPL and Johnson Space Center. The video, musical piece, and ancillary artifacts are archived in the Lunar Codex Polaris time capsule.
       In addition, NASA personnel have contributed works on a personal basis to the Lunar Codex. These include Terry R. Hill, NASA's Digital Engineering Program Manager for the Office of Chief Engineer, and Erica Bernhard, above. These contributions are in the Serenity, Minerva, and Polaris archives.

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Q. How does this project make money? 

It doesn't. We collect no fees from artists, and we sell no associated merchandise. The Lunar Codex is a passion project, meant to spotlight artists and their work.

Q. NFTs? 

No. See detailed answer below, but no.
 

Q. Can you verify if an artist is part of the project?

       The Lunar Codex website names each creative artist, or references a book, anthology, magazine issue, catalog, or similar as part of the project. If an artist cannot reference any of the above on the website, they aren't verifiably onboard.

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Q. Why are you doing The Lunar Codex?

The Lunar Codex is a passion project. It started as a project to spread hope during a dark time - the lockdown, the years of pandemic, a time of economic upheaval, war, the realization that climate change was upon us.

          It attempts to instill the Moon with some of the heart of humanity, our art, so that when we look at the sky, the Moon might become a tangible symbol of hope and of inspiration. 

          The Codex is also a message-in-a-bottle to the future, so that travelers who find these time capsules might  discover some of the richness of our world today. It speaks to the idea that, despite wars and pandemics and environmental upheaval, humankind found time to dream, time to create art.

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Q. How did the The Lunar Codex come about?

A. In late 2019, I was asked to curate an exhibit at the 33 Contemporary Gallery in Chicago, scheduled to run through early 2020. No one could have foreseen that the exhibit, Shelter, would change to an online-only event when the COVID pandemic hit and the world would go on lockdown. 
          About a year earlier I'd learned about NASA's CLPS program through research for Aircari, a logistics start-up I mentored. Around April to May 2020 I re-visited CLPS and found that it had progressed to the point that some CLPS companies were now making space available in their lunar landers for non-NASA payloads.

          After more research, in July 2020, I purchased a DHL MoonBox via Astrobotic, planning to place Moonstone, a piece etched, to last in perpetuity, on a silver metal disc.

          The joy this payload gave me, even before launch, swirled in my mind. Could I share that joy with other artists? The artists of Shelter? I began to search for space on Peregrine to include them, and artists from the circles I was in.

          Several months later, I joined a project assembling a library for the Peregrine mission. As an author and series editor of the  Future Chronicles anthologies, I shared my space with the authors, artists, and editors in my series, validating the joy.

          Inspired, I secured more space on Peregrine via Future Grind, then on other missions, including purchasing hundreds of Lunagrams via GLL slated for  the Odysseus mission, space via LifeShip on Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander, RGB NanoFiche archives on the Odysseus, NanoFiche, AstrGLPH, and MoonBox resources on Astrobotic's Griffin lander, and on NASA's Orion spacecraft.

          I sought out collaborations with major art publications and major anthologies, and eventually governmental agencies. I commissioned poetry collections and art competitions, intending to add these to our burgeoning collection.

          With these cultural collaborations, more payload space, and better technology - NanoFiche instead of silver discs, TB of digital memory instead of MB, nickel-shielding, ceramic-matrix, quartz nanochips, and synthetic DNA technology - I brought my manifests to over 5,000, then 10,000 and now over 50,000 creative artists.

Q. Is there really work from an A.I. onboard?

A. We have a collaborative poetry collection between myself and OSUN, an A.I. based on an OpenAI GPT-2 model programmed by my friend Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, from Sri Lanka. It was included in our Peregrine mission payload in October 2020, well before the explosion in large language model based tools such as GPT-3/4 beginning in 2023.
       Despite the new A.I. tools, we value tightly controlling the training database of OSUN. We did not allow OSUN to scrape the Internet. With this caveat - looking at how the A.I. was created and used, we included a handful of A.I.-aided works from the U.S. and one A.I.-aided short story from India. To the best of our knowledge no other substantive A.I. work is included.

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Q. Can you verify files from the Lunar Codex are on Peregrine? On Odysseus? On other landers?
For Peregrine and Griffin spacecraft, we have certificates from Astrobotic Technology, makers of the landers, affirming our payload is onboard. Astrobotic welcomed us to guest blog for them about our participation in the MoonBox program.
          For the Blue Ghost and Vestri spacecraft, we are partnered with LifeShip, themselves direct partners with Firefly Aerospace and AstroForge, respectively. Our LifeShip contracts document that the Lunar Codex files are included in the LifeShip payloads.

          For Odysseus, we don't have a direct partnership with the lander company or any of its payload partners. Despite this, our content is on the Odysseus disc stack. To illustrate, our website's Time Capsules section shows a micrograph of images from the Lunaprise stack.
          That stack has 15 data layers. GLL and its partners occupy layers 1-13, as arranged by Stamper Technology  dba NanoFiche. Incandence purchased hundreds of GLL's Lunagram product, and provided content. Thus, though not a partner, we are a client of GLL, who have  confirmed these Lunagrams are onboard its data layers.

          In parallel, layers 14-15 are reserved by Stamper. They collaborate with us on a total of 4 time capsules; in the course of work, we supported development of a new audio encoding and a new full-color NanoFiche process. The cooperation culminated in an archive of Lunar Codex-curated audio and RGB-encoded files on data layer 14 of the Odysseus disc stack. 

          Additionally, we acquired the naming rights to one of the imaging cameras of the International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA), affixed to the Odysseus as part of their ILO-X mission. The ILO-X wide field-of-view (WFoV) camera is the primary device that obtained images in transit to the Moon and on landing. This ILO-X WFoV camera has been named 'Lunar Codex'
 

Q. Why is there a lot of your own writing, music, film, and art in The Lunar Codex?

A. That's how this all started, with sending my own creative work to the Moon. It grew from there.

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Q. Do artists pay to be included in the Lunar Codex?
A. No. We accept no payment, in any form. Artists, authors, musicians, filmmakers, and the copyright owners of the catalogues, collections, anthologies included are only asked permission for inclusion.
        We bear the cost of the entire project. That includes background research, search and identification of artists  and works, curation, raw digital or analog archival materials, the process of conversion of works into archival format, documentation and website maintenance, back-up, payload space on the lunar landers, and our incremental share of launch costs. 

       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.

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Q. Who owns the Lunar Codex?

A. The Lunar Codex is a project of Incandence - a Canadian corporation with projects in technology, business, and media. In the case of the Lunar Codex, Incandence owns specific physical time capsules and archival and back-up media, specific technologies for audio and color image archival processes on metal-based media, specific technologies for radiation and environmental stability, related trademarks, and this website. 
       Individual works in the Codex have been archived with permission from their respective creators, publishers, or owners, whether individually or as represented in a collection - such as an anthology, or exhibit or collector's catalogue.            Copyright of individual creative works in the Codex remain with their respective creators, publishers, or owners.

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Q. Does the Lunar Codex select NFTs for its archive?

No. We include digitally-created or augmented art, but non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are more akin to traceability certificates, not art. This perspective is based on a decade of personal experience in distributed ledgers, including co-founding and serving on the boards of companies using blockchain for provenance applications. 
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Q. Does the Lunar Codex sell NFTs?

No. Artists own their work, and the  Lunar Codex does not and will not sell NFTs based on works it has no rights to.  
       To be clear: The Lunar Codex does not and will not deal in NFTs, crypto-, or blockchain-related works, nor does it have any business associations with any entities involved in such ventures, despite any claim to the contrary.

Q. What happens when you're gone?

A. The time capsules of the Lunar Codex will remain on the Moon in perpetuity.
        Under the Artemis Accords, the landers mark Heritage Sites, and all payloads are part of the designated heritage of humanity, to be preserved for posterity.
       The Lunar Codex website, which documents the contents of the time capsules here on Earth, is itself intended to be archived on nickel or gold-based nanofiche, M-Disc, or similar archival media. It is already archived, in part, on the Moon.

       This and any other related artifacts are intended initially for one or more exhibits, and eventually for one or more institutions dedicated to its preservation. The Serenity and Freya collections, specifically, have been included by a partner in such a project.

       We are in discussions with several institutions for specific collections from the Lunar Codex. Several of these are in Canada, which I find fantastic because that's where I am, but it's not a prerequisite. If you represent such an institution with interest in hosting the Lunar Codex, or sections of it, please drop me a line.
 

Q. Is The Lunar Codex open for submission?

A. Not directly, no. The Codex reflects the selections from trusted curators, editors, and publishers that I know personally, as well as my own selections. I'd include more, but behind the scenes there's just one person here - I don't have the time or resources.

        To provide submission opportunities, we  partnered on open calls with Brick Street Poetry in The Polaris Trilogy global call for poetry, with Era Contemporary for their Legends of the Moon open call for art, with the Art Renewal Center (ARC) for their 15th, 16th and 17th International ARC Salon call for art, and with the India Science Festival in their Spin Your Science 2023-2024 short story competition.

          Moreover, we sponsored two other poetry submission opportunities, in coordination with Vagabond Press, the Vagabond Lunar Collection, and in coordination with the South Florida Writers Association, the Sea of Tranquility anthology. Finally, in coordination with the Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC), and the Estate of Norval Morrisseau, the Lunar Codex sponsored an Open Call for Indigenous Music in 2024. 

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Q. Why have I read about different galleries and collections in The Lunar Codex?

A. The Lunar Codex is the umbrella for everything. But the Codex evolved organically, so you will see references which correspond to various stages in its evolution:

  ▪  "Three Faces of the Moon" is work carried on a NASA flash drive via the Orion spacecraft on the Artemis 1 mssion. Orion will not land on the Moon, but orbit it. "Three Faces of the Moon" will be archived on the Moon in the Polaris time capsule.   ▪  "Moonstone" is work in a MoonBox purchased for Peregrine Mission 1. 
  ▪  "Manifest 9" includes works I curated as part of a second MoonBox onboard Peregrine, for which I paid a fee for allotted space plus extra costs.
  ▪  "The Peregrine Collection" consists of works in three MoonBoxes: Moonstone, Manifest 9, and the works of several hundreds of artists and authors on a third MoonBox, containing payload space I purchased via FutureGrind, where I backed-up the works in Manifest 9. Codex Peregrine encompasses all of the works I have onboard the Peregrine lander.
  ▪  "The Nova Collection" refers to a separate group of primarily artworks and poetry in a nickel-based Nanofiche time capsule with purchased secondary payload space via GLL's commercial monochrome Lunagram product and purchased primary payload space utilizing polychromatic technology on Stamper's proprietary Nanofiche layer, all onboard Intuitive Machines' IM-1 'Odysseus' lander. Also onboard is the ILOA 'Lunar Codex' camera. Nova carries a partial back-up of Peregrine.
  ▪  "The Serenity Collection" refers to a separate group of art, poetry, music, and screenplays in a time capsule including Nanofiche, a ceramic-matrix and a semiconductor archive, with purchased secondary payload space via LifeShip, associated with NASA CLPS-TO-19D Mission 1, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 mission. Serenity carries a full back-up of Freya, and a partial back-up of Peregrine and Polaris.

  ▪  "The Minerva Collection" refers to a separate group of art, poetry, music, and film in, with secondary payload space via the Interstellar Foundation in tandem with LoneStar's premium lunar data storage infrastructure, associated with NASA CLPS-TO-PRIME-1 and Intuitive Machines' IM-2 'Athena' lander. Minerva carries a partial back-up of Peregrine and Polaris.

  ▪  "The Polaris Collection" is a third group of creative works in two MoonBox time capsules and a large set of analog files onboard a multi-layer NanoFiche disc stack associated with Astrobotic's Griffin mission. Polaris carries new art, books, music, film, as well as a back-up of all previous missions - Orion, Peregrine, Nova, Serenity, Minerva, and Freya.

  ▪  "The Freya Collection" refers to a separate group of art, poetry, music, and screenplays in a time capsule including a Nanofiche, and a ceramic-matrix archive, with purchased secondary payload space via LifeShip, associated with NASA CLPS-TO-CP11 for its first stage, and the AstroForge 'Vestri' spacecraft for its second stage. 

  ▪  "The Akasha Collection" refers to a separate collection of works in a mission to be announced.
 

Q. Will we be able to watch the launches and landings?

A. All NASA-related missions will be streamed by NASA, the launch provider (SpaceX or ULA) and the CLPS partner involved.
 

Q. Aren't you contributing to space junk?

A. This isn't about old satellites that don't work anymore. This is a time capsule project, meant for future generations to discover a bit about our time on Earth. It has historical and cultural value, like an unearthed time capsule from a pre-1945 world. 

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Q. Won't the time capsules float away into space?

A. The Moon has gravity, just 1/6th that of Earth. A 120-lb weight on Earth would weigh 20-lbs on the Moon. 

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Q. Will aliens be able to read the files? 

A. The time capsules are meant for future human travelers to the Moon. But human or alien, whoever finds them will likely be smart enough to figure them out, just as we can still decipher Babylonian even when the writing has been eroded down to the tablet surface: "Restoration of Fragmentary Babylonian Texts Using Recurrent Neural Networks." 

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Q. I understand how you can archive art and books using laser-etching on nickel, but how can music and film be archived that way? 

A. Film is still prohibitively expensive to etch frame-by-frame on nickel, so digital archiving is still more appropriate; alternatively, we laser-etch scripts or screenplays. For our Polaris collection, we pioneered etching encoded film on NanoFiche via the open-source PaperBak algorithm, or etching selected stills synchronized with a film transcript.
          For music, again we primarily use digital archiving. For some cases, we use laser-etched sheet music, hex-encoded MIDI files, or PaperBack files, on NanoFiche.
          Another Lunar Codex innovation for music is to archive the waveform and frequency spectrogram by etching on NanoFiche; the original music may be  reconstructed via sound wave analysis algorithms as used in paleokymophony or paleospectrophony: "How to Play Back the Picture of a Sound Wave." 

Q. Why don't you list or show every artwork, story or poem represented in the Lunar Codex, only the creator names or book/magazine covers? 

A. It's only one human working here (and one human providing life support). With thousands of artists, and several pieces by each, this is a huge task! Eventually we will link back to the original publication so you can see what individual works are included. For now, it suffices to list the creators and/or the original source. There are a few Galleries showcasing selected pieces.

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Q. What happens if the launch is cancelled? 

A. NASA has provided about $100M or more in contracts to each CLPS partner for each mission. Each mission is critical for the Artemis program and the goal of establishing a base on the Moon. If at all humanly possible, a launch will not be cancelled, only delayed. 

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Q. What happens if your partners don't get the time capsule on the lander in time for the launch? 

A. Once I send my files to my partners, and they confirm receipt, I have no control over what happens next. Deadlines are tight in the space industry, and if they miss onboarding, there's nothing I can do about it. But I will try to put those missed files on my next mission, if there is one, with new partners.

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Q. What happens if the lander crashes on the Moon or doesn't reach the Moon, or if the rocket explodes? 

A. Alas, success in the space industry is not easy. If anything like this happens, I may be out my entire investment in this project. But all is not lost - the works on the time capsule become stardust. 

Q. Does the Codex represent the first art on the Moon?
A. "The Moon Museum" (Apollo 12, 1969) was a tiny ceramic wafer etched by Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain, Forrest Myers and Andy Warhol, smuggled to the Moon on a lander leg. 

          "Fallen Astronaut" (Apollo 15, 1971) was a 3.5" aluminum statue of by Paul Van Hoeydonck, made to honor those who had died in space exploration.
          With books, SpaceIL's Beresheet lander (2019) crashed on the Moon with Arch Mission Foundation's "Lunar Library" on board, assumed intact. It included texts on human history, and public domain Project Gutenberg books.

          There are also other cultural projects contemporaneous to the Artemis program and the Lunar Codex project reaching for the Moon.
          The Lunar Codex's contribution is its focus on contemporary art, books, music, and film; its being fully-curated with no fee requirements of artists or institutions; and its truly global representation of creative artists from every country in the world.

           It 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. In summary, the Lunar Codex it is the most expansive and diverse collections of contemporary arts and culture launched to the Moon or to space.
 

Q. I'm a creative artist listed in the Lunar Codex - how can I identify as being part of this project?

A. Say so, in a way that makes it verifiable: "My etching 'La Figlia Che Piange' is listed in Gallery B of the Lunar Codex." Or: "I'm in the anthology 'Chiaroscuro' listed in the Poetry section of the Lunar Codex." Link to the page when you can.

          Creatives listed in the Lunar Codex may use the Archived on the Moon Seal, previously available, or the To the Moon and Beyond Seal, available below, on websites, book covers, appropriate art certificates of authenticity, as part of a digital resume, with a link to this website  but not on any item for sale based primarily on the seal, such as for example mugs, T-shirts, avatars, stickers, and so on) or any type of other marketing material. It may appear when affixed to a book cover, or as a seal attached to an author photograph.

          Click the image, then 'Go to link' for hi-res version.