(Photo credit: Microphotograph of nickel NanoFiche, Lunar Codex)
A partnership between Lunar Codex, The Estate of Norval Morrisseau, and Crown Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs is sending Indigenous music to the moon.
Founder of Lunar Codex, Samuel Peralta is an artist himself as well as a physicist. He was asked to curate an art exhibit in 2019 that was set to be showcased in Chicago the following year. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone into lockdown mode in 2020, the exhibit was moved to an online format.
Many of the artists showcased in the exhibit were disappointed that their art wasn’t able to be viewed in Chicago. That’s when Peralta had to think outside the box, but he didn’t just think outside of the box; he thought outside of the earth.
“I said, ‘Well, if we don’t have an exhibit in Chicago because the exhibition halls are closed, why don’t we have it on the moon?’” said Peralta while speaking with MBC Radio News.
Peralta found out that the private sector could purchase payload space from NASA, and that’s when he started working on his first mission. Since then, Lunar Codex has completed seven missions.
Pieces of art are loaded onto a nickel disc called a NanoFiche; the technology can hold up to 1000 pages of text or art on a single disc and, according to Peralta, can survive over one billion years.
(Photo credit: Lunar Codex)
“On one of the interviews I had, someone said, ‘Well, you’ve got a lot of artists now; if you could have any artist in the world, who would you want on board?’ and I immediately said Indigenous artists because I’ve got representation from a lot of countries, a lot of territories, but we need the perspective of the Indigenous voice,” he explained.
Not long after Peralta had that interview, he received an email from Cory Dingle, the CEO of The Norval Morrisseau Estate. In his email, Dingle hinted that the work of Morrisseau, a renowned First Nations artist, should be sent to the moon, and Peralta agreed.
“When we started working with Sam, we realized the enormity of the project and the effort that he was doing. For a private citizen to be doing something of this magnitude, we just felt that we could chip in and support and help him through our network,” explained Dingle.
The Norval Morrisseau Estate and Lunar Codex started working together to raise awareness about the missions and to get more Indigenous artists to the moon. Since then, Lunar Codex capsules have represented 341 countries and nations across the world, and within that, 159 Indigenous nations are included in their missions.
Prior to the partnership, Lunar Codex represented 69 Indigenous nations.
“Norval’s original vision that he had when he was a young man was to preserve his culture and to share the teachings of his culture; he felt that there were extremely valuable lessons in the Indigenous culture that would help guide all peoples on this planet to a more harmonious state of nature with mother earth,” said Dingle.
(Photo credit: The Estate of Norval Morrisseau)
The next mission that Lunar Codex and the Norval Morrisseau Estate are working on is called the Lunar Codex Indigenous Music Collection and will be included in Polaris.
Soundwaves from around 200 songs by Indigenous artists will be packed into a NanoFiche and sent to the moon’s south pole, tentatively scheduled for launch in November of 2025.
“We’d really love to get a little bit more traditional music submitted; the one thing that we request of everybody is, please do not send ceremonial music because the ethics around sharing that music, even just to send it and not play it, are very complicated, and we don’t want to be disrespectful to anyone’s traditional values, so at present we are asking for social music to be sent,” explained project lead Jessica Svenningston.
Indigenous musicians have until December 31 to submit their music to go to the moon; information on how to apply can be found below.