art — Blog — Jessica Reed

Remember the Voyager record? What Carl Sagan described as “launching a bottle into a cosmic ocean”? A time capsule is a chance for humanity to send a letter to itself. Right now, artists around the world have the opportunity to contribute to The Lunar Codex project.

A great piece on our collective art project had these wonderful words by director Samuel Peralta:

“The Lunar Codex, at its heart, is a project to spread hope during this dark time — the years of the COVID-19 pandemic on Earth — both for creative artists and those who love the arts,” Peralta said. “The project attempts to fill the moon with some of the heart of humanity, our art, so that when we look to the sky, the moon is a tangible symbol of hope, of what is possible when you believe.

“This is one reason we’ve focused on contemporary creative artists,” he said. “There are projects that archive the works of Shakespeare, or Michelangelo, or Beethoven; and rightly so, for they represent the pinnacle of human artistic achievement. This project focuses on the creativity of our generation, those making art through these troubled years, people like you and I.

“Thus, the Lunar Codex is also a message-in-a-bottle to the future, a snapshot of our generation. 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 dream, time to create art.”

The author of this piece in The Altamont Enterprise, Noah Zweifel, was featuring visual art by Westerlo artist Tammy Liu-Haller; her work is one seed among many in a giant collaborative art work assembling creative works of many genres, from literature to film.

I was struck by Zweifel’s take on the Lunar Codex project, imagining it reaching a “future so far off that humanity itself may no longer be around, possibly destroyed by the same relentless intellectual drive that brought us to the moon in the first place, the same that lets us create art and appreciate beauty only to then demand an answer from it.”

That resonates. Whether we are nearing the end or not, I take comfort from the very grounded human acts of growing vegetables, playing music with others, and making art. (Love, above all!) How potentially meaningful it is, though, to transport poems, or paintings, or films, to another realm—a strange nearby world of no atmosphere and a different gravitational pull. Even if no one sees it, we will have made it, and the making matters.

Details about the project can be found in my last blog post, but here’s a taste:

I was asked by my friend Joyce Brinkman, the inaugural Poet Laureate of Indiana and lead editor of the Polaris Anthologies, to curate one of three collections, taken from select regions. These Polaris Anthologies will be part of the payload of the SpaceX/Astrobotic Technologies’ Griffin Lander/NASA VIPER Rover scheduled to be on the South Pole of the moon by the fall of 2023. Our ambition is to represent each country on earth. There will be print versions here on earth, as well! Each anthology has a theme: Africa and Europe have the earthly themes of Rock, Air, and Water. Asia, North and Central America have the theme of Stars, Sun, and Moon. South America, Australia, and Antarctica have the themes of Ice, Wind, and Fire.

The deadline is Feb 15th, 2022. DEADLINE EXTENDED MAY 31!! There’s very little turnaround, so get your submission in fast!

Where to submit:

Polaris Anthology: Rock, Air, and Water (Europe and Africa, edited by Joe Heithaus of DePauw University) submit to polaristrilogy1@gmail.com

Polaris Anthology: Stars, Sun, and Moon (Asia, North and Central America, edited by Joyce Brinkman of Brick Street Poetry) submit to polaristrilogy2@gmail.com

Polaris Anthology: Ice, Wind, and Fire (South America, Australia, and Antarctica, edited by Jessica Reed of Butler University) submit to polaristrilogy3@gmail.com

*I now have a poem going up this summer! So does Purdue’s Donald Platt and my fellow editors Joyce Brinkman and Joe Heithaus.

I have taught science meets art classes in many formats, from one-day to three-week workshops, from Stanford to Phoenix to Indianapolis to Beijing to Saudi Arabia. But not until Susan Neville gave me the opportunity to stretch this out into a year-long college seminar at Butler University have I been able to fully explore a myriad form of arts (while drilling down specifically to physics as our primary science).

We have read plays aloud together and written about whether female physicists need a love interest (they do not!) to anchor their stories. We have created graphic novel excerpts about physicists and great discoveries in physics—they have used everything from construction paper to glued-on cotton balls with the absolute freedom and creativity of young children, then pivoted to writing scholarly academic papers on physics and graphic novels. I learn so much from my students each year and am inspired by them.

But not until a scheduling coincidence filled one of my classes with dance majors have I been able to learn from a group of dancers about the possibilities of choreography and physics. I usually show videos and have them read an article about a physics dance, then they write a reader response. But this year, I gave them the opportunity (it was only fair to let the non-dance majors do this as well) to write down their choreography of a dance concept from something they learned about physics this year. I am ecstatic about the results, floored by their creativity, and excited to share that, on top of the wonderful results from the dance majors, one unexpected “black hole dance” was created by a football player! Next year, I hope to return to my old Tuesday/Thursday schedule (lots of commuting from rural Indiana to Butler) and I might not be with the dancers again, but either way, this assignment stays.