Arch Lunar Art Archive
The first ever global contemporary art archive on the moon.
Courtesy of the artist, Mitchell Syrop.
The Arch Lunar Art Archive is an extension of the Arch Mission Foundation’s commitment to document and preserve human culture around the solar system. In 2019, Arch Mission deployed cutting-edge nanotechnology to send the largest library of human civilization into space via lunar lander. The 30 million page Lunar Library consists of tens of thousands of books on all subjects, all recorded history, a key to all known languages, and the entire English Wikipedia, making it one of the most durable archives of human history ever built.
Today, Arch Mission turns their attention to presentism, creating a snapshot of contemporary art in the year 2022 with the Arch Lunar Art Archive. Using space-grade technology, the global archive of contemporary artworks will be deposited on the surface of the moon via lunar lander, where it is expected to last more than 50 million years.
The Arch Lunar Art Archive employs Nanofiche™ technology for printing at an ultra miniaturized scale. Etched into durable elemental nickel designed to withstand the harsh environmental conditions of space, the Arch Lunar Art Archive is fortified to survive even radiation once it is deposited on the moon.
Each artwork showcased in the Arch Lunar Art Archive will be minted as a non-fungible token, or NFT, with Blocktag™ authentication tags used for select artworks with a corresponding print edition. Deploying these emergent technologies means that each artwork will be registered with a serial id to a blockchain, making all transactions verifiable and cryptographically secure.
The ALAA featured artists were selected based on diversity of materials, age, nationality, and an ability to speak to today’s exceptional cultural moment. This unprecedented context allows for new meanings and perspectives to emerge when artists from around the world are placed in dialogue with one another for the very first time. Artists in the Arch Lunar Art Archive have exhibited in museums, are featured in major public collections, and have shown in galleries world-wide. The diverse global archive contains unique examples of art in all media.
This is what it means to be contemporary: to index a multifaceted present, to reevaluate the conventions of the past, and to turn our attention outward, towards a boundless, promising future.