In this episode, Alyssa interviews Matt Zywica, Dylan Vitone, and Mark Baskinger of MoonArk, the time capsule and micro museum that is scheduled to go to the moon in 2021. Together, they discuss the organizational process of collaborating with up to 300 artists, the challenges of the ten-year-long project, and the final product that will make its way to space.
Alyssa: Hello, AMT-Lab listeners, and welcome to an interview episode of the Arts Management and Technology Lab podcast. My name is Alyssa and I am the Podcast Producer. In this episode, we feature a project based here in Pittsburgh called MoonArk, the highly collaborative and collective structure and museum that will make its way to the moon in 2021. I sit down with professors Matt Zywica, Dylan Vitone, and Mark Baskinger to discuss the project's process and purpose in greater detail. We hope you enjoy this episode brought to you by AMT-Lab.
[musical interlude]
Alyssa: So I'm here today with Matt Zywica, Assistant Teaching Professor, Dylan Vitone, Associate Professor, and Mark Baskinger, Associate Professor and the Project Director for MoonArk, all at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design. Gentlemen, if you could take a moment to introduce yourselves for our listeners.
Mark: I'm Mark Baskinger, Project Director for the MoonArk.
Matt: And my name is Matt Zywica, and I'm a Project Manager for the MoonArk.
Dylan: Dylan Vitone, and I'm a project Manager as well.
Alyssa: Okay, so today we're going to be discussing MoonArk, the mini time capsule and museum for humankind. According to the MoonArk website, this is “an epochal artifact designed to communicate forward across time and space.” This is the first museum of its kind that’s being sent to the moon, and it will be sent at 2021 via Astrobotic’s precision landing system named Peregrine. And actually, Astrobotics is based here in Pittsburgh and is sponsored by NASA.
Okay, so within MoonArk, there are four chambers, and each chamber is a range from sample of Earth materials to music clips, to metallic structures to visual arts. And the goal of this project is that it's designed to last thousands of years and will be discovered by future humankind. So tell me, gentlemen, how did the idea for MoonArk get started?
Mark: The MoonArk project began about 10 years ago, just shortly after CMU decided to compete for the Google Lunar XPRIZE Competition. And that initial venture spawned Astrobotic as a spin off company to make lander platforms and bring private payload to the moon. And initially, it began with legendary roboticist and educator Red Whittaker reaching out to the College of Fine Arts to find out who might be involved or who could be involved in bringing some sort of cultural aspects to this momentous initial launch for CMU for Astrobotic, and really for private space ventures. And Red connected with also legendary educator and space artist Lowry Burgess, former Dean of the College of Fine Arts. And ultimately through their collaboration, they initiated the MoonArts group. And within the MoonArts group in about 2009, 2010, a variety of projects were created, a public call for participation went out internationally. And over the following years, that effort sort of whittled down or was fine tuned to become the MoonArk project.
So the MoonArk went from cultural payload that was an add-on to the lunar mission to become the cultural element that's going to the moon for the first private mission to the moon in 2021.
Alyssa: All right, excellent. And this is a process that took about nine years to develop for all the aspects of the structure to come together.
Mark: Yep.
Alyssa: Alright, cool. So within this project, you worked with maybe about 300 people from all around the world to gather some of the artifacts and create some of the artwork that went into MoonArk. How did you go about collaborating and communicating your ideas to make the museum that exists today?
Matt: I think it began based on need. In the very beginning, as we started to kind of discuss and further develop what this… We knew that it was going to be an object. We knew that what was required to get this object to the moon and for it to exist on the moon for an extended period of time that involves some very harsh conditions. And I think at the very beginning, the first people that we get to bring into the project probably involve that side of things, the more sort of technical challenges that involved materials and crafting manufacturing-type processes for what, you know, these various pieces might be that are included with it.
I would say like the very first person that we brought on the project would have been Mark Rooker, right? Yeah. And that was because very early on, we realized that this object was going to have to be quite small. And we narrowed some of our various materials down to different types of metals, and the more we got involved with types of metals and how they would respond to these conditions, we realized that we needed someone who specialized in areas of making very, very small, like jewelry almost type, like pieces and assemblies and different things like that. So we brought Mark Rooker into the project to help us eventually begin to fabricate it. So he was a part of the earliest conversations for what this object might look like, what it might be, and how we might begin to think about how we can accomplish actually making this something, I think almost even before some of the sort of content developments occurred.
Mark: Sure, we should say that Mark Rooker is a faculty member of James Madison University. He teaches jewelry and metal crafts.
Dylan: So we wanted to function kind of as a museum and kind of a representation of humans’ kind of artistic capacity. But we also wanted it to be a beautiful object, a really nice elegant object that we could give to the moon and kind of… Mark’s jewerly work is so exquisite that he was really kind of help drive you know some of the form language and conversations and really made just this beautiful, elegant thing that we could then give to the moon.
Mark: You know, when you offer the moon as a potential subject or landing spot for art to exist, right…it's really easy to attract people. You know, a lot of people solicited us. They brought their artwork to us, they responded to the public call. They were friends of friends who are networked and connected with us and really our efforts, we had a predominant narrative that we wanted to communicate something about our natural context and how humans come from Earth and extend out into space physically, intellectually, emotionally so forth. And so the artwork that we sort of collected and curated was largely driven by the need to support the narrative. And the narrative for us was very loose and open ended. And so the project really became what it wanted to become through these collaborations and through the material exercises and experiments and bringing people in like Mark Rooker with his expertise and leveraging Dylan's expertise in photography and image making and Matt’s expertise and form language and semantics. We were really able to craft that narrative at an equal level of precision as markers, jewelry. And so that for us with a very organic handbill type, you know, mentality, we assembled this thing, and it's not about technology. It's really about human endeavor. And so, when you bring people into the fold to collaborate, that's sort of the mindset that they have, and that's what they respond to. So the artworks that we were able to curate, it was less about a yes and no decision. And it was more about “Yes, and what if?” And so, if people brought us something like, “Hey, you know, I'm working on these, you know, these nano structures, and they relate to the moon in this way, or they extend human capacity in this other way.” We engage, you know, with them through the narrative and help them to see the work in new ways, to understand the richer connections to the work and the project, and then to identify opportunities for derivatives or expansion extension ,and so forth. So, you know, I think there were very few pieces that we received that we said, “Oh, yeah, that's great. We'll add it.” And it was more about the narrative, the working in support of the narrative, but having the dialogue and the communication with people, which ultimately turned to collaboration. So it was it was not about “Hey, or artists come on and join the MoonArk project.” And it was more about, “Hey, who's doing interesting things” and “what are you doing?” And “how do you think it relates,” and then working together with them to co-develop and extend their work through ours.
Dylan: So to build off what Mark says; I think it went two different ways. We have half the people that were incredibly enthusiastic about working with us in the project, and the other half of the people that would call up and kind of ask the manufacturer something for us and thinking we were completely unstable, and completely in Fantasyland— “but no, really, we're doing this!” And so kind of what happened: there's one overarching idea that kind of pulls through the four different chambers. We wanted to talk about the human experience. Much like if you were to walk through a city street and you were to smell perfume or you were to hear music and we wanted to make this kind of multi, sensorial kind of experience.
And there's four different chambers that kind of go from life on earth and pretty becomes pretty literal, you know, rock samples to the second chamber is the metasphere, the space between the Moon and the Earth and how we communicate and structure that allows us to communicate with one another, the structure that allows us to kind of make closeness, build bonds. The third chamber is the moon, which is about the moon as a muse. And the way we've used the moon is to inspire art through you know, centuries. And then the last chamber is kind of about these things, you know, things past the moon, things that we don't quite understand.
And so we wanted to try to… not— we want to remove kind of cultural contexts and things that kind of separated us. And we wanted to kind of embed kind of these universal experiences in these different artifacts that we kind of attached to the MoonArk. So we wanted to not embed specific religions or specific cultures or specific identities. We wanted to kind of talk universally these things that we all share that kind of bring us together and you know very much trying to become this positive, uplifting kind of artifact of these kind of shared human experiences. So much of our conversation now is about, you know, the things that separate us and the differences between our cultures or our people or, you know, this or that. And we wanted to kind of rise above all that and kind of remove all that context from the narrative and kind of embed these universal kind of truths or universal experiences. So, you know, the beauty of listening to a piece of music or to smell a flower for the first time or the, you know, those kind of artifacts that we share.
Alyssa: Yeah! So therefore, like that makes the structure of moon are quite complex, and there's maybe about one or 200 touch points along the processes of manufacturing and testing that need to go into the structure. How did you handle so many details of it this process?
Mark: Spreadsheets?
[group laughter]
Dylan: Yeah, lots of spreadsheets.
Mark: Lots of meetings and dry erase boards.
Dylan: So we've been working on it for nine years, ten years. And so it's been a long time. And we tend to list things out a lot, we tend to have lots of lists in our studio. And sometimes we would visit an idea and it would disappear. And sometimes the same idea kind of kept coming up and coming up and coming up again. And those are the things that eventually made it into the actual Ark.
Matt: Yeah, and like, sometimes it was like the stuff that went inside of it was driven by the material that would be a part of the object. And sometimes it was driven by the way that we wanted people to experience the content. So there are elements that are a part of the object, like you can hold the object in your hand and clearly see qualities to its form. But then there are also other elements that are a part of the object that you have to begin to look more closely at. So we tried to create this experience where as you look as you were to maybe open up the object to being until a closer and closer and closer. So scale becomes a very important part of that experience down to the degree where these sapphire disks that are etched in platinum, they contain information that when you can, you can barely see at human scale. You'll see kind of slight reflection as you sort of move the desk around. But it requires more than just your eyes to be able to see clearly everything that's a part of that. So this you know, tiny little— how, what's the size of it? Like an inch and five-eighths or so, about? Yeah, sapphire disk… You can either put it under a microscope or you can blow it up to wall size, to be able to, like read and view imagery, and so on and so forth.
Alyssa: All right, cool. And can you talk about some of the technology that went into some of the design process such as for the cages or the desk, or the nano objects, and the musical bits?
Mark: Sure, we know…when you're designing something with so many different pieces, it is very difficult to design everything and then just put it together. So it was a progressive design.
So we first started with the concept for the discs. Once we knew the technology and materiality for the discs and the dimension of them, we could then design the cage and then fill in with the other elements. And then we had a plan, but it's not until things are actually materialized that you can, you can verify weight and performance and so forth. So there was a discovery process along the way. I mean, we collectively through our team, we had the extra parties to predict, you know, and to plan accordingly. But once you have the real artifacts, it's very different.
And so, you know, one of the mysteries for us was, you know, originally what processes were we going to use. And we thought, “well, we really wanted to emphasize the role that the hand plays in fostering creativity and really making us human and how we interact and engage with the world.” So, you know, Mark Rooker’s presence— the hand-generated components and elements that are in there really important for us, the presence of the hand— you know, is supremely important, and it's part of the narrative. That said, technical feasibility, you know, it was just beyond human capacity to make these cages within an allowable timeframe that would keep us on schedule. So we had—
Matt: Literally by hand.
Mark: Yeah, so we had to turn to rapid prototyping and using metal sintering through an additive process to be able to achieve the cages. And that was an interesting process for us because we were originally working in titanium. And to get our strength-to-weight ratio we needed, you know, we were hyper light. And yes, you can build it. But you couldn't remove the structure of the cage from the support material that gets built along with it. And so in the process of removing the cage, it would get destroyed. And so we had to redesign and change materials from titanium to aluminum, which opened up new pathways for us and new collaborations.
But, you know, the complexity of the cage, about seven, eight years ago when we were fabricating, it was at the forefront of what we're able to do through additive manufacturing. And so most people that I spoke to, you know, in calling production houses and engineering firms and fabricators, they all didn't want to touch it because they knew the risks. They knew the complexity. They said, “this is a high rate of failure.” And, and then I stumbled upon purely by chance, a small outfit in in Indianapolis. And it's an engineering group. And they said, “that's really interesting, we're going to figure this out with you.” And honestly, they looked at it, prototyped it in plastic, made two very small design changes, you couldn't even see them with your eye. And that changed it from unfeasible to feasible. And all it took was someone to say, “hey, let's look at this for what opportunity is there, not the constraints and restrictions that are already present in the design.” So that was good.
So for us, you know, I'll touch back on Dylan's point about the narrative to the MoonArk as an entity is evidence of cooperation and collaboration. And that's the sentiment that we're putting forward for humanity. And it's evidenced through every interaction that we had in in the call for artwork to the collaborations with artists, and then fabricators and manufacturers going out on a limb working with us to achieve this very, very hypothetical object. You know, we, we don't know if it could be built, we don't know if it'll last, we don't know if it'll make it to the moon, and to speculate and to have those aspirations and hope. Really, you know, it requires people to go out on a limb and to invest time and money of their own and be willing to suspend disbelief. And so that that was the main discovery for me how art and fabrication and making and engineering in science and technology and all these people can come together around something so aspirational, and achieve something collectively, even though everyone has a very, very small hand in it. Collectively, we've done this and so it really, you know, brings all these people and all the technologies and all their capability together, you know, in a sort of poetic way.
Dylan: I joke a lot in my life about the level of complexity that has to be in effect for me to move dumb pictures about a cat from my phone to my wife's phone, or just, you know, just the level of infrastructure we have in order to communicate about how excited we are about the birthday party that we're at. And so that idea of how many people have to come together in order to for something great to happen— and I'm not saying that this is a great project, but I'm saying that the process of making this project was great. And so working together with so many people in order to tell you know, as inclusive as a story as we could possibly make with the time constraints, and bringing in you know, Golan Levin's piece where he crowdsourced you know, multiple thousands of people drawing their picture to the moon and they're having kind of an ownership in this. And then, you know, the perfume artists that made a perfume or the ballet that was constructed for this.
So bringing in all these different people with kind of blind faith that this was going to be something special; that became the special part of this project. Not necessarily the artifact, although I do love the artifact. It's the process and the conversations that we had all along the way, both on campus at Carnegie Mellon, but also kind of out, you know, towards the rest of the world. And, you know, from people that are in the Mon Valley that are doing manufacturing with us to, you know, the people in Greece that are, you know, telling a different kind of story, so that the all those different conversations along the way, really made it kind of beautiful for me personally.
Alyssa: And it's sometimes like, a lot of the time it can be about the art, but when it comes to the process itself, making that art. Like, it becomes really about the people that go into the project.
Cool. Okay, so one of the most fascinating parts of the MoonArk project that I learned about was your team's allowance to let the project grow organically. And I pictured it somewhat as taking that artistic idea or part of a plan and simply letting go or letting other people take the reins and let it be naturally derived. So, I can imagine how this necessity came about. But did it present a massive challenge for your team?
Dylan: I…it sounds corny. It sounds trope-y. It sounds pretty goofy. But I think that I can speak for myself that it was just a genuine joy to spend this much time with the people that we got to spend as much time with. So the core group, the four of us; I think there was genuine trust and there still is genuine trust between us. And there's, I think at this point for me, a deep love and caring for these people. And so that ability to be in a room and realize that your opinion was one with three other really great opinions, and to just work through that journey together and kind of trust each other. And, you know, we would all get really random text messages in the middle of the night of an idea that popped into somebody's head or an email that didn't really quite make sense because of, you know, we were walking into another meeting. But, you know, that that staying open to one another and kind of communicating with one another is, yeah, been a fantastic process. So I think that just that trust was never difficult. There was difficult moments. But it was never a difficult journey. It was actually the complete opposite for me, but I think all of us was a different thing.
Matt: The challenge was enjoyable.
Mark: Yeah. I don't know how to describe it.
Matt: Other than that, you know, we didn't know what this was supposed to be. You know, if it was meant to be something, what it could become… And I think for whatever reason, all of us were open to that notion. So yeah, we just let you know that take over and kind of direct us.
Mark: Inward facing, yes, it's easy to work when you have four people that you that all trust each other and are largely on the same page and they challenge each other in the best of ways. It's a wonderful synergy that rarely happens in creative practice where just people get along. I mean, it's like the Beatles at the very end.
[group laughter]
Dylan: Yeah…
Matt: No way! I don’t like the Beatles!
[group laughter]
Mark: But outward, you know, like being the interface to most of the 250+ people, the challenge is more about communication and setting expectations and managing the realities of launch delays. And, “hey, I sent you my, my materials a year ago and haven't heard anything yet.” “Oh, yeah, yeah, we're still thinking about it still.” You know, it's like we were on a very different timeframe and for collaborate some collaborators who, you know, made stuff or contributed in very material ways. They wanted to see the response immediately. “The launch is next year, right?” “Yeah, no, two years now.”
And, and so dealing with the material realities of fabricating this and getting it from our heads and from our sketches into, you know, something tangible, that was herculean. The ability to spin a coherent meta level narrative for the forum, yet have the subplots and stories within is incredibly challenging. Dealing with people's expectations and managing hope and buy in and “yes, we're still doing this”— it's still exciting and, and wrestling with the realities of this first venture to the moon. And, you know, we're payload, we're being carried. That's easy. The hard part is dealing with all the things I just mentioned. But being the provider, being the carrier, designing the lander, designing the vehicle that will for us be the backdrop in which our MoonArk will be discovered.
And so it's there are you know, when you think of all the things to do, and you list it out, and you have the spreadsheet, and it's pages and pages and pages, and there's people and emails and phone numbers, and every day, you're on the phone for six to eight hours talking to people… It gets tedious. It's laborious, but you know, when you have a small group that you load share with, and you can rely upon it, it makes it more manageable.
So to answer the question, yeah, it's massive. Getting anything to space is a massive effort and we can't look past that. Getting 200-300 people to collaborate is massive. But you know, in the right circumstances with the right support in the right context, it can be done. And for us, you know, it took years and it took the very right people to come together at the right time for it to happen.
Dylan: I think that the gift from Red and the gift for Astrobotics in order to see this as something of value is something that we very much internalized and felt a great responsibility to them. They are lifting the heavyweight here. They're doing the hard job. And so times when we get bogged down and updating, you know, contracts with an artist, those kind of things, you know, it came back to the privilege that they gave us and how hard they're working to make this happen. And just the, the great gift and appreciation that we had towards them for allowing this to happen. So we oftentimes, you know, felt a responsibility to them as much to ourselves as being accountable to them, and the opportunity that they've given us.
Mark: Yeah, that's really true. And then I think over time, as more people became involved with the project, you know, you begin to feel responsibility for them and I'm sure they do for us as well. So it just continues to build.
Alyssa: Now that was really excellent. Thank you guys so much. Okay, so according to the website, there will be an additional copy of MoonArk that will remain here on earth for today's audiences to enjoy. Do you know where we could explain that artwork to pop up? Or if you're not certain yet…
Dylan: Um, yeah, so this has been the fun thing that we worked in a closet for multiple months and multiple years, and didn't have much. You know, as we were making this thing, we did it with the hope that it was going to be something special. And now that it's completed, it started to kind of travel around the globe. It went to Greece Cretes for a conference. You know, a big opportunity we had, the biggest thing that kind of changed our narrative for the project was when John Luke curated into a show at the Pompidou in Paris, and you know, we got to go there and kind of, you know, have a different conversation with a different group of people that was just so incredibly valuable for us. And so it's slowly been traveling around at different locations around the world, and hopefully, it continues. So if you have any interest at your institution and having the MoonArk there, reach out! You can find us on our website, we'd be happy to travel there.
Matt: I'll add to that, that for about 18 months, it was at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History on display and so. So just to clarify, too, that there are two versions of the MoonArk, and they're identical twin copies. One is aimed for the moon, one is aimed to stay here as a backup in case something happens, but also as a reference point.
So you know, when you design something that's gonna outlive your lifespan and could last for many, many, many generations, you know, materially it'll outlive it or could outlast language. So, you know, we have to have a material connector here to point to the moon to say, “Hey, you know that this is a thing that's over there.” Someone will discover it in the future. This thing here is version of it that you can see and learn from. And I think that the earthbound copies is super important for keeping people, or— I should say differently— allowing people to speculate in a way. When you say you're sending something to the moon, you know, it's easy for your mind to go into like aliens and sci fi and Star Wars and things like that. But these are material traces that we collectively are leaving for our future selves. So we're telegraphing forward and, you know, the presence of an artifact here as a display sample as something that people can engage with, make it all the more real.
And so, we want people to dream and to consider this as potential that as humanity reaches out into the solar system, and we begin to inhabit different places and an extend out into space further and further, we need to question, you know, the ethics and the politics around that. But also, you know, what are the cultural traces we're going to leave behind. What's worth preserving? What's worth saving? What's worth saying, you know, and remembering for the future? And we don't have an answer for that. You know, the MoonArk is one composition. It's an element in a larger narrative that's emerging. And if you look at the development of space art as a practice since the 1960s, there are many different takes on it. And then MoonArk fits with the Golden Record on the Voyager and some other elements too, but it's different. It's in many ways more complex because of the way it came together. It's not one person's vision, one person's authorship. It's a broad collective. It's in many ways a reflector of humanity. So If that's the case, then we want people to see their own humanity in the object they encounter here today. And so that's why the second copy is important.
And, you know, as Dylan mentioned, it's been traveling around the world in various forms. So we'll send prototypes— well, right now, prototypes and videos are being shown in Japan. Photographs and elements are going to be shown in Greenland. Photographs have been shown in Poland, and, you know, but we've carried it places. We've taken it to New York and to San Francisco and to, to Greece and, and to Paris, and so forth. And those interactions with people allow them to ask questions that they've never asked before. And, and I think that's a truly special nature of art, of cultural objects, of designed artifacts. It’s that it opens a space for questioning in someone's mind that, you know, it's more than the technical capability of getting to the moon with a material endurance of the thing to outlast humanity and so forth. But it's— what are the messages? And how did you say this? And why is it in this form? And what's the creative practice? And how do I access that? How do I begin to think about these things in my own way and question my own existence in my own place in the world, and our own place, in the universe, and so forth. So for the object to crack open that, you know, in someone's mind a little bit to begin to ask those questions, I think are really important. So as we spread out, you know, across the planet, and as a global society into the cosmos, you know, we're projecting right now cooperation, collaboration, creativity, and such. But there may be other messages that will complement this in the future. And so, being part of this continuing larger narrative is really important for us.
Matt: And I think continuing is an important word. Like, we knew from the get-go that we weren't going to be able to provide the answer and how to communicate humanity. That was not the point. We also knew that we wouldn't be able to be, you know, like, ultimately inclusive. As far as that's concerned, we weren't going to be able to represent, you know, everybody and everything and you know, every type of idea that was out there. So it's, you know, it's a piece, it's a fragment that is a part of that continuing story to be told. So someone else can create something that's maybe similar to this to build from, you know, what we've created just as we have from what previous people have created.
Dylan: We hoped a MoonArk that stays on earth allows you to kind of turn inward and kind of analyze you know, your own life and think about your own life. You know, what opportunities do we have on a regular basis to kind of stop you know, getting off our phone and stop thinking about tomorrow or thinking about our investment plans or bills that are due, I just like to sit back and kind of analyze your own life and kind of your own human experience and get it the things that are valuable to you, these core truths that you, that guide you. And we hope it kind of functions in artifact. And, you know, we don't want to overstate this, you know, this isn't a replacement for the, you know, the significant spiritual journey that you know, a lot of— but can we make an artifact that makes you turn inward and think about what, what gives your life meaning? And we wanted it to be that. And so, it was important for this artifact to be on Earth in order to kind of spark some of these kind of stations and starting these conversations. And again, for some people, it could just be, “oh, that's a beautiful object.” But hopefully some of the questions that we asked that we tried to embed in there allow you to kind of turn internally and kind of ask those same questions yourself.
Alyssa: Yeah, I didn't know that the earth copy served that purpose as well like for the people that are viewing it today and then for the people that eventually discover the moon version of MoonArk thousands of years round have that additional copy to link it to. So that's really cool. All right. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a real pleasure.
Mark: Thank you.
Matt: Thank you.
Dylan: You’re very welcome.
Matt: Thank you thank you.
[group laughter]
If you would like to read more about MoonArk or check out the structure and its artwork, you can visit MoonArk’s website at moonarts.org.
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