The Art Side of the Moon is a short documentary produced in 2024 by Director Kim Ingles and Producer Julia Lörsch. The film chronicles the Lunar Codex through the voyage of the Odysseuys Lunar Lander in an ambitious quest to preserve the largest and most diverse collection of contemporary art on the Moon.
This excerpt from the film shows Lunar Codex founder, Dr Samuel Peralta, explaining the cutting edge technology that is used to miniaturise and preserve the artwork for the mission.
The Art Side of the Moon
About the film
It’s February 2024 and the Odysseus Lunar Lander, carrying NASA’s scientific equipment, commercial payloads, and a valuable time capsule for humanity, attempts to land on the Moon. The world watches with baited breath as NASA’s mission control loses communication with Odysseus just as it attempts lunar landing.
The Art Side of the Moon tells the story of the Lunar Codex; an ambitious quest to preserve the largest and most diverse collection of contemporary art on the Moon for the posterity of humanity. We meet Dr Samuel Peralta in Toronto, Canada - the visionary physicist, artist, and founder of the Lunar Codex - and journey with him during this historic moment in time.
On the other side of the world in Noosa, Queensland, we meet Margaret Ingles; a visual artist with five paintings onboard the Odysseus. We hear the personal story behind her painting Feels Like Home and discover what it means to her to have her work included in this historic legacy for humanity.
What makes the Odysseus mission so unique is that this professionally curated art collection, if it successfully lands, will represent the first time that the works of women artists, Indigenous artists, and artists with disability have ever been put on the Moon.
From Australia to Canada, and Earth to Space, the story explores the big questions around the value of the arts and what legacy we want to leave behind... while waiting to see if this important time capsule for humanity will safely and successfully find its home on the Moon.
See the film
The Art Side of the Moon is a 2024 Sunny Coast Showdown winner. The Sunny Coast Showdown is a local film incubator that supports select projects with crew and funding. The film had its premiere at the Sunny Coast Showdown ShowFest on the Sunshine Coast, Australia, in June 2024.
It is now doing the film festival circuit and we will update this page with screenings as they are announced.
Featuring
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Physicist, founder, storyteller - Samuel Peralta has spent a lifetime bridging the sciences and the arts. He’s designed nuclear robotic tools, built solar plants, and founded companies in optoelectronics, smartphone software, and sustainable energy. He is a respected art curator and collector.
His poetry has been spotlighted by the BBC, the UK Poetry Society, the League of Canadian Poets, and Best American Poetry, and has won numerous awards, including the Palanca Memorial Award for Literature.
He’s the creator and series editor of the Future Chronicles anthologies, all of which were #1 bestsellers on Amazon.
His own fiction projects have hit the USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestsellers lists and been shortlisted for Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy. As a filmmaker, he has produced and supported over 120 independent films, including The Fencer, which garnered a Golden Globe nomination, and Real Artists, which won an Emmy Award.
By day he mentors start-ups at the University of Toronto ICUBE accelerator and sits on the boards of several private and public companies.
And he is the founder of the Lunar Codex project, sending the works of 35000+ writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers - from 254 countries, territories, and Indigenous nations - from Earth to space, the Moon, and beyond.
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Margaret Ingles is an Australian artist now living on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, although for most of her adult life she lived and worked in various countries throughout Asia. With an academic foundation in the Social Sciences, Education and the Visual Arts, she taught art in international schools in Nepal, Laos and Thailand but gave up teaching to pursue a full time art career over 20 years ago. These days, she is a dedicated contemporary realism painter focussing primarily on figurative work, still life and portraiture.
Each artwork is created from a reverence for depicting the real and the tangible, and is an opportunity to explore the subtleties of form, light and texture, as well as portraying emotions and telling stories that echo with universal truth.
She has been represented by galleries in Bangkok and Singapore, and is currently represented by the Lethbridge Gallery in Brisbane. She has exhibited in Bangkok, Singapore, London, Berlin, Chicago and in cities and towns around Australia, and her art can be found in private collections around the world.
Creative team
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Kim Ingles
Director, Writer, Editor
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Julia Lörsch
Producer, Writer
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Jon Coghill
Executive Producer
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Dan Munday
Executive Producer
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David Edgar
Executive Producer
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Wes Greene
Director of Photography
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Janet Francis
Art Director, Wardrobe
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Brian Allen Stewart
DP, Toronto Unit
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Denis Feletto
Composer
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William Missett
Finish Editor, Graphics
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Joel Sankey
Animator
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Dan Brown
Sound Designer and Mixer
Artists and curators featured
Rosario Bitanga Peralta, Margaret Ingles, Aneka Ingold, Anna Rose Bain, Jason John, Audrey Kawasaki, Viktoria Savenkova, Mazzy Sleep, Yvonne Melchers, Maria Mitsumori, Perla Kantarjian, Hari Lualhati, Lorena Kloosterboer, Nicolette Wong, Anne-Marie Zanetti , Kathrin Longhurst, Oceana Rain Stuart, Heather Horton, Daniel Maidman, Hazel Bartram-Birchenough, De Gillet Cox, Rosa Fedele, Amy Ordoveza, Anna Rose Bain, Clayton Taha, Martina McAteer, Paulina Aubey.
Kara Ross, Art Renewal Center.
Steven Alan Bennett and Dr Elaine Melotti Schmidt, The Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Artists.
Didi Menendez, Poets Artists.
Danijela Krha Purssey, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
The Art Side of the Moon has become the only authorised documentary of the Lunar Codex.
The complete film is currently being processed for etching onto a NanoFiche archive and will be the first film processed onto NanoFiche using a proprietary digital encoding technology developed for the Lunar Codex.
The film is expected to fit onto six NanoFiche discs and will be archived onboard the Polaris mission of the Lunar Codex, along with other cultural artefacts, due to launch to the lunar southern hemisphere in 2025 with the Astrobotic Griffin lander.
In addition to this, the treatment, preliminary script, and other selected pre-production items related to the film will have already been pre-loaded alongside other artefacts in AstroForge's Vestri spacecraft, to be launched past the Moon, across the solar system, and beyond. The primary fly-by target for this mission is an asteroid about one million kilometres (600,000 miles) away, with a target encounter in late 2026. Once past the asteroid belt, Freya and its cultural cargo will journey on to where no one has gone before.
