The MoonArk, a capsule created by Carnegie Mellon University’s Moon Arts Group, will be unveiled in an installation at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History on September 28, 2017.  MECCO joined the project as a collaborator in 2016 to laser mark components of the ark, engraving microscopic visual sound waves of music on titanium rings and etching landscape imagery into metal sheets.

Dylan Vitone, Mark Baskinger, and Matt Zywica from the MoonArk team will attend the unveiling as part of the Thrival Innovation Festival.  The team will host a table exhibition from 6-10PM and screen a trailer of their documentary film about the project.

“It’s great to see the MoonArk complete, present and in-person at the museum – even to our team,” said Project Director Mark Baskinger. “Now we will see how people respond to it.  At Carnegie Museum of Natural History, it takes on a different presence.”

The team created twin MoonArks simultaneously.  One ark is for the lunar mission aboard an Astrobotic lander, and one is to be shown in museums around the world, starting with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

This MoonArk installation will be located in the Wertz Gallery, a gallery of fine jewelry and gemstones, which is the most secure and protected location in the museum.  

The exhibit’s plaque reads:

The MoonArk is a highly collaborative and massively integrated project at Carnegie Mellon University that will culminate with a landing on the moon in 2019. 

Involving over 300 artists, designers, fabricators, scientists, and collaborators, the MoonArk aims to spark wonderment for future humans through poetically entangled visual narratives of the arts, technologies, humanities, sciences, and technologies. The four chambers of the MoonArk are designed to last hundreds of thousands of years and are fabricated from aluminum, gold, titanium, platinum, nickel and sapphire.

To explore the structure and the contents of the MoonArk, please visit moonarts.org from your mobile device.

Visitors will be able to explore the MoonArk through September 25th, 2018.  As the 2019 launch date gets closer, the CMU Moon Arts team will be working on a print publication and finishing their documentary film, as well as continuing to build out the website: moonarts.org.
 

MECCO's Applications Manager Josh Christley (center) showcasing the laser marked titanium rings with Mark Baskinger (left) and Matt Zywica (right) of the MoonArk team.