ESA has teamed up with eight art schools around Europe and challenged their students to produce art inspired by Artemis, lunar exploration and the European Service Module that will provide the power, propulsion, water and air for the astronauts on board.
Students made 24 artworks that we will showcase on the Orion blog over the coming months. Using a variety of techniques and from many different cultural backgrounds, the artists have thought about what human spaceflight to the Moon and beyond signifies.
This artwork was made by Chris and Markus from the Basel School of Design in Basel, Switzerland.
"Our work “A Book for All and None” started out with wanting to mix the digital and the organic. Here we were both interested in the mixture of the wet silicone and the electronics but also the “skin” that got to be afterwards – which is what you see in the photography – a silicon “skin” or imprint of a circuit board. In the end the photography fascinated us because distance seemed to dissolve – nanometres look like kilometres and the skin itself gets to be planetary."
As the only place that humans have seen with their own eyes throughout history, our Moon features heavily in world cultures. The Artemis programme, itself named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Moon, will take humans back to our natural satellite and, in doing so, will become memorialised in popular culture.
All the artworks are available on ESA's Orion blog with interviews with the artists.