A copy of the MoonArk, a cultural payload headed to the moon in late 2022, has just been added to the permanent art collection of the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum. A cultural marker designed to last hundreds of thousands of years on the Moon, the MoonArk is envisioned to spark wonderment for future humans through poetically entangled visual narratives of the arts, humanities, sciences and technologies, the MoonArk will be the cultural payload on the first private delivery to the lunar service by Pittsburgh company and CMU spin-off, Astrobotic.

The MoonArk was recently featured on the front page of CNN as it continues to get redy for its trip to the lunar surface next year. The MoonArk is a massive collaborative and integrated project designed by a team of CMU faculty, students and a host of international collaborators over the past 10 years. Part of a larger Moon Arts research project in the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry the MoonArk is an epochal project that blurs the boundaries between art, design, science and the humanities – a synthesis of research and practice that could only happen in a place like CMU.

On January 18^th, 2019, the MoonArk will be put on display at the Centre Pompidou as part of the Hors Pistes Festival, in Paris, France. The 14^th edition of the multidisciplinary Hors Pistes Festival will focus exclusively on the Moon and its echoes in the field of cinema, contemporary art and thought.

After nine years and the work of over 300 people, the MoonArk will be unveiled at the Thrival Innovation & Music Festival on Thursday, Sept. 28. It will then be on display in multiple venues before it heads to the moon in 2019.