Our project merges planetary geochemistry, imaging, and critical theory to engage with lunar samples from NASA’s Apollo 17 mission, preserved records of volcanic activity over three billion years old.

Moon Beads: Reimagining the Apollo Archive, a stereoscopic anaglyph inkjet print, reinterprets the iconic Apollo Earthrise photograph taken by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission. The image includes a creative insertion of an SEM image of a lunar bead (in place of the original moon), on which we embedded a nano-typographic message, Hello World, using focused ion beam induced platinum deposition. Just as the phrase marks the first programmatic step in text-based code (the language of the SEM interface), in this context it implies a first step in reimagining our relationship with more-than-human beings and scientific processes. This tiny greeting, then millionths of a meter across, challenges the traditional boundaries between scientist, machine, and specimen and raises ethical questions about human intervention in scientific artifacts. 

"When first trying to define the project, I knew that I wanted to go beyond the 2D nature of a computer screen, but I never expected us to blend reality of different scales into a 3D anaglyph. In doing so, the push to create – rather than just observe – forced us to find new ways of using the equipment, some of which neither of us were sure would work."

—Tom

At its center is a stereoscopic anaglyph inkjet print that reimagines the iconic Earthrise photograph taken by astronaut William Anders (Apollo 8, 1968). We replaced the Moon in the image with a scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of a lunar glass bead, embedding within it the nano-typographic phrase: “Hello World”—written using the SEM’s platinum deposition tool at a scale one-billionth the width of a human hair.