Mission sends U of A artists to explore moon’s creative side

Starting Sunday, a dancer, a poet, a writer and a textile artist from the University of Arizona will spend six days making art on the lunar surface — a simulated version of it, anyway, at Biosphere 2, 30 miles north of Tucson.

The objective of the mission, known as Imagination 1, is to demonstrate the role the arts can and should play in the ethics, interpretation and day-to-day reality of space travel.

“We always take culture with us,” said nonfiction writer and poet Christopher Cokinos, who dreamed up the mission and will serve as its crew commander. “We need those tools and techniques as much as we need accurate propellant loads and orbital trajectories.”

The landing site for Imagination 1 is a new research and training center known as SAM — short for Space Analog for the Moon and Mars — that began hosting mission simulations on the Biosphere 2 campus last year.

For the duration of the mission, crew members will live inside SAM’s sealed, pressurized habitat that includes living quarters, a workshop and a greenhouse. If they need to venture outside, they will have to put on space suits and exit through an airlock.

“SAM is a high-fidelity environment” on par with other analog facilities operated by NASA and other space agencies, Cokinos said.

The U of A professor emeritus of English will be joined on the “moon” by dancer and choreographer Elizabeth George, poet Julie Swarstad Johnson and textile artist and costume designer Ivy Wahome.

“We each bring our own skill set. I’m hoping I don’t have to do any algebra, because I can’t,” Cokinos said with a laugh.

If you’ve ever seen footage of the Apollo astronauts bouncing clumsily across the lunar surface, you can probably understand the logic behind sending a dancer to the moon.

George, an associate professor with the U of A School of Dance, will explore things like movement, balance, fitness and creative expression, both inside the limited space of the habitat and after suiting up for so-called extravehicular activity outside.

By dancing “on a non-terrestrial surface,” she said, she hopes to demonstrate “the ability to move with grace in a confined suit with limited consumables.”

During her EVA, George will be strapped into a harness that simulates gravity on the moon, which is about one-sixth as powerful as what we experience on Earth.

Wahome plans to create an original tapestry that will double as a mission log of sorts, made from recycled fabric scraps she has accumulated over the years.

“The message I want to send home is for humanity to be mindful of our carbon footprint because sustainability and space travel are intertwined,” said Wahome, who is studying for a master of fine arts degree in costume design and production at the U of A’s School of Theatre, Film & Television. “I will attempt to capture scenes of our mission through the art of appliqué, embroidery and patch work with this message in mind.”

Johnson will spend her time on the moon — you guessed it — writing poetry.

“Understanding place, from the local to the galactic, is vital for respectful relationships between humans and our Earth,” said Johnson, who is also an archivist and librarian at the U of A Poetry Center. “This mission offers a unique opportunity to test out how we can engage with the moon as a place.”

As for Cokinos, he will be writing a narrative of the mission as it unfolds for Esquire magazine, in which he will explore some of the same themes covered in his latest book, out April 4, called “Still As Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon, from Antiquity to Tomorrow.”

He also plans to conduct his own science fair project: growing tiny plants in soil made from lunar meteorites. The experiment was inspired by a research team at the University of Florida that made headlines in 2022 by successfully coaxing thale cress plants to grow from seeds planted in moon dust brought back by the Apollo astronauts.

Cokinos said he contacted the researchers, and they enthusiastically supplied him with his own seeds and vials of nutrient solution. If all goes well, the first tiny green leaves should be sprouting on his cress plants by the mission’s sixth and final day.

The experiment will be more symbolic than scientific. He called it an exercise in “taking care of something that’s alive other than yourself.”

This will actually be the second trip into “space” for Cokinos, who spent a little over a week as the crew journalist for a mission at the Mars Desert Research Station, an analog space habitat in Utah, about a decade ago.

He said Imagination 1 has been in the works for several years now.

Heading into its trip to the “moon,” the all-artist crew was trained on everything from how to put on a pressure suit and operate the airlocks to how to properly recycle food scraps.

During the mission, the crew will put in 10-12 hours of work a day, “not unlike what you’d see in a (real) longer-duration mission,” Cokinos said.

At some point, each crew member will get to suit up for an EVA in SAM’s half-acre, moon-Mars surface yard and terrain park, which is still under development. Cokinos plans to spend his “moon walk” on a combination of artistic and practical pursuits, aimed at answering questions as simple as, “What can we do with these gloves on?”

The mission will conclude on Friday morning, when the four artists are scheduled to step out of the habitat and into a press conference.

SAM developer and research director Kai Staats said he is excited to host such a unique crew.

“Missions like these are serious efforts at understanding the scope of human activity off-Earth while improving our work as custodians of our home planet,” Staats said. “In a few years astronauts will be living on the moon. They’ll be doing more than science and exploration, and this crew will help show the way.”

Cokinos said sending artists into space would also provide new perspectives and different, more evocative ways of describing what we find out there. The words we use matter, he said, because “description implies ethics.”

Instead of referring to the moon’s water ice as a resource to be exploited, for example, we should call it a gift and treat it accordingly, he said. Instead of making plans to colonize the moon, we should be talking about building a home there.

“The moon is in the sky for all of us,” Cokinos said. “It is one of the most important places in human history, even though almost nobody has been to it.”