Humanity’s Legacy in an art piece. - Space Apps Challenge

Humanity’s Legacy in an art piece.| Putting the 'Art' in Artemis

Putting the 'Art' in Artemis

Your challenge is to create an artistic work to communicate, inform, or inspire others about humanity's road to Mars. Your art may be in any form, including (but not limited to): drawing, painting, sculpture, computer generated 2D or 3D, music, film, music video, written or spoken word, dance, and textile.

Humanity's Legacy in an art piece

Summary

We want to display and pay tribute to the legacy of all the people behind Nasa’s breakthrough innovations with an Augmented Reality art piece that will be sent to the moon with Artemis. The piece consists of a big glass bottle equipped with projectors to deliver the message in its walls. Inside the bottle there are different types of earth’s vegetation, representing our natural legacy and outside the bottle, there are projected photos and stories about the people responsible for that milestone, representing our technological and creative legacy.We will collect these files with family and friends that will later receive an interactive art piece of the heroes they helped tell the stories.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We have developed an Augmented Reality Transmedia Art piece that will represent humanity’s legacy combining creativity and technology. One piece would be sent to the moon by Artemis in 2024 and other pieces will be sent to the houses of everyone who helped in the process.

The ability to tell stories, create narratives and believe in the intangible is an essential part of what makes us humans, our legacy is cemented by the stories people will tell about us when we are no longer here.

And that was the concept we wanted to explore in this art piece. Behind Nasa’s most important missions and breakthrough innovations there are people. Hard-working, inspiring and captivating people, with countless stories and photos that can inspire a whole new generation of future scientists, entrepreneurs and artists.

So how can we understand the story of the people behind Nasa’s most important missions and transform it in something tangible that they can carry with them to represent their legacy?

The solution starts with an app, with a place to send photos and videos together with a conversational interface where people can tell their stories. The idea was to send links to this app to family members and friends of the scientists, engineers and astrounauts responsible for Nasa’s most ambitious missions, they would tell stories about how this people affected their lifes and share personal photos that would enrich their narratives. After receiving the photos, videos and stories we would compile and organize them to display on the artworks.

The art piece that will be sent to the moon is a big glass bottle equipped with projectors to create an Augmented Reality effect in its walls. Inside the bottle there are different types of earth’s vegetation, representing our natural legacy, the nature of Earth, what was here when we arrived and what sustain us alive. Outside the bottle, there are the projected photos and stories of people responsible those innovative achievemnts including the one of going to the moon, this will represent our technological and creative legacy as a society, what we build throught time and what will keep us exploring this big vast universe.

In order to compensate all the people that contributed to the mission telling stories and sending photos of their friends and families, we will send some personalized art pieces for their houses in the format of decoration frames with Augmented Reality capabilities that be activated by an app, so it can display more photos of the person’s legacy as well as allow people to listen to the stories recorded, providing a truly transmedia experience and contributing for the preservation and dissemination of these stories.

Here are some of the artworks created: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15Luqd9ePIlUfn-ADZN6sNXNe78OEAviX?usp=sharing

How We Developed This Project

Pedro and Lucas are childhood best friends and know each other since they were 10. Pedro’s father owned a video store and they both spent a lot of time there watching all types of movies and getting inspired by those narratives. Growing up they wanted to emulate what they saw on the screens, making several videos for school and leisure, producing a 75 minutes long film, and organizing a stand up concert where they did impressions of their professors.

Their purpose of telling compelling stories through different platforms kept going, Pedro graduated and made his thesis around transmedia storytelling, the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies. He also worked on multiple startups were he met most of the Spaceapps team members, and got involved in the latest innovations in the technology world.

When the Spaceapps “Putting Art in Artemis” challenge was launched Pedro contacted Lucas and they both scheduled a meeting with Angelo, who is studying his PhD in Computer Science, focusing on Semanthic Analisys. They came up with a proposition, how can we understand the story of the people behind Nasa’s most important missions and transform it in something tangible that they can carry with them to represent their legacy.

They proposed an app, with a place to send photos and videos together with a conversational interface where people can tell their stories. The idea was to send links to this app to family members and friends of the scientists, engineers and astrounauts responsible of Nasa’s most ambitious missions, they would tell stories about how this people affected their lifes and share personal photos that would enrich their narratives.

After that the challenge was how to transform this information in an art piece that would be sent to the moon by 2024. For that task we called Maurício, Naiara and Saraah, all art and design students that have previously studied or worked with Pedro.

Our first big decision was to explore some Augmented Reality technologies, in order to deliver the stories and photos in a more compelling way and without the necessity of putting all the content physically in the art piece.

We decided to use “the message in a bottle” metaphor in our piece, as it can be a recognizable visual reference for the message we want to deliver to space. Inside the bottle there would be our natural legacy, our nature, what we arrived on earth with, outside the bottle there would be our technological and creative legacy represented by the photos and stories of the people who were responsible for for those innovative achievements.

One critical part of our solution was to create a mechanism to compensate the people who contributed to the project with photos and stories. For achieving that we thought about making personalized art pieces for being used as frames for decoration, that will display the heroes which those people helped tell their stories. Those frames would also contain Augmented Realities capabilities, so people could interact with them, see more photos and listen to their stories.

The time was very short for us to do any significant development in the technological side of the challenge, either by making some kind of conversational interface or by making the augmented reality projections, so we decided to go with a prototyping approach without coding. The team split in two, one focused on the art piece construction and the other focused on creating the stories and visual narratives.

The challenges were many and the group kept adapting the solution until it got to the point were it could demonstrate the concept clearly. After many hours of work we had built the prototype of the bottle with visual effects representing the AR capabilities and 4 posters of Nasa astronauts to demonstrate the arts that would be sent to their homes on Earth.

Some photos of the journey and the evolution of the prototypes can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15iquGrMc8MzIzbKH8UyWCyxeRGY9Q3Vh?usp=sharing

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used data from Nasa’s visual archives to inspire and create our art pieces as well as information about some important astronauts that would have their legacies eternized in the solution.