Salem Loucks

The artistic components of this work are meant to emulate the process that I take when painting a landscape. You look at colors, and at all the small details, noting and adding them to your mental concept of the landscape. You rotate the picture in your head, shifting the way you see the colors, the scale, so that you may be able to create it fully as you imagine it. In this case, the concept is the Haworth geographic site on the Moon. This is meant to transpose the imagining of painting a scene onto an imagining of creating a new world on the Moon. The data is from NASA’s open source LOLA topography data of the Lunar South Pole, and it is plotted at various scales and animated using Python and Matplotlib. I first started using this data to build a lunar rover with appropriate specifications for the terrain. But when the project was done, I kept coming back to it, because it was a chance to see an alien landscape that I may never get to visit. I could imagine stepping on those hills, tripping on the craters, and I wanted to share that adventure with everyone else. Each frame is sampled from one of ten different sets of vertices, and thus holds different points from the frame before it. Although this vertex sample changing is almost unnoticeable, it is a hint that the minutiae can sometimes be lost in trying to conceptualize the whole. This whole piece is an exercise in data visualization, a proof that to imagine a future, we must be artists as well as engineers. There can be no separation of art and science, when the future is at stake. To create a new civilization on the Moon, we have to be artists to see the possibilities, and engineers to build those possibilities.