Abstract Beginning some 30,000 years ago, nine of our Paleolithic ancestors painted their unique hands on the walls of Altamira Cave in Cantabria, Spain – an act of communication by the community, for the community. We present a proof-of-concept for the Altamira Comet, a 21st century work that expresses the evolution of this gesture in our digital age: we all go. The Altamira Comet invites everyone on Earth to participate, individually and uniquely, through our contemporary society’s iconic representation of identity: the selfie. Everyone’s selfies will be cast as microscopic low relief golden busts, frozen into a ball of ice, and deployed into heliocentric orbit as a sublimating comet, embodying millions of individual humans from around the world. The proof-of-concept is a vial of five million discrete selfie sculptures in solution, using computer vision, electron-beam lithography and high-vacuum deposition to fabricate each selfie the size of a grain of cosmic dust. We also discuss plans to deploy the comet using an off-the-shelf CubeSat deployer and to scale the work to support a goal of at least one billion global participants.

    Highlights Space art in the form of a comet. Global art that invites everyone on Earth to participate. Inspired by prehistoric hand art on the walls of Altamira Cave. Multidisciplinary art combining computer vision, e-beam lithography, comets and CubeSats.


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    Title :

    Altamira Comet proof-of-concept


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Acta Astronautica ; 210 ; 498-510


    Publication date :

    2023-04-04


    Size :

    13 pages




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English