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My name is Erika Blumenfeld and I am an artist and I'm obsessed with the stories
that connect us to the cosmos. I was in Scotland on route to a artist residency that was artists and scientists together
on a sailboat to sail the Scottish Isles and meet communities there. So in order to get there we had
to pass through this road cut and I just remember looking at this road cut very very distinctively
and it was so interesting and I could see all of the layers of strata and I've always
been interested in rocks and I've always been interested in geology but there was something
about that that really captured my imagination. So I came back from that trip thinking about
rocks and I was watching this documentary on geology and there was this amazing thing where
the episode pans to a scientist standing at a road cut in Scotland. It happened to be the
exact road cut that I had gone through and he was telling the story about how these rocks
aren't just like the rocks in the Catskills in New York, but they are the same rock and that at
one point those two continents were joined and this is the story of that connection and then
he said something that sparked this whole thing. He's like but the story is in the rock and that
to me captured my imagination. That rocks could be scrolls of knowledge, that they could be storybooks
that if you know how to read the language in the rock, you can unravel the stories and the mysteries within them.
My hope with Astromaterials 3D is that we can inspire the next generation and that young minds will work with the Astromaterials 3D website and explore the rocks
and will open their minds. We wanted to create a tool for researchers anywhere around the planet
to be able to interact with these samples in a way to initiate investigation. You can download
the XCT data. You can download the models and use them in your own research. And knowing that the
public doesn't have a lot of opportunity to interact with these samples. How could
we bring more of these samples to the public eye and do so in a way that can allow people
to an entry into it so that kids and and adults alike can read and explore? We're developing new
capabilities for small sample returns so we're trying to set up our Astromaterials 3D project to be able
to accommodate and support these missions. As an artist working at the intersection of art and
science and nature and culture, I've always been curious ever since I was a small person and I
think really it's my curiosities that lead me into understanding the natural phenomena of our world
and the stories that we've been telling through our cultures across time. And so, for me personally,
it's meaningful to be able to shine light on these stories and to share them with the public. I
feel so grateful that I get to be in this place thinking creatively with an incredible group of
colleagues and carrying this incredible lineage of these rocks that came from the
Moon lunar surface and are now here on our planet telling their stories. It's just an incredible
privilege and I never lose sight of how cool it is that I'm sitting here looking at Moon rocks.
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