Hosted by Brown's Multimedia Labs, the Moon Design Challenge encouraged community members to transform vintage NASA materials into out-of-this world art projects.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - Rhode Island is a small world, after all.
Leo Selvaggio serendipitously experienced that when he found himself at the Creative Reuse Center of Rhode Island last year, searching for sustainable materials to add to the inventory for Brown's Multimedia Labs, which he helps run as a senior specialist in creative technologies for the Brown Arts Institute.
Instead of beelining for the scrap fabric he originally went there to purchase, Selvaggio and his colleague Kelly Egan, assistant director of creative technologies, found their eyes wandering toward a stack of massive transparency prints and canisters of film featuring of images of moon craters from a NASA lunar mission in the late 1960s.
After perusing the material, the two agreed it was too cool to pass up - they'd both purchase some for their own use. "And then, on a whim, I was like, 'Should we buy some for the Multimedia Labs?'" Selvaggio said.
That idea and subsequent purchase inspired the creation of the Moon Design Challenge, which encouraged Brown community members to incorporate the film into any kind of creative work and share their creations back with the team.
It was only after announcing the challenge that Selvaggio learned that the images were, for years, part of the Brown/NASA Northeast Planetary Data Center, a repository of NASA materials and resources housed in Brown's Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences; the department had only recently donated the materials to the Creative Reuse Center, and now they were back at Brown, being used in a completely different way.
After setting up a pickup station at the Multimedia Labs, which are located in Brown's Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, the materials were gone within days. Selvaggio and Egan returned to the Creative Reuse Center, where they purchased the rest of the materials and restocked the station. That batch didn't last long, either.
It was a full-circle moment that bolstered Selvaggio's conviction that students, staff and faculty on College Hill embrace curiosity and collaboration.
"Our goal is to try to engage the creative mind of our community here at Brown," he said. "We want to encourage people to get together, make with each other, think disruptively and hopefully share things back with each other."
Chilsea Wang, a senior concentrating in public health, works at the Multimedia Labs as a 3D printing creative technical assistant. Wang said she's been a regular in the space since 2021, using it as a creative launchpad to help reflect upon and synthesize her coursework and extracurriculars.
