When Apollo 12 landed on the moon in 1969, it may have been carrying an edition of this artwork. Forrest Myers, a member of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), invited Rauschenberg and five other artists to make drawings, which were etched by scientists at Bell Laboratories onto tiny wafer-thin iridium-plated ceramic chips, developed for use in telephone circuits. When NASA didn’t respond to Myers’s request to send one of these chips to the moon, Bell Labs scientist Fred Waldhauer (along with Rauschenberg, one of the founding members of E.A.T.) asked an engineer at Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, the fabricator of the lunar lander, if he could help. According to Waldhauer, one copy of the chip was covertly attached to the leg of the lunar lander. In addition to Rauschenberg’s straight line, there
is a Mickey Mouse–like figure by Claes Oldenburg, drawn initials by Andy Warhol, a black square by David Novros, a computer-generated drawing by Myers, and a circuit-like diagram by John Chamberlain.