Film
The capstone project of an eight-year collaboration between art historian James Merle Thomas and filmmaker Meghan O’Hara, Tektite Revisited is a forthcoming feature-length documentary film about an underwater research station operated by NASA in the U.S. Virgin Islands between 1969-1970.
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The first critical re-examination of the agency’s Apollo-era attempts to model its space station designs using underwater architecture, the project unearths an extensive collection of newly-restored archival materials as it follows the story of a futuristic aquatic habitat, from its construction and deployment—atop the ruins of a former sugar plantation in the remote Caribbean in the late 1960s—to its eventual demise.
Framed as an essay film about utopian architecture and surveillance, the project examines a broader debate about data-driven and qualitative approaches to understanding human experience and considers how Cold War-era paradigms of knowledge production continue to shape our contemporary relationship to information, architecture, and environment.
The first critical re-examination of the agency’s Apollo-era attempts to model its space station designs using underwater architecture, the project unearths an extensive collection of newly-restored archival materials as it follows the story of a futuristic aquatic habitat, from its construction and deployment—atop the ruins of a former sugar plantation in the remote Caribbean in the late 1960s—to its eventual demise.
Framed as an essay film about utopian architecture and surveillance, the project examines a broader debate about data-driven and qualitative approaches to understanding human experience and considers how Cold War-era paradigms of knowledge production continue to shape our contemporary relationship to information, architecture, and environment.
