The product of an eight-year collaboration between filmmaker Meghan O’Hara and art historian James Merle Thomas, Tektite Revisited is a forthcoming feature-length documentary about an underwater research station operated by NASA in the U.S. Virgin Islands between 1969-70. As the first critical re-examination of the Apollo-era attempts to model space station designs using underwater architecture, the project follows the futuristic aquatic habitat from its construction and deployment—atop the ruins of a remote former sugar plantation of the Caribbean tropics in the late 1960s—to its eventual demise. Framed as an essay, the film examines problematics of measuring human experiences, and ways that Cold War-era paradigms continue to shape our contemporary relationships to knowledge, information, architecture, and environment.
Tektite Revisited is supported by a Media Development Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.