Tektite Revisited: NASA's Forgotten Underwater Mission
FAIN: TD-266403-19
University Corporation at Monterey Bay (Seaside, CA 93955-8000)
Meghan O'Hara (Project Director: January 2019 to May 2024)
Development
of an eighty-minute documentary on the Tektite Program, an experimental
underwater research station operated by NASA in the U.S. Virgin Islands between
1969 and 1970.
Tektite Revisited: NASA’s Forgotten Underwater Missions (working title) is an eighty-minute feature-length documentary that tells the story of the Tektite Program, an experimental underwater research station operated by NASA in the U.S. Virgin Islands between 1969-1970. A sensuous visual depiction of NASA’s manned spaceflight research in the Caribbean as an international “Space Race” came to a close, the film employs a vast collection of rarely-seen and newly-restored archival materials (16mm film, audio recordings, photographs, extensive government records), and revisits a series of unlikely missions led by America’s “aquanauts,” who lived underwater for weeks on end. Tektite Revisited uses the forgotten program as a case study for examining a Cold War-era cultural preoccupation with survival in extreme environments, and ultimately suggests the program’s role in a set of larger, global questions regarding humanity’s relationship to its home planet.
Associated Products
Wild Blue Medium: Modernity, Media, and the Writing of the Ocean (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Wild Blue Medium: Modernity, Media, and the Writing of the Ocean
Author: James Merle Thomas
Abstract: The ocean has inspired countless literary and visual accounts since antiquity, serving as a site for trade,
recreation, strategic resources, and military conquest. However, in what some scholars have termed a “second
discovery of the sea,” the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed a vast expansion of scientific and
humanistic knowledge of the sea and—in sometimes overlapping spheres—a host of corresponding "new
media." Drawing on a growing academic “Blue Humanities” subfield that critically examines the ocean
and this history, this seminar will consider how the ocean—and more broadly, the aquatic—has been visualized,
narrated, theorized, occupied, colonized, and mediated throughout modernity.
This seminar is taught in an Art History department, and in turn, framed within the broader context of the
Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Therefore, the class will focus on the aesthetic dimensions of the ocean
and its various "media ecologies" (McLuhan, Postman) as encountered through photography, film, visual art,
sound, architecture, performance, print, etc. Accordingly, our interdisciplinary approach will privilege a
wide-ranging investigation of the aquatic and its associated contexts.
In addition to the usual suspects in art history and art practice, our readings will draw from media studies (in
particular, a strain of German media theory advanced by Friedrich Kittler, Bernhard Siegert, and others);
histories of science and technology; anthropology; (eco)critical theory; indigenous knowledge; postcolonial
studies, science fiction; and recent theories of the Anthropocene. Particular interest will be paid to how—like
other abstract and uninhabitable spaces (outer space, the desert, the arctic poles)—the ocean has served as a site
for experimental mediation and radical aesthetic possibility throughout late modernity, even as cataclysmic
climate change threatens to transform the oceans and their supported systems.
Year: 2021
Audience: Graduate
Habitability Project: Public Conversation (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Habitability Project: Public Conversation
Abstract: WAM will convene the Second National Symposium on Habitability of Environments in 2020. In preparation for the symposium, a cohort of collaborators from the arts, commercial space exploration, architecture, space medicine, anthropology and art history will gather in Minneapolis this October to consider the question: What fields of knowledge and ways of knowing are necessary to address the notion of a habitability beyond ‘life support’?
Please join us for a public conversation following the workshop, that will include an overview of the Habitability Project by WAM curator Boris Oicherman, followed by a screening of samples of Tektite Revisited: Meghan O’Hara and James Merle Thomas’ in-progress documentary about NASA’s underwater habitability research in the U.S. Virgin Islands between 1969-70, and a presentation about the commercial space platform Axiom Space by Christian Maender. The event will culminate with a roundtable discussion involving workshop participants.
Author: James Merle Thomas
Author: Meghan O'Hara
Author: Boris Oicherman
Date: 10/04/2019
Location: Weisman Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Primary URL:
https://wam.umn.edu/calendar/habitability-project-public-conversation/Primary URL Description: Announcement, Main Page, for Public event at FRW museum, University of Minnesota
Secondary URL:
https://wam.umn.edu/2018/10/01/habitability-of-environments-interview-with-robert-irwin/Secondary URL Description: Interview with Robert Irwin
Tektite2020: Women of Sea and Space (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Tektite2020: Women of Sea and Space
Abstract: Tektite2020: Women of Sea and Space celebrates the vision, the passion, bravery and the comradeship of the first all-female Aquanaut crew-Tektite II Mission 6.
Tektite2020 is a once-in-a-lifetime global line-up of ocean explorers, mission leaders, brave members of Tektite I, Tektite II Mission 6 and a cohort of incredible artists, scientists, technologists and lovers of both sea and space. Keynote speakers include the Hon. Prof. Jane Lubchenco, Prof. Pascale Ehrenfreund, Dr. Sylvia Earle, NASA astronauts and surprise guests exploring new worlds.
Dr. Sarah Jane Paul and Dr. Tierney Thys with cohosts Meghan O’Hara, Dr. James Merle Thomas and Joe Grabowski invite you to dive in and join our presentations from leading sea and space professionals. Recent discoveries, explorations and achievements, building community and tackling the pressing issues of today. Attendees will share in the celebrations, gain new perspectives and hear first-hand how these pioneering game-changers are transforming our relationship with the ocean and space and steering our species toward a better future.
Author: Meghan O'Hara
Author: James Merle Thomas
Author: Sarah Jane Pell
Author: Tierney Thys
Author: Joe Grabowski
Date: 07/17/2020
Location: Online
Primary URL:
https://tektite2020.comPrimary URL Description: Event website with descriptions of the, speakers, presentations and performances that were available for free on July 17-18, 2020.