Apolune: Systems Normal is a multidisciplinary interrogation of humanity’s fraught relationship with progress, using the Apollo 11 mission as a prism to explore the dissonance between institutional ambition and the granular realities of individual lives. By reimagining NASA’s archival materials through a neurodivergent lens, the work critiques the flattening effect of dominant historical narratives while celebrating the intricate human labour embedded within institutional records. It is a project that seeks to unearth the overlooked, the marginal, and the ephemeral, transforming the archive from a repository of facts into a living, breathing site of possibility.
At its core, Apolune challenges the way archives often erase the textures of human experience, particularly for those whose ways of being and communicating exist outside societal norms. Drawing on James McGrath’s Naming Adult Autism: Culture, Science, and the Self (2017), the work embraces autism as a vantage point that disrupts conventional frameworks, offering a unique perspective on the clinical precision of spaceflight and the chaotic, intimate rhythms of human consciousness. Through performance, we reanimate the Apollo 11 archive, filling its silences with our bodies, voices, and gaze. The result is a sensory-rich theatrical environment that oscillates between documentary rigour and poetic abstraction, mirroring the vastness of space and the fragility of human endeavour.
Our methodology treats the NASA Apollo 11 mission archives not as static relics but as dynamic, living artefacts. As discussed by Suely Rolnik’s “Archive Mania” (2011), we approach the archive as a site of both preservation and transformation. Mission transcripts are reimagined as dynamic performance texts, while archival footage is interwoven with live video feeds to create responsive visual landscapes. A hybrid system of analogue and digital tools—including theremin-controlled video synthesis and multi-surface projection—allows technical elements to function as active collaborators, amplifying the emotional and sensory dimensions of the work. By physically manipulating historical materials in real time, we transmute institutional documentation into an embodied, visceral experience. The mundane exchanges, moments of doubt, and fleeting joys buried within mission transcripts are excavated and reanimated, offering audiences a glimpse into the overlooked humanity behind the myth of progress.
Apolune echoes Susan Sontag’s reflections on the moon landings as a form of “collective instruction,” a moment when humanity was simultaneously united and alienated by the spectacle of technological achievement. Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981) further shapes our approach, framing the Apollo missions as both a symbol of human aspiration and a simulation of progress, mediated through screens and frozen in time. The moon landings, once a beacon of futurity, now exist as relics of a bygone era, their meaning reshaped by the passage of time and the fallibility of memory.
Science fiction, particularly the speculative visions of 1950s and 1960s writers like Philip K. Dick, serves as a touchstone for the project’s aesthetic and philosophical inquiries. The playful optimism of Space Race futurism and the speculative technologies imagined by sci-fi writers reflect the excitement and unease of an era defined by rapid scientific advancement. By evoking these aesthetics, Apolune bridges past and future, inviting audiences to consider how our collective dreams of progress are both inspired and constrained by the stories we tell about ourselves.
Central to the work is the concept of awe, as explored by Keltner and Haidt (2003), who describe it as a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion that arises when we encounter vastness and complexity beyond our comprehension. Apolune seeks to evoke this duality, juxtaposing the infinite scale of space exploration with the microscopic details of human experience, the interplay between the cosmic and the personal offering a poetic meditation on humanity’s place in the universe.
Accessibility is not an addendum but a foundational element of the work, informed by Graeae Theatre Company’s Aesthetics of Access methodology, and supported through the CRIPtic Arts in initial R&D. Integrated features such as BSL interpretation, audio description, and tactile encounters with Space Race memorabilia are within the fabric of the project, ensuring multiple pathways for engagement and deepening the audience’s connection to the material.
Apolune resists singular narratives and tidy conclusions. Instead, it invites audiences to inhabit the disorientation of zero gravity and the weight of human experience, to navigate the thin line between awe and terror, and to question the stories we inherit about progress, difference, and our place in the universe. Through the synthesis of archival footage, live performance, and responsive design, the work becomes a space for collective reflection, where the infinite and the intimate, the institutional and the personal, collide and coexist.
Ultimately, Apolune is about the present moment, and the ways in which we continue to reach for the stars, even as we grapple with the complexities of being human. It is a celebration of the messy, the unresolved, and the profoundly beautiful.