This solo show exhibited as part of the UK’s We Invented the Weekend arts and culture festival in 2024. Reaching over 40,000 people on opening weekend, the show was promoted by the MediaCity Innovation Hub and the University of Salford, UK.
To hear me discuss this work, check out my exclusive feature on Episode 18 of the Off Center podcast, an international digital culture podcast based out of Bergen, Norway, that is hosted by electronic literature scholar and Director of the Center for Digital Narrative, Dr. Scott Rettberg.
2024–present
A Fable of Tomorrows
This solo-authored speculative design installation consists of digital and interactive objects, at the center of which is a fable from the future. As a phantasmagoric video panorama immerses viewers in visions of different temporalities (from deep time to a lifetime), a mysterious artifact poses Old English-inspired riddles which take more than one human generation to solve. This work meditates on how a long duration of time, one that exceeds human experience, can nonetheless be mediated through play.
Entering the dark, cave-like installation, a 180° looping and layered video features imagery of deep time, the anthropocene, and abstracted reflections of light. Atmospheric and meditative as much as it is didactic, the immersive video piece offers clues (if one looks closely enough) to the riddle game, further rewarding a slower kind of play.
Installed on a central, illuminated pedestal, an encoded paper sculpture activates a viewer’s smartphone (via secretly embedded and programmed NFC chips) allowing a viewer to play the web-based riddle game. Coded with java, html, and css, the game stores the riddle answers, future fable sentences, and future riddles server-side. After solving each riddle, a mysterious sentence from a future fable progressively appears, but the time between riddles increases exponentially, which forces players to slow down.
The game is also coded to collect a player’s guesses so that while a player plays, the code is also building a real-time archive of language, behind the scenes. Entries from this archive fade in, ghost-like, behind the game.
Play the web-based game here.