Sarah Edmands Martin

DESIGNER

Associate Professor
University of Notre Dame

Designer, artist, and scholar working at the intersection of visual communication design, critical fabulation, and media aesthetics. 


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A Fable of  Tomorrows

Game design, installation design, immersive experience, moving image2024
An immersive speculative design installation featuring a mobile and web-based riddle game, interactive sculpture, and panoramic video.







Installation


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.


Play the web-based riddle game here.
game design
javascript
html 
css
motion design
typography
installation
illustration
archival materials
paper sculpture


2024 solo show @ UK’s We Invented the Weekend 
ft. on the Off Center podcast (ep. 18)











“Following the conceptualization of future as elaborated by Stuart Candy, designer, and futurologist, Martin underscores how speculation and vision can drive the development of a more desirable tomorrow.”

Salvatore Riolo Nanovic Institute for European Studies

 Read more about Fables here.











In encountering the work, you enter a 180-degree panoramic and phantasmagoric video installation that immerses you in different temporalities. On the screen, you see images of different objects appear and dissolve into the background. For example, an etching of a gravestone signals a human lifetime, while bitmapped renderings of ice cores, fossils, and the stratification of sediments over millions of years signal geologic and even cosmic deep time. 

You approach a central, illuminated pedestal that prompts you to interact with a mysterious gem-like origami sculpture. This mysterious artefact, which feels as if it has arrived from the future, activates your smartphone (via secretly embedded and programmed NFC chips, the same chips in your phone that activate when you tap to pay at the grocery store). This NFC chip triggers the mobile riddle game and invites you to start playing.

At first, the riddles seem made for a single player on a personal phone. This does not feel like a participatory activity. A player can only access the fable-from-the-future, one sentence at a time, by solving a series of riddles; however, each sequential riddle only appears after a certain exponential temporal threshold has been reached. 



The entire work is meant to last longer than a human lifetime, with the final riddle arriving after over 168 years. 


While the work interpelates you as an individual, it also makes it impossible for you as an individual to understand or resolve it fully. The code, which is outside of yourself, prevents you from knowing the full fable until 168 years have passed. 


The design of the game creates a kind of waiting that, in the words of Fluxus artist George Brecht
“impose[s] an alien will upon us.”Here, the alien will is that of a long duration, if not quite the deep time that interests a speculative realist like Meillasoux.

Normally, the correct answer to a riddle stops mattering at the moment we solve it. Until that moment, though, the puzzle remains intriguing and consuming yet uncertain. Fable extends this feeling of uncertainty indefinitely, a sublime minimalism, because waiting only becomes real when it is felt. Beyond a mere simulation of waiting, then, this work requires actual waiting without certainty. A player doesn’t even know, for sure, how long the game will last. They don’t see the code. So they wait until the next threshold, and the next, and the next. And each interval becomes longer, requiring an even greater commitment to the art of waiting. 







Media  


Interactive Paper Sculpture

Installed on a central, illuminated pedestal, the encoded paper sculpture activates a viewer’s smartphone to play the web-based game.

Interactive Web-Based Riddle Game

After solving each riddle, a sentence from a future fable progressively appears. The time between riddles increases exponentially, prompting a player to slow down, all the while collecting user inputs to build a real-time archive of language in play. Entries from this archive fades in, ghost-like, behind the game.

180° panoramic video + 3D video pillar

Looping, layered video featuring imagery of deep time, the anthropocene, and abstracted reflections of light offers clues to the riddle game as well as moments of meditation.



Play the riddle game here.









“Using speculative design as a method to engage with the archive, Martin renders the coexistence of human memory, digital media, and the ancient folktale. This latter, Martin claims, has an innate darkness in dealing with the idea of temporality and the ephemerality of human nature.”

Salvatore Riolo Nanovic Institute for European Studies

 Read more about Fables here.











The first line of the fable-from-the-future is a microcosm of what the entire fable does:



“Once upon a time, as we walked into the primordial dark of the woods, we wondered what the passage of time might mean if it did not include us.”



This marks a kind of open-ended temporality of the fable form. “Once upon a time” marks an imaginary outside of time and outside of history. The “primordial dark” marks a threshold beyond mortality and beyond our knowledge. The third-person plural “we” also suggests that maybe there is something more collective about this experience than the initial setup might imply. Instead of waiting for a Messianic individual to arrive, the focus is the community that walks, wonders, and waits together for something that might (or might not) arrive, and certainly does not include the present us.














Impact


  • International solo exhibition in Manchester, UK (2024), as part of the We Invented the Weekend festival, which saw over 60,000 visitors.

  • Exclusive feature on Episode 18 of the Off Center podcast, an international podcast based out of Bergen, Norway, hosted by distinguished digital artist and scholar of electronic literature, Dr. Scott Rettberg (April, 2024).

  • Invited to lecture on this work at the University of Oslo (Norway) and the University of Salford (UK).
     
  • Published this work on The National Archives of Norway’s blog.