Sarah Edmands Martin

DESIGNER

Associate Professor
University of Chicago

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


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Media Revolutions Then & Now

Augmented reality, poster design, exhibition design, moving image2026
Augmented reality poster design, projected video, and life-size cardboard cutouts exploring media from the early modern reformation to today.







Concept


This trio of augmented reality posters, projected video work, and life-sized dimensional cutout reframe Martin Luther as an early media influencer, whose pamphlets, portraits, and polemics functioned like proto–social media posts, circulating his image, voice, and authority with a speed and self-awareness that anticipates contemporary platforms such as Instagram or X. By branding Luther as both theologian and spectacle, the works draw a critical line between religious reform and modern self-marketing, revealing how personal identity becomes inseparable from media strategy. Interweaving apocalyptic broadsides, an inviting “selfie” Luther, and a 24-hour news loop spanning the 1990s to today (from Monica Lewinsky and Obama’s tan suit to the Titan submersible implosion), the designs created for this exhibiton expose how fear, scandal, and immediacy drive attention economies across centuries. Together, they meditate on the persistence of “always-on” media culture, showing how the technologies may change, but the logic of influence, crisis, and visibility remains strikingly intact.


Learn more about the exhibition here.
augmented reality
motion design
poster design
typography
installation
illustration
archival materials
cardboard cutout

exhibited @ U.Chicago’s Regenstein Special Collections 





↑  

2025  /  NAILED IT! or THE ORIGINAL POST
Augmented reality, digital offset print;
42” x 80”
↑

2025  /  BRAND LUTHER
Augmented reality, digital offset print;
42” x 80”
↑

2025 / APOCALYPSE.EXE
Augmented reality, digital offset print;
42” x 80”






While “no Reformation without print” has become a historiographic colloquialism, its chiastic inversion “no print without the Reformation” reflects how a flagging new media technology was saved from premature extinction by history’s first bestselling author: Martin Luther.

Christopher J. WildPeter B. Ritzma ProfessorThe University of Chicago
Read more about Media Revolutions here






Starting from this premise (“no print without the Reformation”), Media Revolutions Then & Now: Martin Luther and the Making of Modern Communication foregrounds the centrality of religious reform media to the fortunes of print and, more broadly, to the formation of modern media cultures beginning in the 16th century. The Protestant Reformation responded to a late medieval crisis of religious mediation and communication, and in responding to that crisis perpetuated it. Like many of his contemporaries, Martin Luther believed that religious and salvational media of the late medieval church were fundamentally corrupted and corruptive — and therefore in need of comprehensive reform. Priesthood, liturgy, worship, practices of piety, and scripture (to name just a few) had all been perverted and had to be restored to their original state of pure communication. Consequently, media were as much instruments of reform as they were its targets.



All media had been perverted and needed to be restored to their original state of pure communication ... in the process, they became as much instruments of reform as they were its targets. 


The exhibit explores how the Protestant Reformation and innovations in printing technology coincided and catalyzed a sweeping revolution that paved the way for media culture as we know it today. Objects in glass vitrines, alongside projected video and augmented reality, invite viewers to interrogate traditional narratives that center on printing technology as the driving force of the Reformation, and instead propose how essential religious thought and practice were perhaps central to the emergence and success of modern media.  



















“Scan ye here, that wonder may be made visible!  Take thine own likeness with mine, then send it to the commons.”

Directions for scanning the QR code that unlocks the exhibit’s AR features. This interactive touchpoint is designed to incentivize exploration, validating the user’s agency while bridging the gap between physical artifacts and digital augmentation.





















The exhibit illuminates the interplay of belief and technology by working from the notion of the Reformation as the first modern media event. However, the exhibit’s aim is not to chart a straightforward linear narrative of progress from the woodcut to the meme but rather to explore the commonalities as much as the differences between the two eras. 



News, memes, and rhetoric explore how Reformation-era media history informs today’s digital landscape.



2026  /  BREAKING NEWS, ENDLESS ROAD.
Single-channel video projection.



Organized thematically around topics such as the emergence of news and fake news, viral memes, hate speech, apocalyptic rhetoric, and biblical mediation, the exhibition holds up a mirror to our contemporary media landscape, asking what the early modern reformation of media can teach us about today’s media culture and what possibilities its future might hold.





























There are six dominant themes underpinning the new design pieces in this exhibition: the apocalypse, the first media influencer, religious controversy as fodder for the printing press, virality and memes, witchrcaft and demonology, news and fake news.

Apocalypse Then and Now 

The Ultimate Media Spectacle
Defined by a pervasive sense of universal degeneracy and decline, the late medieval and early modern eras were saturated with an apocalyptic fervor that reframed every crisis and innovation as a harbinger of the end times. This eschatological urgency transformed even the discovery of the New World and the invention of the printing press into "chiliastic dreams"—divine mechanisms for a world on the brink of extinction. Central to this climate was the expectation of a reformator, a holy medium like Martin Luther, who was frequently cast as a modern Elijah or one of the "two witnesses" from Revelation. Pervaded by the conviction that the struggle between God and the Antichrist (identified as the papacy) was reaching its climax, Luther utilized the press as God’s "last flame," racing against the literal imminence of judgment to translate the Bible and spread the Gospel before the world’s final extinction.





Type-Casting Selves

Martin Luther as Print Media’s First Influencer
Martin Luther transformed a faltering new technology into a mass medium by mastering its cultural and economic logic: at a moment when printing was in decline due to low literacy and unmet demand, Luther moved from obscurity in 1517 to becoming, by 1520, the most published author in Europe, so recognizable that printers needed only the initials “ML” or “MLA” on his title pages. By the end of the 16th century no Western author had more works in circulation. His rise was not accidental; it was the result of a sophisticated understanding of print as both message and marketing, beginning with the reinvention of his own identity, from Martin Luder to “Eleutherius” and finally to “Luther,” establishing a memorable and symbolic authorial brand. In collaboration with Lucas Cranach, he and his public-relations network carefully constructed a visual and textual persona drawn from scripture, hagiography, and history, calibrated to audience and context. The mechanical reproducibility of print gave his image and ideas fixity, recognizability, and reach across time and space, laying the groundwork for modern branding practices. His rose seal, used as early as 1517 and appearing in his earliest printed portrait, fused the printer’s mark with a personal trademark, authenticating his authority in a still unfamiliar medium and showing how influence is secured not only through ideas, but through control of their form, circulation, and visual identity.












Flame Wars

Religious Controversy as Fodder for the Printing Press
This piece traces how Luther’s 95 Theses, originally meant for routine academic debate, became the most profitable enterprise of the German printing industry by exploiting the speed, scale, and volatility of the pamphlet form. The flugschrift, a cheap, portable, and rapidly produced booklet, transformed theological dispute into mass media, with Luther mastering its affordances by issuing vernacular responses within days, overwhelming Catholic opponents who could not match his pace. Sermons fueled pamphlets, pamphlets ignited debates in taverns and marketplaces, and disputations were increasingly staged as performances for future publication, binding oral spectacle to print reproduction. The format’s speed encouraged escalation rather than resolution, expanding conflicts from private exchanges into public theater. In this mutually reinforcing cycle of technology, content, and profit, religious polemic functioned much like today’s social media economy, demonstrating that outrage, immediacy, and visibility were already the currency of influence in the 16th century.










↑  

c. 1569, 1569, 1577  / ECCLESIA MILITANS / UOVO MERAVIGLIOSO / DER GORGONISCHE MEDUSEKOPF / WARHASSTIGE CONTRAFACTUR;
As seen on display in Media Reformations
Broadsheets of various sizes.





Media

AR Posters

Situated alongside the tactile ephemera of the Reformation (its broadsheets and pamphlets) three large-scale poster designs (42” x 80”) collapse media temporalities, utilizing augmented motion to engage “new” technology through a lens of play.

  1. Nailed It! or The Original Post (2025)
    Sarah Edmands Martin
    Augmented reality, digital offset print
    42” x 80”

  2. Brand Luther (2025)
    Sarah Edmands Martin
    Augmented reality, digital offset print
    42” x 80”

  3. Apocalypse.exe (2025)
    Sarah Edmands Martin
    Augmented reality, digital offset print
    42” x 80”

P

AR Life-Sized Cutout

A life-sized, and AR-enhanced cutout of Martin Luther invites selfies with the historical “influencer.” The resulting interaction collapses five centuries of media evolution into a single, playful act of co-authorship.

  1. Brand Martin Luther (2025)
    Sarah Edmands Martin
    Augmented reality, digital offset print
    42” x 80”


Projected Video

Multi-channel video ft. a 24-hour temporal collage, synthesizing decades of broadcast anxiety (the localized terror of the DC Sniper to the globalized spectacle of the Titan implosion). The layered video critiques the “eternal present” of news cycles and the commodification of crisis.

  1. Breaking News, Endless Road (2025)
    Sarah Edmands Martin
    Single-channel video projection
    Size variable










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