On November 13th, 2024, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies hosted a thought-provoking lecture by Sarah Edmands Martin, assistant professor of design and a Nanovic Institute faculty fellow. Her lecture, titled A Fable of Tomorrows, explores the conceptual and pragmatic aspects of her latest installation that intertwines video projection, interactive sculpture, and video game design at the center of which is the experience of time through folktales and riddles. This lecture is a part of the ongoing series of lectures sponsored by Nanovic Institute, The Art and Scholarship of Academic Storytelling. This series aims to explore how art and scholarship combine in academic storytelling.
Professor Sarah Edmands Martin introduces us to her work pointing out how the intersection of narrative, design science, and academia can cooperate to improve our understanding of the past and foresee the future. In this regard, she highlights that this cooperation has the objective of problematizing the established reality, not only finding solutions but also retracing the roots of the issue to then solve them for the future. 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. In this light, Martin’s project aims to address the topic of temporality engaging with folktales as an instrument to highlight and problematize inherited human biases.
Designing the experience of time
Her latest project, A Fable of Tomorrows, stems from a Fulbright affiliate position in digital research in Bergen, Norway. The goal was to explore the encounter between sociopolitical structure and folktale. The founding reason lies in the fact that Western fairytales are embedded in a certain sociohistorical tradition, therefore dealing with gender and racial constructs. This exploration of folk tradition aims to seek ideas that might challenge the pre-established narrative that sees these social constructs as fixed within the cultural roots of Western societies. Thus, researching through the archives grants us access to an accurate historical perspective that underscores the persistence of the human elements within different narratives.
To pursue this vision, Martin’s work uses different materials and media from analogic to digital. The intersection between Visual communication, Media Aesthetics, and speculative design represents the speculative ground that she employed in this installation. The pivotal point of this variety of media is the concept of time and the human experience of it. To display and render accessible this abstract experience, Martin employs video, projected to be immersive, 180 degrees, and an interactive sculpture.
The Viewer in Time and Space
Entering the installation space, the video projection renders what times look like for different life forms aiming to reframe the inherited human-centric perception of time employing nature and folk elements. At the center of the room, an enigmatic sculpture invites the viewers to interact with it. Viewers can interact with this paper-made sculpture with their smartphones, through a NFC chip, and access a riddle game that is solved by answering the puzzles and through the wait. Every level unlocked reveals a piece of a story that deals with the idea of time, but the resolution of the game is also locked in a temporal frame. To complete the sequence, the viewer must wait an established amount of time that becomes increasingly longer. After the first riddle, the second riddle takes 2 seconds to appear on screen, the third riddle requires 2 minutes, and so on following this crescent span. The last riddle is meant to appear in 100 years, so the game is meant to last more than a human lifespan.
Every riddle in this game is drawn from the folk tradition of Norway. Interestingly, this geographical area intertwines Old Norse and Old English folklore, representing a syncretic intersection between pagan and early Christian traditions. 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. Indeed, folktales serve an educational purpose while outliving the anonymous author who created them. Therefore, their very nature deals with the border between mortality and legacy. The function of the uncanny, in such a tradition, explores the horrific and unknown concealed in the social conception of time. The social role in the creation of these stories and riddles reveals a collective meaning-making of profound existential questions. Such interrogatives transcend the individual as well as religious values, demonstrating a shared human nature in perceiving and coping with the idea of time and mortality.
Lingering Voices
To begin, the game opens with a significant riddle:
“What is so delicate that it breaks as soon as you name it?”
The answer: Silence.
So, the initial interaction with the game is, indeed, an act of noise that disrupts the dominant silence of human absence. Just like folktales, the viewer can break through this barrier of silence through participation in this environment based on the tradition that aims to outlive the individual experience. Similarly, anonymous folktales travel in time, mouth to mouth, without a strong link to a specific author but rather merging and shaping the cultural environment. Moreover, every guess attempted by the players in this riddle game is registered in a linguistic database that is displayed anonymously in the background of the game screen. Through this expedient, every approach to the question, right or wrong, participates in the shared experience of the game and, metaphorically, in the concept of shared knowledge and legacy that characterizes the deep nature of folk tradition.
Join the Story...
Do you want to experience the game and take part in the great narration of time:
Originally published by at eitw.nd.edu on December 12, 2024.